Mivlos, the ramblings of a technophile by Oli Mival

We are a few months into 2009, the days are getting longer, the leaves are returning to the trees and there are lambs frollicking in fields. Well, I imagine there are; I live in a city so all that’s frollicking for me are the drunk students outside the chip shop. In the spirit of this new spring enthusiasm I’m going to recommend a little digital spring cleaning. Out with the old and in with the new, first off Safari 4.

Apple has just unleashed the newest version of their web browser Safari (www.apple.com/safari) and it is, in a word, phenomenal. Available as a ‘beta’ download (in the same way that Google products are ‘beta’ i.e. they’re basically totally final but can’t be bothered to offer support to muppets) for XP, Vista and of course OS X. For anyone still using Microsoft’s dire Infernal Explorer, dump it, seriously, your computer deserves better, especially as you probably spend 50% of your digital life in a web browser. If you’re using Google Chrome or Firefox you’ve at least begun the journey to browsing nirvana: be good to yourself and make the final step. Cover flow browsing of history (aka, iPod stylee visual search) is the eye candy but under the hood this thing is far, far, faster than anything else at rendering web pages, which is, after all, the point of a web browser.

Anyhow, Apple needs your support because of Spotify (www.spotify.com) which has been creating waves for the past few months. Imagine your mate’s iTunes collection, you know the one, the slightly overweight thinning haired one who’s been meticulously ripping their alphabetised CD, LP and 8-track collection to MP3 for the past decade and follow the NME as closely as they did Smash Hits circa 1993. They’ve got it all, Nirvana to Ted Rogers to Sneaker Pimps to Rachmanikov, or at least it appears as though they do. Well, that mate is now called Spotify, a free cross platform application using some very smart peer-2-peer technology (yep the one that got Napster in trouble) to play you almost any tune you ask of it. The interface works and looks much like iTunes, which means it’s dead easy, and as long as you’re online it will spew forth basically any musical request you throw at it. You can make and share playlists (a Facebook app is doing the rounds already, mixtapes for 2009), it’s legal, it’s free and the Americans can’t use it, only us Brits and our European brethren. What more could you want? Well, that’s easy….

Every now and then something drops into your life and makes you smile because your life just became that little bit easier. The one touch can opener, Sky+, keyless car entry, pre-chopped garlic. Sure, some people like things the way they were, but technological innovation marches on. That march has brought us Evernote (www.evernote.com).

In my daily life I have lots of meetings, lots of things catch my eye both online and in the real world, lots of things make me think, “Ah, I should remember that,” and, “I’ve got a genius idea, I need to write this down,” and “This meeting makes me want to eat my own face but I should probably remember what the nauseating guy with the bad hair cut and worse suit is saying to me.” I’m something of a digital magpie, drawn to the next shiny piece of techie intrigue, and I never had a digital nest … until Evernote.

I first heard of the service when I was invited to try the limited beta last year. It’s available through a web browser or as an application downloaded to your mac, pc or mobile device. At first glance it looks a little like a mix between an email client and basic note editor. What caught my eye then was the ability of Evernote to use optical character recognition on an uploaded image. What does that mean? Well, imagine taking a photo of a business card or wine label with your mobile phone, you can upload it to your Evernote account and the text in the photo is recognised and becomes searchable in the same way as a normal text note. The accuracy of this process is remarkably good as long as the image is of sufficient quality which is usually the case with modern phones. At first I thought this was a gimmicky, if pretty cool, service. However, over the first week I began to find myself using it more and more, by the second week it became habit to drop any thought, interesting web clipping or other digital flotsom and jetsom into my account. Since then it’s become my Diane (that’s a nicely obscure quote for the Twin Peaks fans out there), it’s my indispensible mental dump space. It’s not about actioning (no-one’s cracked easy ‘to-do’ lists … seriously … no-one) rather it’s about collating mental jottings alongside the cornucopia of fragments of interest we encounter daily, and allowing their easy search, retrieval and review. Meeting notes, shopping lists, article ideas, local gig posters, train timetables and more all sit nestled together and can be reached in an instant with a one word search revealing their content or any keyword tags I gave the note. The use of keyword tagging is particularly handy as it allows us to ditch the idea of set folders and instead create them on the fly when searching, for example searching ‘meeting’ brings up all notes with that tag or mention in the note itself. Very simple, very useful, very cool.

So, how much will this hugely valuable service cost you? Nothing, nada, zip. You get 40MB of uploads a month for free, which is plenty for all but the most hard core of us as text files are so small, and this can be upped to 500MB a month for £30 a year should you need it. Evernote is a web 2.0 service that works amazingly well, so well in fact that it’s changed the way I work. I access my account on a plethora of devices, my work computer, my laptop, my wife’s computer at home and, of course, my iPhone. In fact the iPhone app is so brilliantly simple and powerful I find myself using it the most. Indeed, I wrote this article on my laptop but edited and delivered it with my iPhone … from a bar on the ski slopes of France … and that’s why I love the march of technology.

Do yourself a digital favour, download and try these three today. Until next time you can join me at www.mivlos.com for more ramblings from a technophile.

- Oli Mivlos