Every­one knows Ever­note is great for note tak­ing, but what else are note­books for? Specif­i­cally, for writ­ers? That’s right, drafts. And with Ever­note, I can com­pose both arti­cles and fic­tion on any device: locked down work PC, desk­top at home, net­book, Win­dows Mobile and yes, even my iPod Touch.

I wrote my first novel, Between Heaven and Hell, almost entirely in long­hand in a paper day plan­ner, typ­ing the pages in at night when I got home. In large part, it was this expe­ri­ence that led me to my focus over the last decade on tech­nol­ogy for mobile writing.

As com­put­ing moves into the cloud and more of us have mul­ti­ple com­put­ers to use through­out the day, I’ve been look­ing for a solu­tion for not so much as mobile writ­ing as ubiq­ui­tous writ­ing. The abil­ity to access the projects I’m work­ing on or jot down new ideas any time, any­where. And the cen­ter of my sys­tem is Evernote.

If you haven’t seen Ever­note before, it’s a mul­ti­plat­form note tak­ing and retrieval appli­ca­tion. You can use it on the web, on Win­dows (installed or portable), on the Mac, on the iPhone, Win­dows Mobile and a mobile web ver­sion for other phones. The data all syncs to the cloud, so what you save in place shows up every­where else. You can orga­nize your notes in mul­ti­ple note­books, and each note can also be tagged with key­words. And of course, you can search for any aspect of a note, from con­tents to date mod­i­fied. (Notes even have fields to store your GPS coor­di­nates from when you cre­ated them.)

Obvi­ously, this is boon for writ­ers when it comes to research. But what I’ve dis­cov­ered is that it works just as well for writ­ing copy itself. Every arti­cle I write for my blog, and every chap­ter of nov­els I write, begin as notes in Ever­note. They all live in my “Writ­ing” note­book, with blog entries tagged with “JeffKirvin.net” and chap­ters tagged with the name of the book they’re a part of. Then I just start typing.

I’ve found that I pre­fer the var­i­ous ded­i­cated clients to the web ver­sion, just for speed. I use the portable Win­dows ver­sion run­ning off a thumb­drive at the office, installed Win­dows clients on my net­book and home PC, and I have Ever­note installed on both my Win­dows Mobile-​based Touch Pro and on my iPod Touch. Stuff that I’m cur­rently work­ing on is tagged with “!Quick­Ac­cess” so I can just search on that tag and see every­thing at once.

On the iPod Touch, I have to be mind­ful that on that device I won’t always have an active inter­net con­nec­tion, mean­ing I can’t guar­an­tee I’ll be able to pull notes down from the cloud. Mobile clients don’t store every­thing locally and sync the way the desk­top clients do. They basi­cally just pro­vide a faster inter­face to your web-​based notes. But the excep­tion is that on the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can mark indi­vid­ual notes as “favorites” (they get a lit­tle star) and those notes will be locally cached on the device for offline access. So I make sure every time I access some­thing on my Quick­Ac­cess list on the iPod that I star it as a favorite.

There is one catch I feel I should men­tion. On both the iPhone and Win­dows Mobile clients, you can view any note you want, but you can only edit plain text notes. Any rich for­mat­ting– ital­ics, bold, chang­ing the font– will make the note read-​only on the mobile device. Since I’m using this for drafts, not pre­sen­ta­tion, this doesn’t really affect me much. I write every­thing in plain text and then add for­mat­ting only when I copy the text into either Word (for fic­tion) or Live Writer (for blog­ging). But I thought it war­ranted a men­tion just to save peo­ple some of my ini­tial confusion.

If you want the capa­bil­ity to write any­where you have a PC or a phone, no mat­ter what it is, Ever­note might just be the tool for you. I breathe a lot eas­ier know­ing that not only is all my writ­ing auto­mat­i­cally backed up to the cloud, but that I can get to it, add to it and edit it from wher­ever I may be.

There are shap­ing up to be four big ecosys­tems in com­put­ing. As all four diver­sify into the cat­e­gories below, I’m notic­ing that a lot of users are stan­dard­iz­ing on using every­thing from a sin­gle ven­dor, a silo­ing of the mar­ket rather than embrac­ing vari­ety. You can do nearly every­thing you need to do with offer­ings from any one of them, and they tend to work bet­ter if you don’t mix and match. But is it really pos­si­ble to put all your eggs in one basket?

Microsoft

Microsoft has, by far, the best selec­tion of the bunch, with every sin­gle cat­e­gory I could think of cov­ered. They have gone out of their way to pro­vide solu­tions for the office, liv­ing room and on the go. Some of the options here aren’t best-​in-​class (though I’d say the Zune is bet­ter than the iPod clas­sic and IE 8 can give Fire­fox and Chrome a run for their money if you give it chance), but they all work. And more impor­tantly, they all work together. If you use the soft­ware and ser­vices listed above, they inter­op­er­ate cleanly and effi­ciently, exactly the way con­ven­tional wis­dom says Microsoft doesn’t do. The biggest prob­lem Microsoft has is the snarky haters who have their minds made up and won’t give them a break.

Google

Google has a lot of gaps in their ecosys­tem offer­ings, but they make up for it with even bet­ter inte­gra­tion than Microsoft. Once you start using one Google prod­uct (Gmail seems to be the most pop­u­lar “gate­way drug” aside from search itself), it’s all too easy to start using the rest. But where Google wins in inter­op­er­abil­ity, they lose in power. Google Docs, for exam­ple, is fine for light use, but most users wouldn’t think of using it to com­pletely replace a more pow­er­ful desk­top office suite. Google also lacks an OS and vir­tu­ally any enter­tain­ment options. Even Google’s Android plat­form offers only the most basic media playback.

Apple

For Apple, inter­op­er­abil­ity is king, but it comes at the cost of choice. Apple’s offer­ings work seam­lessly together, often appear­ing to be one organic sys­tem, but heaven help you if you need to replace one of them because it doesn’t entirely meet your needs. Their gaps are fairly minor, and the lock-​in pro­vided by iTunes over portable media and home the­ater offer­ings keeps a lot of users in their camp.

Linux/​Open Source

The open source route is for the free spir­its out there who so don’t want to be in thrall to one com­pany that they’re will­ing to cob­ble together every­thing them­selves, even when it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily even try to work together. Think of these as the polar oppo­sites to the Apple users. A lot of this stuff is build your own, but at least most of it doesn’t require you to com­pile it your­self any­more. It’s also so frag­mented between dif­fer­ent Linux dis­tros (KDE and Gnome both have their own photo man­agers, and there are oth­ers as well if you don’t like those), that any kind of consensus-​based inter­op­er­abil­ity is unlikely.

Con­clu­sions, my ecosystem

I tried to stay within a sin­gle ecosys­tem, and my life would prob­a­bly be eas­ier if I did. But because of the var­i­ous gaps or miss­ing func­tion­al­ity, I’ve been forced to mix and match a bit, fully know­ing that that would be up to me to find my own ways to makes the pieces interoperate.

Most of my ecosys­tem is based on Microsoft offer­ings, but I’ve swapped out a bit from the Google and Open Source stacks where appro­pri­ate. Fire­fox per­forms bet­ter on my net­book than IE 8, and the IE Tab plu­gin allows me to use the IE ren­der­ing engine when I need it. Google Talk is lighter and less noisy than Live Mes­sen­ger, and I find Google’s search results a lit­tle bit more reli­able than Live Search’s. My blog­ging solu­tion is also a three-​headed mon­ster with some quick posts done in Live Writer but most of my blog­ging done in OneNote for early drafts, and then Word for post­ing. I’ve also bypassed Zune in favor of Win­dows Media Player and my Win­dows Mobile smart­phone, but I know peo­ple that use both.

What are your choices? Do you stick mostly to a sin­gle ven­dor, or do you play the field?