Once in a while you come across an app or utility that knocks it out of the park. I stumbled across EverNote on this article over at LifeHacker, and it really made me think twice about how I store, keep and organize my notes.
I have a lot of notes in a lot of different places, on my desktop (Windows XP), on my laptop (MacBook Pro), on a Windows CE palmtop (HP Jornada), and a Windows Mobile phone. Of all these, the lack of interoperability between the Windows CE gadget and the Windows Mobile phone flat out infuriates me. They’re not able to sync to the same PC because one uses an old version of ActiveSync and the other uses a later version, and you can only have one version installed at a time. Great job there Microsoft.
EverNote got my attention because of its seamless syncing to ‘the cloud’ from desktop versions on the PC, on the Mac, plus Windows Mobile phones, plus the web access. You get access to the same info where ever you are, on what ever gadget. Very neat. I haven’t played with it extensively yet, but this solves a big problem for me for having info in too many places.
Next I want to find an app that consolidates all my different calendars.
Update: on second thoughts, the only provision for encryption and security is to encrypt selected passages of text from the desktop app that are then not visible in the web client, and accessing your notes and information from either the desktop client or the web client goes over HTTP unencrypted, not over HTTPS. For the purposes of making my information available so I can access it anywhere, passwords etc, this makes this service unusable for me.
Update 2: I just had a quick look at Google Docs and checked that you can access all your docs over https just by prefixing the url with https. And same goes for EverNote too, so maybe this isn’t as much as an issue as I thought.
Update 3: the catch with HTTPS/SSL though is that while you can access the web app over HTTPS, the desktop clients will connect and sync unencrypted with the online server, unless you pass $45/yr for the premium service. Hmm. Maybe back to Google Docs then.