Comments on: Beyond Mobile Music Making: Organizational Musical Uses for iPhone, Other Smart Devices

By: Graham English

Graham English — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:28:53 +0000

Richard is right. Evernote isn’t fully ready for prime time. Heck, iPhone 3G was hardly ready for prime time. But at the moment, Evernote is a great capture tool. I was shocked to see it in the App store since it’s basically a beta service. I imagine they’ll roll out improvements based on the feedback. John Gruber (Daring Fireball) totally ripped into them so I’m sure they’ll take notice.

By: KCLau

KCLau — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:10:10 +0000

I am using an unlocked iphone in Malaysia. But iTune store just couldn’t let me create an account. Without an apple account, I can’t download app via the apple app store.
That’s bad. Do you know any way that I can download evernote?

By: RichardL

RichardL — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:23:08 +0000

I think just OmniFocus at this point which is sort of an outliner on steroids.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:41:15 +0000

Ah, good comments, Richard. Jeez, I can actually edit existing notes via the Web interface — which is a problem I have with a number of the iPhone apps, from what I’ve seen. There are a bunch of things that are really browser tools with a skin or a fancy icon or whatever. (Similar problem on some of the Blackberry “apps”.) This isn’t necessarily even the fault of the SDK so much as lazy or unambitious developers…. or, perhaps, the need is really for something that lives in the browser, depending on the application.

Well, Evernote’s clients at least continue to iterate on all platforms … though, at the same time, you see the problems of having to deal with a bunch of different platforms without a clear core across all of them.

Omni’s stuff has traditionally been pretty good. There’s an OmniOutliner for iPhone out there, too, no?

By: RichardL

RichardL — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:34:58 +0000

As I noted in the iPhone music app thread. Evernote for iPhone doesn’t seem to be ready for primetime. You can create new notes on the iPhone, but existing notes are not editable on the iPhone/iPT. I ran into numerous bugs including the inability to sync notes to the server. The top line of the text editor for new notes gets clipped off so you can only see the bottoms of the letters. If you accidentally start the app and enter the wrong choice or information about your account you seem to be able to get into an infinite loop. OK quitting to your home screen is only a button away. But the Evernote iPhone app is in need of some serious work and testing. The idea seems great though.

I would expect lots of innovation and improvement the GTD product niche. Two Mac-based offerings seem interesting. OmniFocus and Things by Cultured Code.

OmniFocus is costly at $80 for the Mac version plus $20 for the iPhone client. It’s Mac-only too and requires that you set up a WebDAV server or use MobileMe to sync your data.

Things by Cultured Code is $40 for the Mac and $10 for the iPhone, but it doesn’t sync at all yet. And they say those are introductory prices. i.e. the price goes up when they actually finish the program. Again its Mac only.

Which brings up an interesting point: will a Mac-only program fly on the iPhone? I think something Web-enabled like Evernote has a much better chance of dominating. Hopefully Evernote will run with it and actually get a functional version of their client out for the iPhone.

In the mean time I would expect to see a number of other products to enter this potentially lucrative niche over the next few months.