What’s going on at Google? They invested million of dollars to buy promising ideas or to develop cool services. Now, they have users for their services and could make money with it, but they skip some of them. The worst example is: Google Notebook.
Google is stopping the development for Google Notebook. All existing users are allowed to continue to use the service. But, new users have to stay out in the future.
Software, that is not further developed is dead. So, we can expect a lot of leaving users in the near future. Especially, with the conversion offers of the competition.
I use Google Notebook for years. Although, the user interface still has its tweaks I think the idea is brilliant. The plugins for Firefox and MSIE are perfect for taking notes: URLs, text sections from pages, and the like. I even missed the plugin for Chrome, until I read about the “Note this” link the last days.
I followed some links on Digg and found an alternative a lot of people talked about in comments: Evernote.
It’s free in the basic edition and also offers a premium service for $5 a month. You even get a discount for a yearly subscription.
So, I created an account and played some minutes with it. Although, I didn’t extensively tested the “take a note” functionality, I can already say: much better in its user interface presentation. And much nicer in design.
You may remember the ICEfaces blog award price, I won: the iPod Touch. You can use it with Evernote and it works like a charm. The Touch allows to use Evernote in the Safari browser. You can use www.evernote.com/m for a special presentation mode.
Additionally, you can download a native application that is more comfortable from the AppStore. But, it has behaves a bit too much like an iPhone application. Some functions are pretty useless with the Touch, although constantly shown.
Synchronization of notes in this scenario is pretty cool. I used the Touch with its WLAN adapter in my local network and wrote a note. This was immediately usable in the browser of my Windows desktop. The other way around showed the same behavior.
There’s also a Windows/Mac desktop client. I tested the Windows release. The Windows client allows drag-n-drop and even offers a portable installation feature.
You may guess it: I took my USB stick with the PortableApps installation and chose the \PortableApps\evernote folder for destination. As the menu expects an exe file inside of the Evernote installation, you’ve to copy the \PortableApps\evernote\Program Files\evernote.exe into the Evernote root folder (that’s one level up).
When you start Evernote this way you can recognize how good the user interface design is. The login dialog doesn’t allow to check the “remember” checkbox. But, it remembers the user name, so that all following starts only need the password typed in. The dialog becomes simpler for this.
All Evernote clients show almost the same user interface layout, although the Touch is a bit limited. The simple use, and the plattform-independent consistency are well done. Praise to the engineers. Everybody doing Web frontend design knows how many effort this can be 
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