About a week after switching from the stock iPhone Notes app to Evernote, I'm moving back to Notes.
The feature list for Evernote is seemingly impressive. You can enter notes on their site, from a Windows or Mac desktop application, from email, or from a Windows Mobile or iPhone application. Content is stored on Evernote's servers and synchronized with all your devices. As the intro video on their site shows, you can highlight content on web pages and use the desktop client to easily send something to your Evernote account. Using the iPhone client, I was given the option of creating notes by entering text, taking a picture with the phone's camera, or even by capturing a voice message.
For me, however, the way I mainly want to use it is to simply jot down something fairly short when an idea hits me so that I can later go through my notes and process it. I can do the same with the phone's built-in camera and photo management app, and I already use Jott for capturing and transcribing voice notes.
Still, I decided to try something more advanced than the stock notes app and give Evernote a whirl.
I can really understand this Daring Fireball post on iPhone-Likeness now (scroll down to where the Notes app is discussed). It's as if the Evernote iPhone app is trying to be too clever, and in doing so, fails at following iPhone UI conventions and loses the simplicity that made using the Notes app useful. There were just too many fields and too many tabs to fidget with, and I felt the app was getting in the way of writing my thoughts down. The Notes app, by comparison, is beautifully designed and fun to work with (important for an app that you're going to be using on a regular basis).
Also, Evernote's syncing service was ok, but there was misleading lag at times (I lost a couple of notes when I accidentally shut down the app before it had a chance to save and sync notes, and unsynchronized content would appear momentarily before changing), and I like the simple mental model of having things be in one place that I can depend on. And, after going through years of duplicated or missing contacts and calendar events using Outlook, Exchange, and even a trial of MobileMe, I'm still nervous about syncing.
For sure there are some perceived cons to Notes: there's no cut and paste (the same for all iPhone apps), notes can only be sorted one way, the "loading" screen is misleading and annoying, and there's no dedicated way of syncing notes to your desktop. But actually, these haven't bothered me and, for the way I use it, there are adequate workarounds. It's hard to believe, but I honestly don't miss having cut and paste, the sorting I just deal with, and if I have a long enough note that I want to get out of the phone, I can just email it to myself (but maybe these are symptoms of Apple Stockholm syndrome).
But that's probably enough time devoted to a little note-taking app for now...
The feature list for Evernote is seemingly impressive. You can enter notes on their site, from a Windows or Mac desktop application, from email, or from a Windows Mobile or iPhone application. Content is stored on Evernote's servers and synchronized with all your devices. As the intro video on their site shows, you can highlight content on web pages and use the desktop client to easily send something to your Evernote account. Using the iPhone client, I was given the option of creating notes by entering text, taking a picture with the phone's camera, or even by capturing a voice message.
For me, however, the way I mainly want to use it is to simply jot down something fairly short when an idea hits me so that I can later go through my notes and process it. I can do the same with the phone's built-in camera and photo management app, and I already use Jott for capturing and transcribing voice notes.
Still, I decided to try something more advanced than the stock notes app and give Evernote a whirl.
I can really understand this Daring Fireball post on iPhone-Likeness now (scroll down to where the Notes app is discussed). It's as if the Evernote iPhone app is trying to be too clever, and in doing so, fails at following iPhone UI conventions and loses the simplicity that made using the Notes app useful. There were just too many fields and too many tabs to fidget with, and I felt the app was getting in the way of writing my thoughts down. The Notes app, by comparison, is beautifully designed and fun to work with (important for an app that you're going to be using on a regular basis).
Also, Evernote's syncing service was ok, but there was misleading lag at times (I lost a couple of notes when I accidentally shut down the app before it had a chance to save and sync notes, and unsynchronized content would appear momentarily before changing), and I like the simple mental model of having things be in one place that I can depend on. And, after going through years of duplicated or missing contacts and calendar events using Outlook, Exchange, and even a trial of MobileMe, I'm still nervous about syncing.
For sure there are some perceived cons to Notes: there's no cut and paste (the same for all iPhone apps), notes can only be sorted one way, the "loading" screen is misleading and annoying, and there's no dedicated way of syncing notes to your desktop. But actually, these haven't bothered me and, for the way I use it, there are adequate workarounds. It's hard to believe, but I honestly don't miss having cut and paste, the sorting I just deal with, and if I have a long enough note that I want to get out of the phone, I can just email it to myself (but maybe these are symptoms of Apple Stockholm syndrome).
But that's probably enough time devoted to a little note-taking app for now...