Thanks to Sho's comment on my post yesterday, I have switched from Appigo's Notebook app to Notespark, by Metaspark.

One thing Notebook does wrong is that it makes you hit an Edit button at the top of the screen to start editing a note. It then scrolls all the way to the bottom of the note and puts the insertion point there. This is especially annoying for me, because I very often want to add stuff to the top of the note, or near the top.

Unlike Notebook, Notespark does almost the right thing, which is that you tap the text to start editing it and the insertion point goes where you tapped. This is what Apple's Notes app does. Unfortunately Notespark doesn't remember where you were scrolled to between launches, as Apple's app does; I've submitted feedback about this to their forums.

Both applications integrate nicely with their respective web apps. What makes Notespark stand out is how it is specifically designed to support shared editing. Multiple users, or the same user logged in multiple times, can make changes to the same note. Notebook supports this too, but the difference is that Notespark will merge everybody's changes instead of blowing away your changes with my newer ones.

If there is a conflict that prevents a merge (for example, if two people make different changes to the same sentence), Notespark makes it easy to either resolve the conflict or fork the note into two notes. Thus it elegantly solves what was by far the hardest problem in my wish list. I can jot a note on my iPhone when I'm on the go, and I can edit the same note on my iMac when I need to do more sophisticated editing.

Here's what the Notespark iPhone app shows you when there is a merge conflict:

And here are your options for resolving the conflict:

One thing you can't do with the web interface is edit notes offline. It would be nice if Metaspark told us one day that all our notes are actually in svn, and we could have the option to check files out and use whatever text editor we want. But that might be too much to ask.

I have minor quibbles and I found one bug, all of which I reported on Notespark's forums. Nothing that prevents me from being a happy customer so far.

UPDATE: The folks at Notespark fixed the bug I found.