Happy April! The journey begins, what you will find in the new app update and why you are lucky if you already bought a copy of Ghostnote.

Only a few weeks ago Jimmy & I were anxiously awaiting Apples approval – Today thousands of users are using Contextual Notes to improve their workflow. The journey started years ago but rest assured, we are only getting started.

The short version

“Why isn’t there a way to just attach notes to a file or a folder” I kept asking until a friend of mine one day said: “Because no one has built a solution for it yet”. And so I started exploring some ideas on how this solution could look like.

We originally started out with the idea of making “ghost-it-notes”. Notes that you can make and forget once you are done with them. Your use of the Mac itself is the notes browser and the notes should just magically appear when you need them. This was the basic principle we build Ghostnote around. Boy were we wrong…

After having launched the app, suggestions started hitting our inbox. Very quickly we realized there were many use-cases we hadn’t even considered. Students using it for Udemy courses. Developers wanting to add individual notes to iTerm windows. Evernote integration, a browser for all your notes.

Some of our customers have told us it literally changed their entire workflow in 5 minutes.

The roadmap

Being a very small team (two people to be exact) we want to strike the balance between doing things properly and still pushing new things to meet some of the suggestions from you we think are valuable. We are not going to say yes to everything but there are several suggestions we feel would make Ghostnote an even stronger tool than it already is:

Whats coming in the next update?

Evernote export. One of the most popular requests have been support for Evernote. We have successfully implemented it and it will part of our next update.

Customized Shortcut. Another popular request has been the ability to open and close Ghostnote via a shortcut. Happy to say we got that in there too.

Switch between document & application notes. Starting from next update, you now have the ability to switch between notes for the application and notes for specific documents. That way you can have general notes for the app while still being able to write notes for specific documents.

Ghost icon shows if there are notes or tasks. Also coming in next update ghost icon will indicate whether you have a note or a todo. It even shows you if you have unfinished tasks.

Custom scripting i.e. the ability to customize the scripts. If you know your way around Applescript you can actually add your own Document Support already now. Some users have been sharing scripts and we recently wrote a brief tutorial about how to do this yourself. If you end up making your own scripts please don’t hesitate to share them with us we will make sure you get full credit and will add it to our scripts repository.

Real time note export. If you want access to your notes in a readable format we have made a simple note exporter which puts all the notes into a folder. We will be adding more advanced support a little further down the road.

Preferences. We changed the preferences panel to be more in line with standard Apple GUI and to provide bigger flexibility for adding new features.

What’s coming a little further down the road.

Ghostnote for MS Windows. We want to make Ghostnote available for windows users too. It’s a little trickier to pull of but we believe it’s doable. We already started sketching. If you are a Windows user and want to become a beta tester, mail us at info@ghostnoteapp.com.

Ghostnote for Chrome. We want to offer some of our users even better granular control of websites and PDFs and we want to them be able to share their notes in teams and in context. Keep and eye on the blog for a more detailed explanation of Ghostnote for your browser.

Team notes. Exactly what you think it is. Notes and todo’s for teams. We are expecting to implement it for Dropbox first and the other cloud services. More on this next month.

And much much more. We literally have several pages filled with things we want to build.

Pricing. After some careful consideration we will be increasing the price after next update from $4.99 to closer to $9.99. We believe this is a more fair price-point compared to the value Ghostnote provide. So if you have any friends, followers or family members you think would benefit from using contextual notes and todos, tell them to buy it here. If they want to understand how Ghostnote works show them this video.

And last but not least. We are a small independent developer trying to build a kick ass product. One of the best ways to keep us in business so we can keep making Ghostnote ever more aweseom. is to give us a good review in the app store and share Ghostnote with your social networks.

Best

Thomas & Jimmy