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iPhone productivity

Since the iPhone 2.0 software came out, I’ve been really enjoying a number of third-party applications. Recently, however, that’s been taken to a whole new level. From NetShare (which I was fortunate enough to grab after it was first pulled from the store), to yesterday’s release of DataCase, there are some apps that have fundamentally changed the way I work.

Evernote

In this post, however, I want to talk even more about one app in particular: Evernote. I tried Evernote on the desktop (and web, of course) back when it first hit beta, and I wasn’t particularly impressed. I’ve never been a big fan of the note apps (including Yojimbo, for instance)—they just never seemed to fit my workflow.

Once the free version of Evernote on the iPhone hit, though, that all changed. The ability to create notes via text entry, the phone’s camera, and by recording audio is fantastic; I find myself recording notes in the car, and snapping pics of things all the time. The photo notes are particularly interesting given Evernote’s ability to index text in images—take a photo of a book you want, and you’ll be able to find it by searching for the title or author later. Add in the desktop-web-phone sync, and you’ve got something that (for me) is a killer app.

In Action

Here’s one way I’ve recently started using Evernote via the iPhone. We recently moved offices, and I discovered a cache of business cards that I’ve collected over the past year. Instead of trying to find a place to put them all, I took pictures of each card within Evernote (using the iPhone camera for some, and the note-from-iSight feature of the desktop app for others). Each went into my Business Cards notebook, so I’ve created a virtual, searchable rolodex. If I could only sync it with Addressbook, I’d be set*.

* Evernote apparently plans to release an API, so cross-application syncing might become possible in the future.