Brian Jarvis, UMPC Geek

For the last few days, I’ve been trying to make the new Evernote Beta work for me. I absolutely love the idea of using the internet to keep my laptop and UMPC notes in sync. Plus, the concept of having them web accessible through any web browser is absolutely brilliant! I’ve just run into a few too many problems.

The formatting options are terribly limited in Evernote. First, the fact that I can’t mix ink and text is not a deal breaker, but I do this regularly enough that it’s a feature I would miss. Second, there is no support for dragging and dropping text within a note (I use this function all of the time in OneNote for indenting, organizing my thoughts, etc). And third, Evernote appears to use HTML formatting and so it does things I think are really ugly - as one example, it places unnaturally large breaks between body text and bullets. I’ve included a small portion of a screen shot (to avoid sensitive data) that illustrates the bullet issue.

This last complaint may seem like nitpicking, but I use spacing and formatting in my notes to provide structure, context, and meaning. Believe me, I’ve tried to be forgiving and make it work because I really like a lot of the other features of the software. OneNote is a very feature-rich application though and it looks like I will be sticking with it for now. Maybe some developer could write an interface for OneNote that emulates the tape and allows for the web functionality of the new version of Evernote.

The first time Josh Bancroft showed me his iPhone, he (half-way) jokingly said, “Let the countdown begin.”

“To what?” I replied.

“Until you buy one” he said.

Well, in the end, I chose the Touch over the iPhone, but Josh knew me well. :^)

Today I find myself wanting an Apple computer worse today than ever before. You want to know why? It’s so that I can play with the developer kit for the iPhone/Touch. I’m not a professional programmer by any means, but I am a hobbyist and I would love to play in the world’s newest mobile playground. Now if I could just convince my wife that I need an Apple computer worse than our kids need to go to Disney in May…

I spent the weekend (not-so-successfully) fighting the flu, and found some relief in distracting myself with reading. I downloaded the latest in a series I’m reading from Fictionwise in Microsoft Reader format and had the book on both my UMPC and my Pocket PC.

I have read dozens of books on different PDA’s and enjoy the format a good deal. This time, I read about 80% of the book on my UMPC because the I was able to consume more text on each screen and found that it was just easier on my eyes. I have included screen shots of the same text from my UMPC and the Pocket PC for comparison.

You should probably check out the full UMPC image here to get a real feel for what the text actually looks like on the device (since I had to scale it down to a reasonable width for the post).