After all these years of promising the successor to nvALT, it’s amazing to be able to tell you that the nvUltra beta has begun. We (Fletcher Penney and myself) still don’t have a final name, but the app is really solid and I’m excited to be bringing people on board to put it through its paces.

The first round we’ve sent out is to a tiny group of private beta testers (only about 20 people). We hand-picked this round from people who’ve been great beta testers in the past and whom I know already understand the concept behind nvALT. Once we get through a few rounds of bug fixes and improvements with this group, we’ll be opening it up to a larger segment pulled from the mailing list. And then probably wider after that, but with the hopes of going to market in as short a time as possible.

Because we’re still refining the UI, I’m not going to share a lot of screenshots yet. I will tell you about Connections mode, though. In addition to blazing fast, full-text search, you can also toggle into Connections, which takes the text of the currently selected note and compares it against the text of all the other notes in the folder (and subfolders), with the result of showing you all of the notes most relevant to the current one. It’s a cool new feature in the nvALT and Notational Velocity style of note-taking apps, and one we think you’ll find useful.

Look forward to more updates soon. Sign up here to join the mailing list!