You Must Remember This Get

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You Must Remember This

Evernote will help you organize your life, at last. Now if only you can remember what it’s called...

BY TOM SAMILJAN // ILLUSTRATION BY GRACIA LAM

PITY THE DISORGANIZED. Not only must they (fi ne, we) go through life—school, work, grocery shopping—in unrelenting befuddlement, they’re constantly being tempted by new gadgets that promise to deliver them from chaos. First came the Trapper Keeper, with its endless array of folders (so you can lose every scrap of homework at once?), then PDAs, with their damnably easy-to-misplace styli.

The latest product promising relief to the organizationally disadvantaged is a free piece of software called Evernote. While it’s still too early to tell if Evernote is going to put PostIt notes out of business, the early numbers look very promising—1.2 million users signed up for the service in its first year, a bigger debut than either Twitter or YouTube.

Evernote’s main function is allowing users to take notes in any form—by snapping pictures, recording audio, capturing web pages or typing words. And unlike a fancy Moleskine notebook, you can’t lose it no matter how hard you try. Thanks to what’s known as cloud computing, every fi le sent to Evernote is uploaded to a “cloud,” essentially a

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TWEETING TOO HARD

A cavalcade of raw ego, this site collects the most obnoxious, pretentious and self-absorbed ‘tweets’ ever Twittered. Log on to read—or submit—examples, or to make sure you’re not already there. tweetingtoohard.com server farm somewhere. From there, fi les are accessible on just about anything connected to the web—your home or offi ce computer, your laptop, your cell (and eventually maybe your brainstem!). Say you’re browsing for recipes at work and fi nd a good risotto. Clip it into Evernote and view it on your phone while you shop for ingredients. Back at home, pull it up on your laptop and start stirring.

But what really distinguishes Evernote is its uncanny ability to “read” text contained in images, which allows you to, say, take a shot of a business card and send it to Evernote, which will index the information and render it searchable.

The program’s early adopters are fanatical in their praise. But they’re the hard-core effi ciency fetishists, the type who’ll cheerfully snap a photo of their car on their way into the Apple store, so Evernote’s geo-tagging feature can help them fi nd it later on.

But what about the rest of us? Those whose idea of organization is a 2005 day planner with the fi rst three weeks of January fi lled out, or those who’ll eagerly sign up for the service and promptly forget the password?

Time to admit the obvious: We’re doomed.

New York writer TOM SAMILJAN actually thrives on chaos.

RUNPEE It’s the web’s fi rst wiki-pee-dia. Taking the guesswork out of moviegoing, RunPee lists movies and their accompanying “PeeTimes,” the missable scenes that are perfect for a quick restroom run. runpee.com

FLIPNOTE STUDIO Turn your brand new Nintendo DSi into a free pocket cartoon studio. Use the stylus to draw images, turn them into fl ip-book animations and send them to friends or upload them online. Free at nintendo.com/ ds/dsiware