Pete Warden:
All the known examples of this type of identification are from the research world — no commercial or malicious uses have yet come to light — but they prove that anonymization is not an absolute protection. In fact, it creates a false sense of security. Any dataset that has enough information on people to be interesting to researchers also has enough information to be de-anonymized. This is important because I want to see our tools applied to problems that really matter in areas like health and crime.
I’ve long suspected this to be the case, but I didn’t realize that it had already been studied. I wonder whether anything interesting could be deanonymized out of consolidated.db. It doesn’t worry me personally, but it would be nice if Apple provided a way to opt out.
There have been some important updates since version 2 of my comparison. Notesy 2.0.1 now supports nested folders and has improved searching and a cleaner list view. PlainText 1.4.1 now has a basic search feature. Both apps unfortunately only show you the list of matching documents; they provide no help in finding the matches within the files. Overall, Notesy is the clear winner for me.
|
Droptext 1.2.1 |
Elements 1.5.1 |
Locayta Notes 2.0.1 |
Nebulous Notes 4.3.1 |
Notesy 2.0.1 |
PlainText 1.4.1 |
Simplenote 3.1.4 (Premium) |
| Choose Folder on Dropbox |
Yes |
No |
No |
Yes1 |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes2 |
| Nested Folders |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes1 |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
| Works Offline |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Choose Font |
No (Helvetica) |
Yes |
Yes3 |
Yes |
Yes4 |
No (Georgia) |
No (Helvetica) |
| Font Size |
No |
Yes |
Yes3 |
Yes |
Yes4 |
No |
Yes |
| Font Color |
No |
Yes |
Yes3 |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
| Background Color |
No |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
| Multi-File Search |
No |
Yes |
Yes5 |
No |
Yes9 |
Yes |
Yes |
| Search Results List |
No |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
No |
| Jump Within File |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Yes6 |
| LF Line Breaks |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Sort by Name |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Sort by Modified |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
No7 |
| Rearrange Lines |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Versions |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Yes8 |
| Price |
$1 |
$5 |
free |
$2 |
$5 |
ads or $5 |
$20/year |
1. Rather than syncing everything, Nebulous Notes makes you choose individual files as “auto-saves,” which is a drag.
2. Simplenote seems to be much slower than the other apps at picking up changes from Dropbox. It was often 5 minutes out-of-date, and sometimes hours or days. You can force it to sync, but to do that you have to go to the Simplenote Web site.
3. Locayta Notes is the only app I saw that lets you set font and color options per-file.
4. Notesy lets you set both a variable-width font and a fixed-width font, which is a good compromise between choosing just one and choosing per-file.
5. Locayta Notes does some sort of indexed/prefix search, coupled with auto-correct, which didn’t work well for me. Some words it didn’t find at all. When searching for “cat” it would find lots of useless matches of “at” but totally miss “wildcat”.
6. Simplenote’s results-jumping did not work for me with files containing basic Unicode characters such as é and ’. The tech support person was not able to tell me which subset of characters to avoid, so the only solution seems to be to stick with ASCII.
7. The option is there, but in my experience the modification dates shown in Simplenote, if I’m using Dropbox, have little relation to when I actually edited the files. The tech support person said this is not the normal behavior and is looking into the matter but has not yet found a solution for me. Even going by the displayed dates, the sorting is sometimes out of order.
8. Simplenote’s versions feature is like the one in Lion and works within the app—very cool.
9. Excellent options for searching by word (Boolean AND), phrase, or regular expression. You can also choose whether to search everything or just the filenames.
