Recently I abandoned two of my favourite apps in favour of two fresh & new apps with very similar functionalities but one major difference: Syncronization. The following thoughts explain the reasons of switching and the big advantages of having done so.

Leaving “Vienna” and sailing over to “NetNewsWire”

The former commercial RSS Reader NetNewsWire released an free version of it’s magnificient reader. The experience consists of an online account with all your RSS Feeds nicely aggregated. A neat desktop client with great performance advantages over Vienna (saying goodbye to my beloved theme was the hard part of switching – exporting and importing the OPML file was a snap). And last but defenitely not least there’s an iPhone application, that nicely loads new entries and let me switch them trough while on the train or bus. Saving the interesting ones as clippings allows me to find them later on the desktop client with ease.

Taking “Evernotes” instead of writing a “Journler”

Journler was my companion troughout my studies at the ZHDK. It held my notes, drafts, concepts, server login data, passwords and undefinable rambling neatly together. But at some point I wished I had all my notes in an online repository to have access to it all the time and not just from my own machine. I allready thought about setting up my own Wiki on my server, but luckily wasn’t completely satisfied with the available solutions around. Then I heard Jon Hicks mentioning Evernote over and over again, so I gave it a shot. Multiple Notenbooks, tagging, online & offline editing, syncronization from my online account to the desktop client and the sweet iPhone app in combination with nice conflict handling. Need any further proof of the well thought out concept of Evernote? Okay here’s more: iSight notes from the desktop, speach recordings from the iPhone, geo-tagging and an interface as sweet as candy for both the iPhone and the desktop application are just some nice extras.

Closing note

Syncronization proved to be the most helpful feature when working on multiple devices. After all the waiting seamless communication between desktop, cloud and mobile is at reach.

After bookmarking, note-taking, news-reading and so on, what are next best things to sync over the cloud? Here’s my wishlist:
Timetracking: well, there are some applications – let’s try these out
ToDo management: Can I haz a Things online version?
Backup: This would be the most useful one, but the initial 80 – 500Gigs backup scares me just a little.