Personally, I've moved through exactly that progression.

If you prefer to have direct file access and make everything UNIXy, or like the Markdown features, go with nvAlt and Elements over Dropbox. Evernote has their own app to talk to their serviceĬhoosing an option depends entirely on your needs: if you need to put up images or want to take pictures of whiteboards and OCR them, Evernote is great.SimpleNote has a nice editor for talking to their service.Elements is a nice Dropbox editor with Markdown support.Evernote syncs via their own service (no direct file access), but lets you store images, and does OCR in the cloud.nvAlt is a fork of Notational Velocity that also syncs with SimpleNote or Dropbox.You can back the notes with simple text files so other apps on your computer can see them. Notational Velocity syncs with SimpleNote or Dropbox.Use a good app on the desktop to edit them.Choosing where in the cloud is a matter of which apps you'll use. There are a million ways to do this, but the gist of all of them is:

Evernote desktop note sync