Goodbye SyncNotes

October 14, 2014

SyncNotes was born out of our desire to have small snippets of information always at our fingertips and brought to life by some fantastic design and engineering by the Cynapse team. 10 years ago when we first released SyncNotes on 21st October 2004, it was a one-of-a-kind service that enabled you to create notes on your desktop or mobile device and access them anywhere, anyhow. The Pocket PC version further empowered users to access their notes on their portable devices. The combination of the desktop app, the mobile app, the web and WAP interface tightly coupled with a near realtime sync made SyncNotes a killer app of its time.

The lack of a market for revenue generating consumer software in those days did not allow a bootstrapped company like Cynapse to continue development on SyncNotes. While the Cynapse team has moved on to solve other needs and in time most of us stopped using SyncNotes as we moved away from the Windows platform to Mac and Linux, SyncNotes continued to be very popular amongst its users and a lot of you have requested us to keep the system alive. Thanks to its awesome engineering, the service continued to tick with minimal maintenance from our side. To ensure infrastructure continuity we moved to Amazon Web Services to host the system.

Being one of our favourite creations it pains us to announce that the time has come for us to finally put SyncNotes to rest. Due to a change in Amazon's policy and due to the aged technology at play, the SyncNotes server will go down forever on the 25th of October 2014. It has been a great experience inventing and running SyncNotes and some of the most enjoyable parts of the experience was to interact with you, its users and fans and learn about your unique use cases and applications of SyncNotes.

While the technology landscape has changed exponentially since we first released SyncNotes, diverse current world solutions exist to solve the same problem. While these new solutions provide features far beyond what SyncNotes does, we believe there is still much to be desired in terms of simplicity and ease from tools that let you manage your small snippets of information. We at Cynapse intend to re-solve this with a fresh approach in the future, taking from all of the learnings we have had with SyncNotes.

Goodbye SyncNotes! For some of us you will be always remembered as one of the best software inventions ever.

Thank you for using SyncNotes.