Evernote: If I Could Just Add This As a Feature to Springnote, I’d Love It

I am, in all likelihood, one of the most absent-minded people in existence. While in my mind I am insanely organized, the presence of some combination of my children around me most of the time means I forget a lot of things. I've been using my cell phone's camera for jogging my memory for as long as I've had a phone with a camera, and I've been hoping Evernote would be the solution to all my problems.

The idea behind Evernote is that you can use it to store and access those same pictures I've been taking, even recognizing words in the photos to help you tag them and call them up later. With the ability to use Evernote with both Mac and Windows web cams as well as mobile access, you can sync your memory across every device you use, accessing your notes at any time in any place. Each free account comes with 200 MB of storage, more than enough room with the small files you generally create with a mobile phone camera.

Where I find I'm most likely to use Evernote is on my mobile. The iSight is kludgy for holding items up to take photos, and since I still haven't gotten around to upgrading to Leopard (even with the software sitting right next to me), I wasn't able to try it out. I do know that the iSight takes shots as a mirror image, so I'm assuming I'd have to flip the image before getting it to recognize any text. With my mobile, however, I have Evernote set up in my contacts directory, and whenever I take a shot I'd like to save, all I have to do is send it via my private email address, and it uploads directly to my notebook.

The camera on my phone (a Motorola RAZR until Apple hurries and releases that 3G iPhone) isn't the best quality, and a shot of a wine label I tried to save was too blurry to get any word recognition, even on street signs or license plates that I can read easily looking at the image. Once I've uploaded my images, though, I can add tags, add text to an image, change the title, and organize into different notebooks I can create.

So why am I not in love with Evernote?

The biggest problem for me is probably the UI, which is barebones, at best. The "tour" they provide shows the functionality, but not how to use it, and it took a bit of poking around before I could figure out that I had to create a new tag, then add the tag to the image under "note operations." Why should it be a two-step process? I should be able to create a new tag right on the image without having to go to the sidebar menu and do it in two separate steps.

It also lacks the organization and ease of use that I found with Springnote. There's no rich formatting for adding text to your notes, much less cool little design features that just make it easier on the eyes when you are trying to organize your notes and information.

Please note: I take my screenshots in Camino since I have more screen real estate than I do in Firefox. The drop-down for tags doesn't float to the top like that in Firefox, and Camino is not on the list of approved browsers for use with Evernote.  

The final kicker for me is that it doesn't let you upload videos. I one short video of my youngest dancing in the aisle at her older sister's spring concert and I automatically tried to send it to Evernote as I would have with a photo, and I received an error message. When they say "multimedia note" they mean an image or audio, but not video, which I think more and more people are using to make notes of conversations or conference material to refer back to.

I like the idea of being able to really access the information I store in picture form on my mobile, but the kludgy UI and the other lack of features left me wanting much more. If the Evernote folks and the Springnote folks were to merge their products together, however, I'd probably be first in line to buy the resulting product.