I’ve been remiss in not mentioning John Gruber, Brent Simmons and Dave Wiskus’s little gem of a notetaker, Vesper before now. It’s a smart, crystal clear piece of software that defines a very specific problem — quick, frictionless capture of ideas — and polishes the heck out of it. Maybe even more interesting is the way that the product was shaped: developer Brent Simmons created a CSS-like method of manipulating the display variables — color, spacing, fonts — that his colleagues could edit independent of the main code. This is the next step for native app development; abstracting the display layer so that designers can have direct access. Simmons calls his system “DB5” and you can read more about it here. You can also learn more about Vesper.
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