Apple Releases John Gruber Special Edition Note App

Cupertino - In a rare move, Apple Inc. (AAPL) today released a special edition of their highly prized, and cleverly innovative Notes application for the iPhone, in honor of the well-known evangelist John Gruber.

At a cozy friends-and-family-only reception, CEO Steve Jobs introduced and presented the application personally to Gruber on a small stage, who was visibly moved by the occasion.

The guests, which included Bertrand Serlet and Joan Baez, gave a long standing ovation to the laughingly chatting Jobs and Gruber, who left the stage arm in arm, suggesting a long night out in downtown Palo Alto.

The application, called simply Note, consists of a single virtual page of paper, onto which a user may write small sentences, almost tweet-like. We have reached Gruber, who has by now had time to play with the application, for comment. In his classic style, Gruber writes to the readers of this blog:

First of all, I need to strongly state that although Steve Jobs has bestowed upon me the special honor of being the first and only independent blogger with a Special Edition iPhone App, this doesn't in any way make me "more special" than the other equal and like-minded individuals that make up the harmonious community that we call the Applebubble.

But let's talk about this technical wonder. The Special Edition Note app must be understood as the newest in a long series of insanely great applications designed by Steve, starting with the original calculator.

The brilliancy of Note is so stark that it almost hurts the brain. This is innovation in classic Apple style: bold, fearless, different. I can literally feel the Zen-like atmosphere that must have been present in the board room, right after Steve had received the crucial insight in a lightning flash out of the cloud of limitless creativity, and spoke to his savants: "There is only one page."


Look at the diamond-like beauty forged by the The Man's sheer mental power. There are no buttons anymore: you don't need a trash button, because why would you want to delete the only page that you have? Marvellous! There's no send button either, because why would you want to send your single page of notes to somebody else. They're probably not interesting for them anyway. And of course, there are no forward and backward buttons, because now we are freed from the folder-like tyranny of having to manage our multiple (ugh!) pages by hand.

There's also no way to enter more text than fits on a single screen. This radical design gives birth to a new paradigm of note-taking – about which I'll blog at length once I've immersed myself fully in this new experience – just like the 140-character limitation of a tweet forces you to compress your complex, subtle, and interlinked thoughts into pearls of clarity, wisdom, and poignancy. If your screen is full, there is probably something on it that's no longer interesting. Delete that piece and you have more room for your precious notes.

Also, Note has no synchronization. This turns out to be yet another grandiose achievement of the single-page design: why would you want to sync a single page, when you probably know what's written on it anyway? Brilliant!

All in all, I want to thank Steve and the whole Applebubble for making possible this kind of advancement in computing in this bright new millenium.

Thanks, John, you've been as fantastically insightful as always, and really, Apple continues to surprise and awe us with marvellous innovations like this!