We receive many emails from customers and really appreciate the execellent feedback we receive through that. The feature that has been requested most often for some time was the ability to email your photonotes. People loved the ability to take notes with their photos, but felt restricted by the fact that their photonotes were locked within the application.

Unfortunately adding email was not that simple. Well, a simple text email would’ve been easy enough, but the Apple SDK does not allow attachments, and emailing a PhotoNote without the photo is somewhat pointless. So a workaround was required. Fortunately a developer by the name of Ian Baird has released an open source package called SKPSMTP. That allows sending of smtp emails from within an application. And more importantly it supports attachments.

So we are very pleased to announce that the new version of PhotoNote now allows you to email your notes.

However, it is a temporary solution and it is far from perfect. It works outside of the native iPhone mail client, which means it cannot be a background process. You need to keep PhotoNote open while sending the email. It’s also not as robust as the native mail client, so it only has basic retry and recovery functionalty. Finally it relies on our mailserver, which means the email is send from our account and the recipient won’t be able to simply reply to it. Similarly there is no notification to you in case the email bounces, for instance because of a typo in the email address.

We found an answer to the mailserver problem and will allow you to configure your own smtp account. Every gmail user will be able to use this option. Many other email providers will support it as well, but not everyone.

The other issues are somewhat tied to the workaround and can only be solved once Apple allows email attachments within apps. Once that happens, we will upgrade PhotoNote and provide the more robust option.

Meanwhile we hope you enjoy the new functionality and do let us know if you are having any issues or have suggestions for improvement.

Happy to introduce the release of version 1.2.1 of PhotoNote today. This is primarily a bug-fix release, but we managed to include a new feature as well.

A customer raised the issue of the application crashing on certain types of deletes. Turns out that this was related to the new sorting functionality that was introduced in the last release. This issue is now fixed. We’ll aim to do some more regression testing when we introduce new features. 

Another customer raised the issue of odd behaviour when typing notes in landscape mode. They stumbled on a piece of new functionality that wasn’t supposed to be there yet, so that’s been removed. We are still working on landscape functionality for the notes screen, which will make it easier to write larger notes (diary style), but this will be released in a future release.

Many customers asked for the ability to add notes without a photo. That would take PhotoNote on the path of a full Notes replacement. The feature has been included in this release. It appears as an extra “source” option when adding a new PhotoNote, so make sure that the “Select Camera/Library” function is turned on.   

We will continue to add new functionality to the application, so let us know if there’s anything that would rate very high on your wish list.