iPod Fans

So the hype of the iPhone 3G seems to be dying down ever so slowly, although no one has made the comment that you still can't sync notes. Even though both the iPhone and Macs have the ability to create notes, you can't keep your note databases in sync.

To many, this seems like something totally un-Apple: to make two identical features on both platforms, yet not allow for syncing between the two (especially when you consider that everything else syncs perfectly). Obviously, there’s something else going on behind the scenes (similar to the Time Machine backups via Airport fiasco, which was given a technical explanation and subsequently fixed by Apple).

Notes in Mail.app support everything from font styles to file attachments, and everything in between. Images and files can be dragged in, and text can be turned into a to-do item at the click of a button.

iPhone notes, on the other hand, are plain-text. As the OS only supports a few system fonts internally, the fanciful designs that can be created on a computer aren’t possible. Craig Dunn points out that notes on a jailbroken iPhone can be modified to include HTML fonts, though this is obviously a procedure that most end-users wouldn’t want to take just for fancy fonts.

As notes are HTML-based, images are most likely possible, and the Notes app could probably handle the display of these images (just as Mail on iPhone displays images). But file attachments aren’t possible (for obvious reasons), and to-do items aren’t supported on the iPhone (yet).

There’s an easy way to fix the incompatibilities, though. Pages can do it:

So Mail could just show a similar dialog when sending notes with iPhone-incompatible features, and users probably wouldn’t mind.

My suspicion is that Apple is withholding their implementation of sync abilities because of these issues, and turning Notes into a full-featured, auto-syncing document editor means that Apple has created their own competition to TextEdit and Pages, not to mention Word. Perhaps Apple has iWork Mobile up their sleeve? Time will tell.