What039s not in a name

I had already been testing a new iOS app named Notesy when the boys over at the B&B podcast started to recommend it. I have to say, I really like the app. However, I started to see some funny business while I was test driving new note naming systems. I’ll post about that experiment later. However, I discovered some interesting limitations when using Dropbox for taking notes. Dropbox limits the characters used in note titles.The Notesy blog has some good succinct information.

The short and not so sweet of it is that Dropbox prevents or changes several characters when used as part of a note title. The following characters are not allowed as part of a Dropbox note file:

\ / : ; ? * < > |

For example, I am syncing Simplenote and Dropbox. Simplenote allows me to save a note named as follows:

blog::review::Notesy 2011-04-10.txt

However, that same file shows up in Dropbox as follows:

blog--review--Notesy 2011-04-10.txt

The double colons are replaced with double dashes. I’ve confirmed the same behavior with several Dropbox based note taking applications so this is not specific to Notesy. Notesy does have a setting to allow the use of Windows non-prefered characters, however, that does not fix this issue.

This will definitely impact my file naming experiment. That short exclusion list includes several characters I was considering for use as tag separators in note titles. It can be frustrating when limitations are purely technical. The mind is willing but the API is not.