The New Simperium API is the Future of Data Availability

Simperium is the company behind Simplenote. It's now also a data syncing service. Simperium announced the Simperium API and it looks nothing short of amazing.1

Here's a fantastic example from their API Samples page:

Simperium is offering libraries to incorporate this impressive data sync into iOS, Javascript and Python based apps.

There are a number of other concept videos showing how developers can think about the Simperium service. I'm not sure if this could be done with iCloud in iOS, but I do know that this is not something that can be done with JavaScript and iCloud. To be fair, this is not like iCloud's data sync. Simperium is syncing much more simple (and much smaller) objects. JSON is really just text.

Just some highlights from the Simperium overview:

Simperium persists your data for you in buckets. Buckets are application-wide namespaces and exist as a convenience for you to organize your application's data. Every Simperium object is JSON data that is stored in a bucket.

Simperium uses an inherently schema-less datastore. Objects in the same bucket need not have the same structure...

If you are a fan of the Simplenote versioning system, Simperium provides that for all objects automatically. Grab the scrubber and watch the data roll back through time. Restore to any point along that timeline. Now imagine that option in sketching apps, games, or image editors.

Proper versioning and roll-back is something that I would like to see spread into new contexts. Rather than roll back an entire document, I would love to retrieve an old state of an isolated sentence or paragraph.

While the Simplenote app has not changed much in the past 3+ years, behind the scenes they were building the future. I have high expectations for this project.

The three integrations I expect in apps now: Dropbox, TextExpander, Simperium.

By way of Shawn Blanc


  1. No, I'm still not using Simplenote. I can't go back until it stops messing with URL encoding in my text notes. That doesn't detract from how impressive this service is.