iAppLover

If you’ve ever wanted an external brain, well, apparently Evernote is the way to go. It’s a simple organizing program that allows people to organize their lives, though with some very neat options. The iPhone literally has hundreds of options out on the internet, but Evernote has been getting some of the best reviews out there.

It lets you organize things into folders called notebooks, which allows for a maximum level of organization. It takes several cues from its desktop brethren by allowing several views of these customize categories, such as a simple text based list view to the traditional thumbnail folder view. This makes spotting the information you’re looking for as easy as possible. Whatever text you enter into Evernote can be edited in a variety of ways – certainly more than your average text file as you can change fonts and italicize the letters, among other things.

One of the biggest advantages of an organizer program as opposed to a notebook is that you can, usually, search for a specific item that you’ve entered. Geotagging or putting in specific coordinates along with a note to add a new dimension to organizing your notes. While combining that use with a GPS program is still in the works, it promises to be very useful for people who travel a lot or even people who like making various notes about places around the world.

Incidentally, Evernote also has the neat capability of looking for text in pictures, which is always a fancy option to have especially with the rise of internet memes. Of course, you need to have Evernote index the images first – it’s a program, not magic. This also means that if your writing is more akin to a doctor’s scribbling than a street sign, you probably won’t get the outcome or search result that you’re looking for.

One of the more intriguing options offered by Evernote to the average person is that if you have something you want friends and or co-workers to look at, there’s an option to publish stuff. Publishing notebooks means that you can easily share that stock of funny pictures on that trip to Tulsa or whatnot. You could even use it for work, allowing you to send files without a second thought.

Incidentally, for those who’re secretive or have work that require some form of secrecy, Evernote offers selective text encryption. Evernote makes your iPhone into a literal mobile desktop, even allowing you to send in some photos that you’ve taken with it to yourself. The aforementioned picture text searching is of course, done automatically.

The greatest part about all this is that Evernote is a very, very young app – which means it has so much more to grow into. This isn’t the end of the line, it’s the beginning of something amazing and a worthy addition to the arsenal of anyone who wants to organize their life a little more or even for people who want to share while on the road with their iPhone. It promises to grow into a program that many people will find integral to their lives.

Days Until

Organizing your schedule can be hectic or a waste of time, depending on what kind of activities you’re involved in. Stage managers, team leaders and department heads are probably full of deadlines, event schedules and similar items to organize.

These people are the ones who are so busy, they probably need a program to make sure they don’t drop the ball while they’re working on some high powered project.

That program, if you’re toting an iPhone, is called Days Until. Now, while it certainly won’t win any naming contests, it’s beauty lies in its functionality and options, not in what it’s called.

That and it’s free.  That certainly adds a few stars to any rating system around.

More than a mere organizer, Days Until, as the name suggests, also informs you helpfully how many days or hours are left before a specific event takes place.  You don’t have to go flipping between virtual pages to check what’s up next week – all you need to check is the main screen and you’ve got that info.

Customizability is the name of the game and Days Until makes an earnest attempt to deliver in spades. As always, backgrounds can be changed to pictures on your phone.

Multiple events are of course, a must if it wants to actually be useful.  A wide variety of fonts and text colors are available for those who want to color code between personal and business events, or any other division or category that you want.

Since it is a program, it also allows something that a paper organizer is hard pressed to truly offer – indexing. You can select a specific date easily simply by scrolling.  You could also add short summaries for events, which could easily be viewed with a couple of taps on screen.

As far as organizers go, it’s highly customizable and once again, free.  The functionality it offers for free is something you cannot pass up.  It will cost you nothing to try out this app.  If you don’t like it, there are plenty of other options running around the net for you.  Try out Days Until – it’s free.