Featured Freeware: Evernote

Functional, useful, and always on, the note-taking application Evernote goes beyond mere cool program architecture and is also interesting. It's a true three-platform play: it works very well, and somewhat differently, on desktop computers, mobile phones, and over the Web. You can download it for Windows, Mac, and your mobile phone.

One of the cooler features is that when Evernote runs on your camera phone, it will automatically upload your snapshots to the Evernote server, creating a useful archive of them. The killer feature is that it also does OCR on your images so you can find them later by searching for text in them. Use this tool to snap pictures of products you see in stores and want to remember, to grab whiteboards in meetings, and to take pictures of people with name tags at conferences. It's one of those utilities that might just change your life.

Everything you do on your phone and on your computer is synchronized to your Evernote account on the Web. Since it synchronizes as soon as you log on, and regularly thereafter, reinstalling the software or losing data because of a crash are nonfatal problems.

Do note that the Web-based text editor isn't keystroke compatible with the PC-based editor, which makes switching between the two experiences confusing. Evernote is also still in beta. The free version offers 40MB per month for uploading and unpredictable OCR performance, while $45 a year gets you a 500MB a month allowance, priority OCR, better security features, and support.