Wherever Note

Update: Merely 24h after I wrote this, there’s a new Windows version available that improves performance a tad (even under WINE). Sadly, the UI still follows the same approach, and actually looks much uglier under WINE. Here’s a shot of it with the new toolbar:

After a few days of using the new iPhone version with favorites/offline support, I think it’s fair to say that Evernote has finally become useful to me.

I still don’t think its entry-level offering is secure enough for professional use, but I find it good enough to draft random bits of stuff in.

My sole woe right now is that its Windows version has the grace and UI styling of, well, a rather sluggish green elephant. Whereas the Mac version is sleek, fast and has a sensible UI layout that showcases most of the features (even if it doesn’t do client-side OCR), the Windows version has a “river of notes” view that I find fiddly and aggravating to use - after you’ve used the Mac version, everything pales in comparison.

So much so, in fact, that I sometimes prefer to just use the web interface on Windows, something I only usually did on my Linux netbook¹. Speaking of that, by now most people know that Evernote will run mostly OK under WINE or Crossover Office², albeit with some visual quirks - if they had a couple of options to remove the gradients and use a “flat” toolbar, it would be just dandy.

Still, it’s nice to have options. I personally see no point in a fully native Linux port of Evernote with my current setup (and the company has stated that they will be publishing an API for third-party programs to talk to their platform, which should prompt someone to write a native client for the GNOME desktop), but on other platforms things seem to be shaping up.

I’m not sure if it’s really the best note-taking application out there (and I should point out that I use OneNote for all the sensitive stuff, so I can readily compare the two), but at least now it’s sort of working for me.