• WHAT: A way to collect, organize and sync your notes between all your computers and your iPhone
• WHY: Apple’s Notes function (incredibly) doesn’t do this
• COST: Free

Evernote logo

Regular readers of this column will know that I’m an unabashed fan of most Apple products.  Heck, I’ve even got a license plate that reads, “MAC MAVN.”  But every once in a while, the “insanely great” products that Jobs & Company produce can be irritating or miss something so incredibly obvious that you’ve got to wonder whether they just ran out of time, or coffee, or patience before releasing the product.  The recent “MobileMe” product release, as an example, was an unmitigated disaster and it took months for the company to get things working properly.  Some people are still having difficulties with it.

One of the blatant oversights spotted by thousands of users around the country when the iPhone debuted was the inability to sync notes from the computer to the phone.  I mean, c’mon guys, I have a Palm Pilot that might officially qualify for entry in the Smithsonian that syncs notes.  What happened here?  Nobody outside of Apple seems to know and, worse, we’ve gone through two software updates on the iPhone without any indication of it being fixed.  Thankfully, there’s a thriving developer community that spots gaping holes like this and develops elegant, totally cool products like Evernote to fill the gaps.

Evernote is a whole lot more than just a way to sync notes from your phone to your computer, though.  After using it for a month or so I’m completely hooked.  You can create a variety of different types of notes using text, voice or even a photo with a simple, intuitive interface and edit them on any computer because the application is web-based.  And now, after a recent revision, the notes can be edited directly on your iPhone, too, although that part of the process is considerably more cumbersome than the others and needs improvement.

In addition to downloading the free application from the iTunes App store and installing it on your phone using the standard sync process with iTunes, you’ll need to create an account.  The basic accounts are free; if you become a serious power user and needs lots of space or bandwidth you can purchase an upgrade that will handle all but the most addicted users for about $5/month.  Once it’s installed on your iPhone you’ll see a screen like this:

To me, this screen alone represents the brilliance of the whole application.  It’s clear, clean, attractive and tells you exactly what you’re going to create.  Tap on any of the functions and you’ll be taken to another screen that allows you to create a note and title it, tag it and put it into a specific “notebook.”  You can create lots of different notebooks on the web site, but when using the phone you’ll have to put the note you created into one of the existing notebooks - I didn’t see a way to create a new folder from the iPhone so if it’s there it’s not sufficiently obvious.

One of the handiest is the voice note.  Just like a lot of the recorders that you can find in the iTunes App store, this one will record your voice accurately and allow you to save the recording easily.  What’s different here is that you’ll be able to access that recording from either the phone or the Evernote site within a few moments of recording it.

You can tell when a note is waiting to be synced from the phone to the site because there’s a clever “Pending” section on the phone that shows what’s waiting to be transferred.  Again, very intuitive.

You can do the same thing with a photo, or even with an existing photo - although not from the list of photos from iPhoto, which I consider an oversight that should be rectified - that you’ve taken using the iPhone’s camera and saved it.

Photos, voice notes, text notes can all be tagged easily, making them simple to search for either on the phone or on the web site.  The search function will search the title, tag, body text and anything else about the entry so you don’t have to tag it - it just makes things a bit easier to organize.

If there’s a better way to take notes on the iPhone and have them synced to a web site (which, in my opinion, is even better than having them synced to a specific computer because you can access them from anywhere, or from a laptop instead of your desk, etc.) I haven’t found it.  And if it does exist it’s going to have to go a long way to equal the smooth, intuitive and almost ethereal interface that Evernote presents to iPhone users.  If Apple had any sense they’d buy this company quickly and make it part of the MobileMe suite; they rarely take my advice though, so I’m just going to keep on using Evernote from my iPhone and computers to keep my life in sync the way it should have worked with a native Apple application.