Regarding Evernote

I’ve gotten a slew of nice responses to my piece on Simplenote yesterday, but the most common one is “Why not Evernote?” It’s free, it has over-the-air-syncing, it has native Mac and Windows clients in addition to the web and iPhone apps, and it offers a slew of additional features.

I have no doubt that many people love Evernote. That’s great. But I don’t like it at all. I don’t like the Mac app. I don’t like the web app. And I especially dislike the iPhone app, which, even if I did like it, doesn’t work at all on the iPhone OS 3.1 betas. (I’m sure they’ll fix that before OS 3.1 actually ships, but every app I do depend on runs just fine on the OS 3.1 betas.)

Simplenote is a perfect example of my primary guideline for iPhone UI design:

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

Evernote goes in a very different direction: a long list of features but a janky experience.

★ Friday, 17 July 2009