Hannah Whaley . com

A while back I asked around on twitter about the best way to take notes digitally. I was curious whether people use digital pens, iphone apps, netbooks or anything else. There was a reason I was asking….

For the last 5 years I have kept hardback notebooks at work to take notes in meetings - a common system amongst developers. I’ve never felt it suited me - realistically its about the only writing that I actually do with a pen. My particular concerns were that I didn’t have access to my notebook at home or around campus, I couldn’t easily search for anything in it, and I had no real reason to refer to it. In short, it was non-digital. Everything else I interact with is, which means I am used to being able to search through text, access things from anywhere, and integrate across tasks to increase usefulness. My notebook was effectively useless - I constantly took notes that never became useful to me, and that I didn’t tend to read once I’d written them. It makes sense to me that I rid myself of the final bit of paper and become a paperless person.

Anyway, most people that left me comments said that netbooks were good (and didn’t take as long to boot as I’d thought), that digital pens sounded cool but no-one had one, and that mobiles provide good spur of the moment note taking.

I thought I’d share with you the solution that I came up with, and am currently trialling at work. After much searching, I found an online service called Evernote that lets you create an account, take notes online, save them and search them. You can tag them, group them, add URLS, clip webpages and include snippets. Poifect.  But here is the cool bit…

• They have a Mac app that you can use as a client, and sync online
• They have a Windows app for the same purpose
• They have an iPhone app that also syncs with the online service, lets you take images, and can tag notes with your geo-location

Awesome. I have digital notes on my work mac, my home PC, my iPhone and on an Asus eeePC for meetings. I take the eeePC when I think I’m likely to need to take notes and the rest of the time I have my iPhone. If needed I can use any web-enabled PC to access my notes. I think I’m paperless…

Tweetie is my preferred twitter client for iPhone. I have about 4 others installed (including Twitterific and Twitterfon) but use nothing but Tweetie. I therefore had good reason to be excited about the release of the Tweetie Mac client a couple of days ago.

I expected it to be good, I didn’t expect to love it. And I do love it.

At first, I thought this was because:

• It has proper customizable show and hide commands
• You can easily do searches without switching client or using twitter’s webpage
• You can ‘tear off’ searches and keep them running
• It displays conversations as conversations
• You can retweet, and you can post webpages using a Tweetie bookmarklet
• Easy access to @ replies and direct messages

Then I realized something – those are the things that make it good, not the reason I love it. I actually love it because it is simple yet does advanced things, its smooth, it’s well laid out, it flows, it looks pretty. It has streamlined things I didn’t even realize I did regularly until I can now do them with less hassle. In short: it is well designed. You can never underestimate the power of something that is well designed - its what moves software from being useful to being a real pleasure to use.

The Twitterific client has been removed from my Mac dock. Not only has Tweetie taken its place, but I’ve actually designated some screen real estate for it to live in. It deserves it. A reminder to us all that thoughtful design is worth more than the sum of any number of features.