How To Write A Simple App On Mac

Taking notes on a Mac is as simple as opening Notes and starting to type. But the best way to take notes actually depends on your own personal habits and workflow.

Also it syncs immediately and effortlessly with the Notes app on your iPhone and iPad. We highly suggest you first checking out this app which already comes with your Mac, before buying or installing another note taking app. Pros: – Very fast and simple to use – Comes pre-installed – Sync with notes app on iPhone and iPad. First of all, this app is exceptionally lightweight which makes it a great solution if you are using an older Mac. Mind you the software runs on MacOS X 10.7 and later. In terms of tools and features, FireAlpaca doesn’t offer as much as some other entries on this list.

The first three apps on this list all take a similar no-frills approach to writing.

Some people are better with sticky notes that stay on your screen all the time, or an app that syncs seamlessly with Evernote. If your notes tend to turn into blog posts, an app like MarsEdit can keep them organized until they’re ready to publish.

Setapp collection is packed with useful apps that might fit your unique way of note-taking better than a one-size-fits-all solution like Apple’s own Notes. With over 150 apps to choose from — and a free trial — you’re bound to find the best app for jotting down your thoughts. Here are our favorites.

Best note-taking apps for Mac

Get the most out of your notes - with a huge set of top Mac apps in one pack!

Capture ideas with Unclutter

Unclutter is perfect for capturing the smallest germ of an idea, since it works as both a sticky notes app and a clipboard manager. Because it’s always open, you can write down an idea the second you have it. Unclutter’s notes are sticky because they never go away, and the interface is even better than default sticky notes on the desktop since Unclutter doesn’t clutter up the view when you’re working in other apps.

To access Unclutter, you can just mouse to the top of your screen and scroll down (or choose your own key command), and its three-pane layout appears, with sections labeled Clipboard, Files, and Notes.

In Clipboard, you’ll see a list of everything you’ve copied to your Mac’s clipboard, ready to re-copy and paste whenever and wherever you need. You can star favorite items to keep them accessible here forever.

Files is a handy place to drop files you need an easy access to, like things you’re working on right now.

Unclutter’s Notes pane is a text field where you can type out notes and also drag text and links into. You can keep one long-running note to yourself or create multiple notes and view them in a list — the Search field searches the full text of all of your notes, so you can always find what you’re looking for. All panes are easy to resize to give yourself more room.

Unclutter is easy to fit into your workflow since it’s always there, and the search field helps you find things later. Dropbox integration even syncs your Unclutter files and notes across multiple Macs. When you want to turn your thoughts into something more edited, you can choose another note-taking app from Setapp.

MarsEdit and Strike for blogging

MarsEdit makes it easy to create content, cleverly edit what you write, and integrate with WordPress as well as other blog publishing services right from the app. Besides giving you a place to write in Markdown or Rich and Plain text, MarsEdit lets you build and format robust blog posts, complete with links, images, and other media. You can add tags and schedule your posts to go live anytime.

MarsEdit even makes it easy to gather links and media to blog about. It has a Safari extension that lets you save URLs and start blogging instantly once you find something worth writing about.

If you’re looking for a writing tool that allows to collaborate on a doc, you should go with Strike. This effortless text editor lets up to 10 people to work on the same content in real time.

Improve your writing‎ with Ulysses

Ulysses is a writing app with outstanding organizational features, so you can move from notes to an outline to a full manuscript. In fact, Ulysses is a popular app for Mac users participating in NaNoWriMo, a month-long exercise that encourages people to write a novel. It has all kinds of features to get you to write more, from flexible themes to eliminate distractions, to writing goals that count words written.

You can use Ulysses to post to a WordPress blog, export Word documents, or even format an entire ebook. But at the most fundamental level, it’s a great note-taking app because you never have to save anything, and your writing can sync between multiple Macs and iOS devices via iCloud or Dropbox. Your notes can contain images, keywords, and PDFs. The search function is incredibly thorough; for example, you can find keywords in notes created before a certain date, in case you want to see how your thoughts about something have evolved over time.

Take study notes with Studies

While other note-taking apps are flexible enough to handle work and personal topics side-by-side, Studies is created especially for those in academic settings. It’s designed to take your notes and turn them into study notes, which are basically flashcards on steroids.

Instead of a traditional two-sided flashcard for memorizing terms, the study notes in Studies can have as many “sides” as you need. They can contain text, images, videos, even audio. This makes them flexible enough that you can create study notes for any subject, from accounting to zoology. You can share study notes with classmates or even download pre-written note sets from Quizlet.

Then, you can use Studies to quiz yourself. The app can set up a schedule for you, based on prepping for an exam or just learning the material as quickly as you can. It chooses notes to study every day, and the cards you got wrong will re-appear more frequently in future sessions, so you can get it right.

Setapp puts all best note-taking apps together

All these note-taking apps are available in Setapp, so you have access to them all for your ideal workflow. You could start an idea as a sticky note in Uncluttered, paste it into Alternote, where you flesh out the idea a little more. That syncs it to Evernote, which you can also connect to Blogo, and turn that note into a full-featured blog post for the world to read.

It’s all up to you, and Setapp lets you focus on the work, instead of finding the right apps, buying them, and then buying them again for updates. Just consider subscribing once and then all you have to do is write.

These might also interest you:

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This document is the starting point for learning how to create Mac apps. It contains fundamental information about the OS X environment and how your apps interact with that environment. It also contains important information about the architecture of Mac apps and tips for designing key parts of your app.

At a Glance

Cocoa is the application environment that unlocks the full power of OS X. Cocoa provides APIs, libraries, and runtimes that help you create fast, exciting apps that automatically inherit the beautiful look and feel of OS X, as well as standard behaviors users expect.

Cocoa Helps You Create Great Apps for OS X

You write apps for OS X using Cocoa, which provides a significant amount of infrastructure for your program. Fundamental design patterns are used throughout Cocoa to enable your app to interface seamlessly with subsystem frameworks, and core application objects provide key behaviors to support simplicity and extensibility in app architecture. Key parts of the Cocoa environment are designed particularly to support ease of use, one of the most important aspects of successful Mac apps. Many apps should adopt iCloud to provide a more coherent user experience by eliminating the need to synchronize data explicitly between devices.

Relevant Chapters:The Mac Application Environment, The Core App Design, and Integrating iCloud Support Into Your App

Common Behaviors Make Apps Complete

During the design phase of creating your app, you need to think about how to implement certain features that users expect in well-formed Mac apps. Integrating these features into your app architecture can have an impact on the user experience: accessibility, preferences, Spotlight, services, resolution independence, fast user switching, and the Dock. Enabling your app to assume full-screen mode, taking over the entire screen, provides users with a more immersive, cinematic experience and enables them to concentrate fully on their content without distractions.

Relevant Chapters:Supporting Common App Behaviors and Implementing the Full-Screen Experience

Get It Right: Meet System and App Store Requirements

Configuring your app properly is an important part of the development process. Mac apps use a structured directory called a bundle to manage their code and resource files. And although most of the files are custom and exist to support your app, some are required by the system or the App Store and must be configured properly. The application bundle also contains the resources you need to provide to internationalize your app to support multiple languages.

Finish Your App with Performance Tuning

As you develop your app and your project code stabilizes, you can begin performance tuning. Of course, you want your app to launch and respond to the user’s commands as quickly as possible. A responsive app fits easily into the user’s workflow and gives an impression of being well crafted. You can improve the performance of your app by speeding up launch time and decreasing your app’s code footprint.

Relevant Chapter:Tuning for Performance and Responsiveness

How to Use This Document

This guide introduces you to the most important technologies that go into writing an app. In this guide you will see the whole landscape of what's needed to write one. That is, this guide shows you all the 'pieces' you need and how they fit together. There are important aspects of app design that this guide does not cover, such as user interface design. However, this guide includes many links to other documents that provide details about the technologies it introduces, as well as links to tutorials that provide a hands-on approach.

In addition, this guide emphasizes certain technologies introduced in OS X v10.7, which provide essential capabilities that set your app apart from older ones and give it remarkable ease of use, bringing some of the best features from iOS to OS X.