Meernotes review [iPhone]

The retro bubble hasn't exactly burst, but it's probably deflating quite slowly. Every game you ever loved is readily available once again, and novelty items like cassette tapes and mechanical toys have been brought back to life several times over to add a nostalgic appeal to modern tech.

But the iPhone notebook application Meernotes proves that there's still room for lashings of retro goodness on your hot lifestyle gadget, and that slick, attractive design can turn a good app into a superb one.

The reason there are so many note taking apps on the App Store is probably because Apple totally failed with the native Notes application. It's depressingly featureless and your notes are more or less locked on the device. There's little in the way of organisation, and its style struggles to compete with the kind of app we saw on the Palm Pilot a decade ago.

Style is where Meernotes begins, and where it seduces you before you even get around to examining its features. Quite why there's a meerkat motif attached to the app is anyone's guess, so we'll overlook that aspect of its design and go straight to the notebooks.

Meernotes borrows heavily from those highly-attractive, yet prohibitively expensive notebooks you see on the shelves of a posh stationary shop, with elastic closers and super-trendy hardback covers. You can select from a host of different covers when you add a new notebook and they're all beautifully displayed on a rustic wooden shelf for you to take down, scribble in, peruse and admire at any time.

Of course, the real advantage here is that you can separate all your thoughts into individual books, which is a surprisingly powerful feature. There's no waste of paper here in Meernotes, so there's no guilt attached to starting a new notebook for every idea you want to document.

The app's organisational skills don't stop there, either. Each notebook can have as many tabs attached to its pages as you want, essentially creating a new chapter that you can jump to simply by tapping the page divider tab running down the edge of your virtual notebook.

A single button tap also date stamps your current page, which is another massively useful feature you didn't know you needed. It'd be nice if there was an option to use this date stamp to tie a note page in with the iPhone's calendar, but currently there's no such facility.

An index is automatically compiled for every new tab that you add, so before you know it you've organised your thoughts in a very efficient - and attractive - manner. A less-permanent bookmark can be added to any single page in one of your notebooks, which returns you to that page whenever you open the book again. In many respects this is the same as a tab, but quicker and less permanent (although, of course, you can add and delete tabs as required).

The app features some very simple gesture commands to reveal your notebook shelf, your tabs, and other options such as the settings. Exporting is limited, in some respects, in that Meernotes can only really send out your musings as raw text. It retains a degree of formatting, so you can still see where your pages were (complete with page numbers and titles), and you can also sync up seamlessly with Dropbox to add a very welcome backup cloud storage option to your books.

The developer is currently working on a desktop app that should really boost Meernotes' cross-platform functionality, but in the meantime the standalone app still comes highly recommended. It oozes style, but still delivers on the functionality. There's no one who won't find this app a delight to look at and a pleasure to use.