The Year Ahead

Twenty-twelve has been an exciting year: we’ve been focused on building a system called Simperium that not only increases the speed and reliability of Simplenote, but enables other applications to have the same effortless synchronization and online/offline capabilities.

The Nitty-Gritty

The legacy version of Simplenote’s API is hosted on Google App Engine. Many of the apps that sync with Simplenote, including some of our favorites like Notational Velocity and nvALT, still use this legacy API.

Our newer Simperium service uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), and is built to be much more resilient to failure. DashNote and ResophNotes are on this new API already. We know that many of you rely on Simplenote to run your lives, so even a few minutes of downtime is a major pain. We’re committed to dealing more gracefully with unexpected failures, bugs, limitations, and communicating better with you when there is a problem.

Holiday Bonus

We’ve given all premium subscribers two months free to thank you for being early adopters and sticking with us through some tough times in the last year. We’re also going to be working with all our developers to get their apps on the new API so we can officially deprecate our older, less scalable systems by the end of 2013.

Finally, we’re going to loop back on some of the most popular user requests, including an Android app, Mac app, and native support for Markdown while of course preserving the simplicity you've come to expect.

We hope that you, too, are using this holiday season to relax and recharge for a full 2013, and here’s to many more (simple) notes in our future together.

Service problems this week

First of all, we're very sorry about the current issues and we're working to fix them. All premium users will get time credited to their accounts.

Our primary syncing systems are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Earlier this week, AWS experienced significant downtime that caused Simplenote syncing to fail. The AWS downtime also affected sites like Reddit, Airbnb, and Foursquare.

We have a separate system for syncing notes with third-party apps (like Notational Velocity) that is currently hosted on Google App Engine (GAE). About three weeks ago, we started experiencing significant latency when writing changes to this system, resulting in delayed syncing ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. Our efforts to fix this on our own weren't successful, so we turned to the GAE team for advice.

They recommended we immediately migrate our third-party syncing to a newer version of their platform. On Wednesday night, we decided to do this. It went less smoothly than we hoped. We did not properly take into account some consequences of the migration, but we corrected this last night.

This morning, GAE is experiencing a global outage and we are waiting to hear more news on that front. Our official iOS apps and all third-party apps that have upgraded to our latest API (like ResophNotes and DashNote) should be working since they don't rely on GAE. Our web app is still hosted on GAE, so it will be down until their service is restored.

We'll work on a process to remove duplicate notes that have appeared in some users' accounts. We're a small team working hard to get things stable again. Thanks for sticking with us.

Update on Wednesday, October 31, 2012 at 01:30AM by Simplenote

We've been running a process to clean up note duplicates in the affected accounts and we expect this to be finished within the next 24 hours. This problem was found to have affected less than 1% of users, all of whom are users of third-party apps like Notational Velocity.

Today's interruption of services

Earlier today, the Simplenote web app stopped displaying notes for many people, and syncing with devices was temporarily disabled. The cause of this interruption was a problem with our servers that we've since fixed. All services are beginning to come online now.

We're taking steps to prevent these kinds of interruptions in the future, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Major performance update released

A few weeks ago, Simplenote 3.2 for iOS was released to the App Store. This was a huge update focused on performance and stability. If you've already updated, you should notice that your changes move between different versions of the app much more quickly now.

The latest version is also much better at handling lots of notes. As a growing number of users pass the 1000 note threshold, this new version will accommodate them easily.

If you're having any trouble with the update, please contact us at support@simplenoteapp.com and we'll work hard to help you.

Here's a complete list of changes: 

3.2.0: 

• improved overall performance and stability 
• improved startup speed 
• improved support for lots of notes 
• improved sync speed and reliability (iOS + web app) 
• added support for syncing emoji characters 
• show total number of notes next to All Notes in tag list 
• fixed problem where tag list numbers might not be accurate 
• tag editing can now be done from inside the main tag list 
• added support for linking to Simplenote from other apps 
• fixed crashes that could happen when notes update 
• fixed text occasionally being hidden behind iPad keyboard 
• fixed problem where ads could turn back on after renewing subscription 
• fixed some inconsistencies with sorting notes 
• increased size of Extra Large font option

3.2.1: 

• improved search performance when you have lots of notes 
• fixed problems with sharing via email address tags 
• fixed note publishing 
• fixed in-app premium upgrades 
• fixed problems with tags that have symbols 
• fixed problems with renaming tags 
• fixed ads sometimes turning back on for paid users 
• fixed empty tag creation when note is created from Instapaper 
• fixed some passcode lock problems on iPad 
• fixed tag autocomplete popover on iPad 
• fixed new inline tags not syncing 
• fixed login problems for certain complex passwords 
• fixed searching so it searches for multiple terms separately 

Performance, stability and reliability

We've been hard at work testing Simplenote 3.2, an update that is aimed at improving overall performance, stability and reliability. It has no new features. Instead, it's intended to solidify the features that are already there, and it should be ready fairly soon.

Thanks to the many people who have contacted us with their kind words, suggestions, and bug reports. We're excited to share this update with you.

Update on Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 02:18AM by Simplenote

Simplenote 3.2 was released a few weeks ago. More details coming soon.