Note taking on steroids: Catch

A few weeks ago in my Web Applications Alert newsletter I discussed a Web-based note-taking and distribution service called Catch.

The service is interesting for several reasons.

First, it’s simple. Through the Web interface, Catch allows you to create a “note” of up to 100,000 characters. You can add a note, append content to notes (even multimedia), and view notes by alphabetical sorting, date or by tag. To create or use an existing tag you simply preface any word in a note with a hash symbol ("#").

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

A few weeks ago in my Web Applications Alert newsletter I discussed a Web-based note-taking and distribution service called Catch.

The service is interesting for several reasons.

First, it’s simple. Through the Web interface, Catch allows you to create a “note” of up to 100,000 characters. You can add a note, append content to notes (even multimedia), and view notes by alphabetical sorting, date or by tag. To create or use an existing tag you simply preface any word in a note with a hash symbol ("#").

Second, Catch is cross-platform: You can use the Web and there are free Android and iOS apps available for the service. The iOS and Android apps are more sophisticated than the Web interface as they support audio notes, offline access, SSL encryption of synchronization sessions, audio notification of new synced notes, font display controls, and automatic geo-tagging of notes.

And third, but not least, through a single account, you can synchronize your notes between all of your devices on any of the supported platforms.

Catch offers two types of accounts, Catch Free and Catch Pro. Both accounts allow for an unlimited number of text notes and, in addition, Catch Free allows 70MB of uploads per month (which works out to roughly 700 minutes of audio or 270 iPad 2 photos per month).  Catch Pro, which costs $5 per month or $45 per year, allows for up to 1GB of uploads per month (that’s about 1,000 minutes of audio or 3,900 iPad 2 photos). Note that there is no limit on the total size of note storage for either account.

Catch plans to add support for PDF and other productivity file formats for the Pro account in the near future.

But wait, that's not all, folks! Catch also has extensions for Web browsers, including Firefox, Chrome and IE. And along with that Catch slices and it dices … turn it over and it's a chainsaw! Yes, here's the really cool part: Catch has an API!

Yep, through the Catch API you can do everything you might want to do with your notes: You can create, manage or delete an account; log in to your account; annotate a note; get user information; list, add, get, modify, or delete a note, manipulate media; manage comments; search notes; tag notes; and manage geotags.

If you want to play with the Catch and its API you can experiment using cURL, the free, open source Internet retrieval utility.

For example, for the account "yourname" with the password "yourpass":

F:>curl -u yourname:yourpass -k https://api.catch.com/v2/notes.json

The response to this request lists all of the notes attached to that account:

{"status": "ok", "count": 5, "notes": [
{"server_modified_at": "2011-07-20T02:37:40.965Z", "id": "27841150"},
{"server_modified_at": "2011-07-20T02:37:42.270Z", "id": "26055767"},
{"server_modified_at": "2011-05-26T21:21:19.904Z", "id": "26057747"},
{"server_modified_at": "2011-05-26T21:21:44.254Z", "id": "26074696"}, {"server_modified_at": "2011-07-20T02:32:32.946Z", "id": "27890979"}]}

The "-k" switch gets around the problem that, because cURL performs an SSL certificate verification by default, when the test fails for whatever reason (hopefully not because of a hacker), you can switch off cURL's certificate verification (you can use either the -k or the --insecure switches).