Here's how to sync your Notes between iPad and Mac

This is not immediately obvious and took me several conversations with various AppleCare techs before I finally got the solution as to why my notes on my iPad where not syncing to my Mac Pro. The problem seems to be that you can't sync if you only have Notes on your iPad. You must have notes on your Mac to which unlike Calendar and Contacts don't have corresponding standalone applications, iCal and Addressbook, respectively. Notes exist within Mac Mail. I only had Notes on my iPad and none on my Mac Pro. In this event here's what to do to get setup and syncing:

SETUP:

1. Go to System Preferences on your Mac > MobileMe > Sync > and make sure Notes is checked although, syncing via the cloud apparently won't happen until iOS 4.2.

2. With Mac Mail launched, if you've never created a note in Mac Mail, in the left column you should see:

MAILBOXES
ON MY MAC
RSS

or if you've created some notes on your Mac Mail, you'll see:

MAILBOXES
REMINDER
- Notes
ON MY MAC
RSS

The key is you have to have REMINDERS created. So if you don't have it created, when you sync your iPad and Mac, the iPad doesn't know what to do as there's no "receptacle" for it's notes on your Mac.

So in Mail, in the top of the window create a new Note, click the notepad icon to the right of the New Message.

Now REMINDERS will be created in Mail's left column with this new note. You can simply put "Test" or whatever and click "Done" in the upper left of the Note's window.

3. Plug your iPad into your Mac, in iTunes, in the left column click your iPad under DEVICES the Info tab in the top. At the bottom of the page is "Other" > click: Sync notes. Do NOT click the checkbox "Notes" in the next section under "Advanced"

4. Click "Apply" at the bottom of the page and your iPad and Mac will begin to sync. It may take awhile as I believe it is doing both a sync and backup.

Once this process is done, you'll see your notes fully sync'd on your iPad and Mac. Yea! but there's more...

5. Notes created in Mac Mail show up in 2 places: your MAILBOXES > Inbox and under REMINDERS > Notes, and if you delete the Mac Mail note in your inbox, it deletes the note in your REMINDERS.

This is unfortunate and not great interface design IMHO and should be remedied.

Luckily the last Tier 2 AppleCare tech I just spoke with had a workaround for this, which is:

6. Create a new mailbox inside Notes under REMINDERS. Click Notes, then go to Mailbox > New Mailbox... in the top of your monitor screen.

Under the location pulldown it should show a notepad icon and On My Mac.

For the Name, I called my new mailbox "iPad Notes" Then click OK.

Then a triangle appears next to Notes mailbox to access this new subfolder (iPad Notes) and you then drag your now sync'd notes from Notes under REMINDERS to your "iPad Notes" subfolder under Notes. Now your left column will look like:

MAILBOXES
REMINDERS
-Notes
--iPad Notes
ON MY MAC
RSS

Doing this drag to "iPad Notes" will remove the note(s) from your inbox, but keep it in your REMINDERS and thus be available for Syncing, which currently can only be done with your iPad when plugged in via USB to your Mac.

Apparently, in iOS 4.2, you'll be able to use MobileMe to sync Notes just like Calendar and Contacts. We'll see.

I hope this is helpful. It took me awhile to get all this set up, and being that I am not an AppleCare tech, if you have questions instead of asking me, I recommend you call AppleCare and review with them. Let them know I got the above info from Tier 2 support.

Once iOS 4.2 and Lion come out, all this may, hopefully be a simpler process, but as of this writing, pre 4.2 and Lion, this is now working on my iPad and Mac Pro.

Good Luck.
Steven