Fifteen years ago Simplenote freed me from Outlook Notes. It was one of the last steps in a long and remarkably painful migration from PalmOS to iOS. [1] Prior to that, in 2008 my Palm Notes moved to Toodledo Notebook.
I considered Evernote at the time, but by 2010 I'd learned about data lock and data freedom. I didn't see an easy migration path from Evernote to anything else. Even then I feared products I could not easily leave.
In those days Simplenote didn't have an export facility, but it would sync with Notational Velocity and that stored plain text notes in the file system. They were indexed by Spotlight (when it worked) and even by them there were products that would import those plaintext notes. At worse I would have them in the file system. So Simplenote was my choice.
Later Simplenote introduced support for RTF but I stayed with plaintext. Data portability was the key.
Over time macOS Notes slowly, very slowly, improved. It added import facilities (but not export [3]!). Sync worked, more or less [2]. Meanwhile Simplenote kept working, but their business failed and Automattic bought them -- and kept it running without a business model. But it still worked and I knew there was an exit strategy.
Then yesterday Simplenote's macOS client started crashing for me on Sequoia 15.3.1. I would click on a note and the app would through an exception. 100% of the time. It worked on web and iOS. I tried logging out, deleting their Application Support folder, and a few other measures. Nothing worked. There's no email support or way to submit bugs. They had a forum but it was little used. I learned that the web version no longer supported my Simplenote credentials, instead authentication required mailing me an email code. I'm guessing, in the absence of useful documentation, that I needed to create an Wordpress.com account with the same email address and maybe I'd get access to my notes. I also fond the web app wouldn't work in Safari (redirect to Simplenote app I think).
There were other "red flags", like some erratic behavior by Automattic's CEO, that told me the time had come to leave Simplenote after 15 years of great service for essentially no money (I paid back when you could still do that).
So I got Simplenote's web app working, exported all my notes (still plaintext) as text files, then imported them into Sequoia's Notes app. All 954 notes showed up in the "On My Mac folder" after import. It seemed to take a minute or two for Notes to digest them, but after that I could drag and drop the files into the iCloud notes folder. After a few seconds they appeared there.
I did run into one bug - incorrect Style applied to Note on import. The imported notes appear with Helvetic Regular 10.3 font in Sequoia Notes with the "Body" Style checked in the UI. They are a bit hard to read my Air, but impossible to read on my iPhone.
This isn't the Body style! Despite these being plaintext notes the import tool assigned them an odd style and mislabeled it as "Body". If you use the "Remove Style" option or assign "Body" they revert to the correct default font (System Font, Regular, 13). In practice this is only annoying and when I use a Note I just fix the style as desired. One day I might see if I can automate removing the bad style [4]. (I "submitted" the bug via an Apple Discussion post, which at least gets indexed and AI accessed.)
One nice surprise about the migration is that the export process set "data last modified" in Finder metadata to the date the note was last modified. And on import Notes set it's date modified to the Finder value! One of my oldest notes kept it's modified date of 3/9/2010 (it's actually much older but got that data during a 2010 migration). I did not expect that nice detail.
I may run into other bugs, but for now this was the easiest data migration I've ever done. Praise be to Data Freedom and plaintext!
I'm sad to leave Simplenote; if they had had a subscription plan I'd have paid for the service. It was a great product that worked well for 15 years. AND they had a decent export capability. Thanks to all who made Simplenote work. I will remember it fondly.
- fn -
[1] Few remember, but it took several years for iOS to be as useful as PalmOS had been. There was a gap between PalmOS dying and iOS being functional where I went back to paper for several tasks.)
[2] It's possible to create version conflicts in Notes where the conflict notes stop syncing. There's no error message and sometimes they sort-of merge. We live in fallen times.
[3] There are 3rd party solutions and Shortcut/Automator solutions. Not ideal, but in 2025 we don't get ideal any more.
[4] There's no AppleScript or Automator/Shortcut for changing the formatting or style of text in a note that I found or that Perplexity knows about. I was able to create a script for Keyboard Maestro that lets me remove the style on a selected note with a shortcut keystroke. Of course that does set modified date to today, so keeping the old modified date ends up being a transient benefit.
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