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Is it just me, or are 99% of the the Chrome themes downright gaudy without being tasteful? Sure, the artwork can be just dandy on its own, but having a face full of bright, stupid pattern when I want to browse or, god forbid, actually concentrate on reading something on the web is madness. With some of them you can't even read the text over the top. Have these people learnt nothing about productivity? Don't they ever suspect that less is more?

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With the demise of further development of Google Notes, I didn't seriously think for long about implementing my own web notebook. Instead, I've persevered with Evernote and it's gradually infiltrating my daily habits.  

Me, I like lists, so I've captured some thoughts on its strengths and weaknesses.

For

• Web access means ubiquitous access
• Native iPhone app means it suits the limited UI
• Native Windows and Mac apps, mean that clipping and saving both native and web content is easy
• Accepts rich formatted text, pictures, PDF attachments
• The free version is pretty capable (for now)
• Text recognition on images, so the text is searchable.  This is pretty clever

Against

• Lack of decent text editing. I hate making something a heading by selecting bold, and upping the font size. I want styles, or at least HTML-type headings (h1, h2...). 
• Searching on iPhone is a bit painful, although very flexible. Why can't I just go to a home page with a list of all the notebooks?
• Lack of rich text editing on the iPhone, so you can't edit most of the docs you create
• Can't select Google Mail as my email client on any platform

What I am getting used to is having all this information at my fingertips, wherever I am -- work, home, or out and about. It's a GTD inbox for one. I also keep a shopping list on there, so when I have an idea, it's quick to add, and when I'm in the supermarket, there it is.  Same with books to read when I'm in a bookshop, DVDs to watch when I'm in the video store and so on.  I have some favourite recipes on there so I can think about what to cook when I'm at the shop and know what ingredients I need to get.  And so the list of uses goes on.

Some have suggested that Evernote is a killer app for the iPhone. That's overstated, but it's certainly a good example of how a ubiquitous network and multi-platform client can make your information more mobile.

Another example I talk about: I was in a café one Saturday morning reading a magazine, and saw a recipe that was worth noting down. I could have quietly (and selfishly) torn it out of the mag, I could have tried to find it on the Internet, or I could have typed it into my iPhone, but no, I photographed it with the iPhone and uploaded it to Evernote using the app. Some time later it got OCR'ed and the text is now searchable. That's pretty neat.

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Here is an interesting proposition for music-heads like me.  It's a portable music workstation with knobs, buttons, and a bunch of audio goodies.

It reminds me of the old Casio VL-1.

I think this would make a nice add-on to the iPhone. In fact, with a mix of knobs and buttons on this, with the touch-screen interface of the iPhone, you could have a very portable composition setup, with the ability to upload to somewhere at the end of it.  

It would be nice to be also be able to use this as a portable hardware add-on to Ableton Live, for that only slightly-less portable setup.

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With the near ubiquity of web access through my iPhone, when I look at a serious productivity app, a high-priority requirement is to have useable access from both laptop/desktop and iPhone. If offered only through a browser, rarely can the one interface work on both devices well.  Even simple navigation events like a double-click or scrolling are problematic on an iPhone, not to mention the lack of Flash. 

So, web app developers that want wide acceptance need to either introduce an installable client for the iPhone and a decent API, or provide an iPhone-friendly web interface that can be accessed safely over Safari.  For some apps, only one mode of access makes sense (GPS-related mapping for example), but for others it's a major turn-off.  This isn't just limited to iPhone of course: Android and (soon) Palm Pre users will have the same requirements.  And it's not going to go away. Increasingly, more users will be accessing apps through a smartphone than a laptop.  If nothing else, any web app should have a good public API and let the market come to the party with different ways of accessing and manipulating the content.

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If you make a living from design, then you need to be closer to the edge than if you make your living from selling widgets. So when your widgets are design objects then your risk profile is higher than other widget companies. Apple is a poster-child for a product company trading on its innovative and elegant design, but so is Alessi, maker of famous kitchen accessories and other items. The McKinsey interview with Alberto Alessi, current CEO of Alessi, shows the sort of focus and approach that a design company has, when compared to the others. The commercial aspect is there, of course, but it's almost secondary to the idea of expression, and the necessary level of risk that is required.

As Alessi says:

Well-organized, mass production companies try to work as far as possible from the borderline. They cannot afford to take too many risks. But by all producing the same car, the same television set, and the same fridge year after year, those companies are making products more and more boring and anonymous.

The destiny of a company like Alessi is to live as close as possible to the borderline, where you are able to really explore a completely unknown area of products. The problem is that the borderline is not clearly drawn. You cannot see with your eyes where it is. You can only sense these qualities.

His metaphor for his role in the business is as a gardener, and, as with gardens, you need to cope with wet seasons and dry seasons.  From the article:

We consider our core activity to be mediating between, on one side, the best possible expressions of product design from all over the world and, on the other side, the final customer's dreams. I prefer discussing "customer dreams" instead of "the market," because market is so rough.

Deep down, I feel that my activity as an artistic mediator in product design is not very different from the role of a museum director or even a filmmaker—putting together and organizing talents in different fields to get to a result, which is not a mass-produced product in the traditional sense, but a product that's trying to speak to the masses in a new sense, like a well-made film.

To do this, we make use of some qualities that are more and more rare in industrial culture today, such as sensibility, intuition, and the desire to accept a bit more risk.

It's a refreshing message.

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With the financial crisis and all, now's a good time to look at the web apps you use and rely on, and put a continuity plan in place. We're not at the bottom of the market yet, so many of those start-ups without a solid revenue model, and offering compelling reasons to continue using their services, just may not be around in six or twelve months time. And you may not get much warning.

So, where possible, export your data and back it up, ideally in a standard text, CSV, or XML format that you can wrangle -- with various degrees of difficulty -- into a usable format elsewhere.  At a time like this, open data is more than a privacy issue, it's may be a survival issue if that data is critical to your personal or business life.  Failing that, getting hold of the source code may be a fallback if there is someone who can get it up and going long enough to get the data out. Think about any hosting you use as well. Make sure you have your digital assets backed up, including config files, images, htaccess files and so on.

I'm thinking about the things I use regularly, and which of them have the best margin to business failure, and which I care about.

• Google
• Flickr (Yahoo!)
• Delicious
• SimpleGTD
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Bloglines
• Posterous
• Evernote
• NuevaSync
• etc.

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