This is intended to be the first of seven (possibly more) posts on game-changing business ideas.

It’s often difficult to recognize when something changes the game. A few months or years down the road, you can usually trace a trail of copycats and wannabes back to the original idea, but even then, sometimes it’s not immediately apparent how something changed the game, or which aspect of the thing was responsible.

Other game changers are instantly recognizable. The first game changer I planned to write about was the Apple iPhone, but after thinking about it for a few seconds, I decided to inaugurate this series of posts with an ode to Apple in general.

The Mouse and GUI (1983)

Apple has built its house on one game changer after another. They introduced the mouse and GUI concept to the mass market way back in 1983, which may be the biggest game change in the history of personal computing. In many ways, the mouse and GUI is the very essence of personal computing. If you’re not a developer or a sysadmin, can you even imagine a command-prompt universe?

“Lifesavers candy” iMacs (1998)

In 1998, Apple released its candy-colored “Bondi Blue” iMac, and the world said “hold on, you can design a computer?” Now every previously overlooked appliance and utensil is designed, from toothbrushes to toilet brushes.

The iPod and iTunes (2001)

In 2001, Apple unveiled the first iPod. Portable music wasn’t revolutionary (Sony’s walkman was first to blaze that trail). The ability to carry all your music with you was new, but not revolutionary either. The scroll wheel UI was innovative, and super efficient, but not game changing. The real game changing thing about the iPod was what it did for MP3. The iPod made MP3s mainstream, and it’s no coincidence that the music industry killed Napster just as the iPod took off, paving the way for the iTunes Store (or iTunes Music Store as it was called at the time).

The iPhone (2007)

In 2007, Apple launched the first iPhone. Hard to believe it was only four years ago, since it’s become so deeply nested in my life. Everyone was wowed by the touchscreen. So sensitive, responsive and precise. And the way it bounces! So kinetic! But it’s not the screen that makes the iPhone a game changer. I played with various touchscreen prototype devices back in 2002-2003 when I worked for Vodafone. I recognized the touchscreen as the future of mobile phones, and so did everyone else who used them. The touchscreen was simply inevitable.

So it’s not the screen that changed the game. It’s the App Store. Apple opened the mobile phone up to developers, and lo the developers didst come. Now there are lots and lots of touchscreen smartphones, and lots of would-be App Stores. There’s the Android Marketplace, Blackberry App World and the Nokia Ovi Store, not to mention app stores launched by the various carriers. But if you ask iPhone users why they don’t want to switch to Android (or ask users who did switch what they miss most), many will still say it’s the apps.

Two years after Pinch Media released their iTunes App Store Secrets report, I still see this iconic curve on a regular basis:

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game or a productivity app, free or paid, the typical mobile app is dumped like a cheerleader after prom night. Most are all but abandoned within a month or two, which means they’re either ill-conceived, poorly designed, or both. It’s especially sad when you consider how hard it is to get your app onto someone’s phone in the first place. With a million apps in the iTunes store competing for the same real estate, it’s tough to get yours discovered, much less downloaded.

Every developer wants to be one of the lucky few who break through, but they should also want to make their apps sticky. So what does it take buck the curve? To answer this, it’s important to look at the ways mobile apps are used.

I organize mobile app usage scenarios into concepts I’m going to call the 3 Cs, and the more of them that factor in to an app, the stickier it is.

Continuity

These are apps that keep you connected to things you can’t stand to be away from. The great grandfather in this category is mobile email, which is what made Blackberry into Crackberry. Newer, sexier examples are Facebook (iTunes store link), Twitter and any other app for accessing time-sensitive content (NetNewsWire, Sportacular). The common thread is freshness – a steady stream of new content. Push alerts are key to Continuity apps, since they tell users when there’s something new to see.

Context

Mobile devices and ubiquitous 3G and GPS created whole categories of apps built around the here and now. Location and presence. If you find yourself wandering around a city block in search of a public restroom, you can check SitOrSquat. Hungry? fire up Yelp, or Foodspotting. These apps keep you coming back because of their contextual relevance and utility. Yelp’s iPhone app has become my de facto Yellow Pages to the half-mile radius.

Capacity

Modern culture has killed our appetite for idleness. We’re uncomfortable with silence. When we have some extra capacity – for lack of a better alliterative term – we fill it as quickly as we can. Mobile apps are ideal for this, especially almost any kind of game. As far as stickiness goes, though, this is the weakest of the 3 Cs. Most games lose their appeal after a month or two, and there are certainly a lot of games represented in the Pinch Media curve.

The stickiest apps are the ones that span more than one of these concepts. Foursquare, for example, covers all three. There’s Continuity in the need to know where your friends are, Context in the location features, Capacity in the gamelike mechanics around acquiring status and collecting various rewards.

Mobile video apps make up another category that spans several of the Cs. People watch short-form videos during idle moments – while riding the bus to work or waiting in line for the ATM – which is another way of saying people use them when they have some extra Capacity. Kyte (my current employer) makes it easy to distribute video content to mobile devices, which enables publishers to keep it fresh, which in turn means Kyte-powered video apps check the box for Continuity. The Kyte Mobile App Frameworks take Continuity further with turnkey support for integrated Twitter updates and RSS feeds, giving brands and publishers a multi-dimensional engagement opportunity.

One of the things that stood out for me amongst all the hype around the Motorola Droid before the device hit the market was the screen resolution: a whopping 480 x 854 pixels. At first I thought it was a misprint.

Once I verified the specs, I started making my design templates for the Droid in Omnigraffle, and I ended up spending a lot of time tweaking the scale of my document to get the right amount of stuff on the screen. I was struck by how different everything had to be compared to the templates I use to design for other devices. In fact, each of my device-specific templates uses a different scale.

This seems strange when you consider that the devices are all roughly the same size, physically:

I was suddenly curious, so I decided to see what things would look like if I scaled the various devices as if the pixel densities of their respective screens were equal, and everything else was relative to that (actual pixel density of each device is noted in the image below):

As you can see, when you adjust for pixel density, the Droid is practically a tablet compared to the iPhone.

To better illustrate the difference, here are the two images with one overlaid on the other:

I hear designers talk a lot about the differences in capabilities and design vocabularies across the range of mobile devices, but variations in screen resolutions are another challenge designers have to confront in the mobile world. It’s especially important with touch screen devices, since the right target size for a user’s finger tap is a physical question more than a matter of pixels. Apple’s guideline for buttons is a height of 48 pixels for example, but the same physical height on the Nokia N97 measures about 58 pixels.

What the hell is wrong with Nokia? It’s as if they got together as a company, identified all they ways their software could suck, and then aimed for the bottom.

I’ve been using some of the latest Nokia handsets at work for a few weeks now. The N97, for example, is awesome on paper. Big, high-resolution touch-screen display. Decent amount of memory, power, battery life. 5 megapixel camera – with a flash even. In person, Nokia’s handsets are still nicely styled – a good size, weight and form factor. But man oh man, the user experience of these devices has me shaking my head every time I try to do anything.

The touch screen doesn’t really work. The phone prompts me 50 times every time I need a network connection. And take today. I fired up my N97 Mini and it prompted me, “Do you want to check for software updates?”

Sure, I thought, and tapped the on-screen button to continue.

Then a dialog: “There’s an important software update for your phone.”

Cool. Go on… [tap].

A message. “Go to http://www.nokia.com/softwareupdate in your browser”

Wait, a message? I can’t just download and install the update using my phone?

OK, that seems dumb, but I fire up the browser and struggle my way through typing out the URL. Which takes me to a web page (not a mobile web page) that has a horizontal scrolling iframe containing all the Nokia handsets. I’m supposed to find my handset model, but I can’t operate the scrollbar/iframe using my N97.

Don’t ask me why I even bother pressing forward at this point, but eventually I find a search box, and I enter “N97 Mini” which brings up an image of my phone.

I click on the image, and I see the following message:

Nokia Software Updater can be used with most Nokia devices listed above and need only be downloaded once.

Requires: Windows Vista or XP, USB cable to connect your device to your PC.

Then a button to download a 23 MB .exe file.

WTF? I have to use a special app installed on a Windows machine (I’m a Mac user) to update the software on my phone? You couldn’t have told me about five steps earlier in this process?

So I don’t have a Kindle, and I don’t want one. For some reason I’m predisposed to dislike it. When I try to articulate my reasons, though, they feel as irrational as any other prejudice, so I won’t embarrass myself by trying to share them.

The Kindle has virtues for sure. It seems like a great way to take a lot of books on vacation. It saves paper and therefore trees. On net, it’s a green device, even when you factor in the materials and manufacturing.

Having said that, there are some rational, non-prejudicial reasons to dislike it…

It’s ugly. To me, the Kindle already looks like a cool gadget from ten years ago – like those candy-colored iMacs from 1998. And the display makes everything look like you’re seeing it through the window of a Greyhound bus.

Typography. I’m a bit of a font geek, but I think it should bother everyone that the Kindle uses one font for everything. I hear the Kindle DX has native PDF support, which I assume includes fonts, but I also assume it – like the Kindle 2 – uses Monotype Caecilia for everything else. It’s hard to imagine reading the New York Times in such a robotic looking typeface, but the bigger issue is that fonts are carefully chosen. They signal something about the contents of a work, just as body language and clothing signal something about a person. You can tell just from the typography of a movie poster, for example, whether a film is serious, funny or frightening. Fonts are like the clothing of a written work.

No backlighting. Really? This is a battery-powered device, but if you want to read in bed without bothering your partner you need to clip a book light onto it? When I learned this about the Kindle I could not believe it.

No pictures… or terrible pictures. I hear the DX has made some improvements here over the Kindle 2, but in any case the device doesn’t do color, so things like infographics and many kinds of illustrations are simply rendered useless.

You can’t lend or borrow. I love the public library, and I love having my own library. One of the things I love about having books in my house is being able to give them away to people. By the same token, I love it when a friend hands me a dog-eared paperback she just finished and says, “you have to read this.”

Yep. I’m happy with the ancient, tree-killing version.

Whenever the conversation turns to Apple, there erupts a certain amount of troll vs. fanboy squabbling. Usually there are a few would-be referees in the mix too, telling everyone to shut up because the topic is worn out, or pointless, or both.

And so it has been lately with the iPhone App Store saga.

Nonetheless, I’m going to give the dead horse one more kick in the ribs.

In my last post, I linked out to some of the recent indictments of Apple on other blogs (Factory Joe, Calacanis.com, GigaOm, TechCrunch). In the comments of these posts were many devil’s advocates (the devil in this case being Apple), and the defense seems to come down to three main points:

1. Apple has always been closed, and Steve Jobs has always been a control freak, but it’s precisely because of this that Apple has had such a track record of quality and success.
2. The iPhone and the App Store are actually awesome. Seriously, the thing is sweet, and there are like a gazillion apps for it. Stop whining!
3. It’s really AT&T’s fault.

There’s certainly truth in all of these, but they ultimately leave me asking, “what is an iPhone, really?”

When Apple was just a computer company, and the Woz was still around, Apple catered to geeks and hobbyists, because they were the people who bought computers. Steve Jobs saw the future early, however. He knew that computers would be a mass-market product, and he helped make it so. He made it so by deciding (or understanding) that a computer should be like any other piece of consumer electronics – like your stereo or your tv. Most people don’t want to program those things, they want to play with them.

Apple took this philosophy to another level with the iPod – a bona fide consumer electronics gadget. No more, no less.

And now, there’s the iPhone, a product that is so firmly somewhere in-between (plus, a phone). And therein lies the problem…

Steve Jobs has always tried to have it both ways. He wants Apple to be the best computing platform on the market, and he wants Apple’s products together to make up a sexy, plug-and-play personal electronics ecosystem.

When you look at it this way, it’s surprising how well he’s managed to make this work.

So, what about the iPhone?

If the iPhone is a little computer, then I expect it to be open and infinitely customizable. Anyone should be able to make any kind of software they want for it, and I should be able to buy the software wherever they want to sell it. Furthermore, it should connect me to the Internet and all that the Internet offers.

If the iPhone is a personal electronics device, then first and foremost I expect it to be plug and play. It should be super easy to get my media onto it, and the experience of consuming or interacting with that media should be fun and easy.

If the iPhone is a phone, then well, first and foremost I expect the supreme suckage of the phone company. I expect to be able to make calls and send texts and get monthly bills that I don’t understand.

The problem of course is that the lines between these things are getting fuzzier and fuzzier. People are either satisfied or dissatisfied with the iPhone depending on which of these three perspectives they favor.

I tend to favor the idea that my iPhone is a little Macintosh computer, so I get cranky when I can’t install a different web browser or get rid of the stupid Yahoo! weather app.

But I also think it’s an awesome little gadget for listening to my tunes and my stories, and I appreciate the gazillion apps I can get for it.

What if the company that made your computer forced you to use only their web browser and email application? (Remember, Microsoft was prosecuted for less than this). What if that company could dictate what software – of any type – other companies were allowed to make for your computer, what you were allowed to install and where you could buy it? What if these restrictions were only vaguely defined, then enforced in a totally ad-hoc way, on a case-by-case basis – after the software was already built?

Obviously that would be crazy, and obviously I’m talking about the iPhone.

After a week of high-profile App Store snafus (Google Voice, Ninja Words), there’s a bona fide Apple backlash a-brewin’. Leading the charge are the likes of Michael Arrington and Om Malik, who have each made a very public point of ditching their iPhones, and Jason Calacanis who wrote an epic 5-part case against apple. Last week’s hubbub was even enough to warrant a response from Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of product marketing.

The iTunes App Store process is broken in all kinds of ways, but few people question its basic premise: an app for almost anything, and a distribution model that (a number of hiccups notwithstanding) guarantees big bucks for Apple and gives developers access to a high-profile storefront. It’s proven to be such a cash cow that everybody is getting on the app store bandwagon. There’s the Android Market, Blackberry App World, Nokia’s Ovi Store, the Sony Ericsson Application Shop, plus stores from carriers like Vodafone, Verizon and who knows how many others. The game has changed. It’s all about mobile apps now.

Think about it though. In today’s web-powered world, imagine if you had to install a special app on your computer to use Facebook, plus another one for Twitter, another for YouTube, another for getting weather reports, another for checking your stock portfolio, etc. Multiply this situation by all the different mobile operating systems and form factors, and it’s essentially the same problem that has plagued mobile from the beginning. On the positive side I suppose, there’s no shortage of work for mobile developers when there are a half dozen different Facebook apps that need to be made.

Chris Messina posted a fantastic and provocative piece on his blog last week entitled Steve Jobs Hates the App Store wherein he argues that “the iPhone has always been about the web” and that:

…development for the iPhone platform is a distraction. It’s taking our eyes off the ball, and ignoring the bigger shift that’s happening beneath our feet. Developing iPhone apps now means postponing a better and more capable web until later, because so much energy is fixated on the cool whiz-bang effects in the iPhone platform that just haven’t been implemented in browsers… yet.

It’s like going back to the days of the CD-ROM, before the web as we know it existed.

Messina sees the future, and the future is the web. The only things he sees standing between the anachronistic, walled-garden, app-store-filled present and the glorious web-powered future are a good discovery paradigm (he compares the iTunes App Store to the “Yahoo! directory phase” of the web) and current browser limitations (e.g. Safari for iPhone can’t talk to the iPhone’s GPS or accelerometer).

I would argue, however, that the web has already given us a much more powerful discovery paradigm than iTunes. It’s called Google (there’s also Amazon and BestBuy and all the other places you shop for software, music, etc. online).

I would also argue that a third big missing piece is a business model. The most reliable way to make money from iPhone apps is to charge a one-time fee for downloading them. Ad-supported apps don’t pay for themselves, and Apple doesn’t yet support a subscription model (or maybe they do – various sources conflict).

Once the app store bubble pops and we move to web apps, the one-time fee model will have to go away. Mobile ads will probably be a bigger market by then, but it still won’t be enough to support most services. So SaaS will probably become the dominant business model for mobile web apps. Many could be sold as value-adds to existing (desktop) web services. The death of the one-time fee model would be OK with developers, but Apple would lose their 30% cut. They’re bound to resist and push back against any big shift toward web apps, but resistance will prove futile.

Which brings me to my final point, and the title of this post.

Despite all the hullabaloo over Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice iPhone app, Google themselves took it in stride. And it seems they might simply relaunch Google Voice as a web app.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist told the Mobilebeat Conference last month that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in the future. He suggested it wouldn’t be cost effective for Google to support all the different native mobile platforms – from iPhone to Blackberry to Windows Mobile and all the flavors of Nokia. In his words:

“What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers. Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning. We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

In a nutshell, Chrome for mobile is why Android will win. The Google Chrome mission statement is tailor-made for mobile. This bit in particular resonated with me:

To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff – the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Nowhere is it more important for browsers to “get out of your way” than on small screens. When Google makes a mobile browser powerful enough to run real applications, then native mobile apps will die a merciful death. And what would constitute “powerful enough?”

• The browser would have to talk to native device functions like the camera, accelerometer and GPS
• The browser “chrome” (pun intended) would have to almost completely disappear in favor of the application currently running.
• Irrelevant browser functions would ideally go away (e.g. the browser’s main menu gets overtaken by the web app’s main menu).
• The browser would have to retain user and session information better than today’s mobile browsers do
• The browser would have to have to be faster, more stable and basically feel “smoother” in the way it performs

Two parting thoughts:

First, there will always be a place for native apps. Games and other apps that don’t require any connectivity, and that involve a more “immersive” experience will probably always be better as fully-native apps. But 90% of the apps in the iTunes store are really web apps in disguise.

Second, borrowing from Winston Churchill, I’ll say the iPhone is the worst phone out there, except for all the others I’ve tried. Seriously though, I really like my iPhone, and I’m happy with the apps I’ve installed. I’m not giving these up anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean I think this paradigm makes sense.

Remember CD-ROMs? Remember how cool they were and how for a brief moment in the early 90s it seemed every possible thing was being CD-ROMified – from children’s books to topo maps to baseball cards? CD-ROMs were briefly so cool that people would pay $200 a pop for the latest and greatest titles. Then they became so ubiquitous that you’d get them as giveaways and even in your junk mail. Then after just a few years, the Web came along, and most CD-ROMs suddenly made no sense at all.

So what does this have to do with iPhone apps? Well…

1. There are a whole bunch of iPhone apps that are really just repackaged websites and don’t make a lot of sense as apps.
2. There are a whole bunch of apps that everyone would dismiss as pointless and annoying if they weren’t wrapped in an iPhone.
3. iPhone apps have a stupidly limited distribution model.

I want to focus on #3. The idea that our mobile phones are small personal computers is still somewhat novel. Other than the simplest of games, we’ve never been able to install software on our phones before, and so the App Store is a little like going from Communist Prague to the Las Vegas strip – except we still have a dictator (albeit a benevolent one) called Apple.

If Apple or any other company tried to exercise complete control over what people could install on their computers they way they do with the iPhone, the reddit kids would go absolutely bananas. Having just arrived from behind the iron curtain, however, we think the App Store is like the best candy store ever.

But people don’t really want one company to dictate what they can install on their phones, even if it’s Apple. There’s no reason Apple should be able to force me to keep the Yahoo! “Stocks” app on my phone, or prevent me from installing a pair of virtual iBoobs (somewhat NSFW). And developers – not to mention companies – would love it if they didn’t have to deal with the whole iTunes Connect process in order to make their apps available to you.

Here’s a hypothetical example: If there’s a problem with the New York Times website, or they want to add a new feature, they have complete freedom to make any changes they want. Not so with the New York Times iPhone App. First they have to find a developer who knows the iPhone platform – a much smaller labor pool than that of web developers. Then, once the work is done, they have to submit it to Apple and wait. Usually about two weeks. And there’s no guarantee that Apple will accept it into the iTunes store. If Apple doesn’t like the way the New York Times has decided to, say, monetize the app by displaying ads, then the New York Times has no choice but to change it, re-submit and wait again. There’s no way the New York Times can make their app available to you outside the iTunes store (jailbroken phones excepted).

Now you might say the New York Times makes no sense as an iPhone App, but why should Apple get to make this decision for the market?

Apple has a huge advantage right now, not just because of their head start. Their SDK is light years beyond anything I’ve seen from Nokia/Symbian, Palm, RIM or J2ME. Apple provides better tools and guidance than anyone else for creating amazing, beautiful, elegant apps. Philosophically, Apple looks at the phone differently than those traditional players do, and this is Apple’s real advantage. They see the phone as a software client first and an extension of the phone company second (and the latter as a kind of necessary evil at that). Android is the only other platform that looks at the phone this way, but at some point in the not too distant future, this is just what phones will be.

When you think of the iPhone as just another computing platform, then it doesn’t make sense for Apple to hold a monopoly on distributing software for it. The iTunes store might always be the best and easiest place to get apps for your iPhone, and Apple surely loves their 30% cut, but someday nothing will prevent people from selling you their apps by way of their websites or Amazon or even in the form of… gasp… CD-ROMs from old-school retailers. Count on it happening sooner rather than later.

Apple always has impecable timing, and they will probably open things up right around the time that Nokia’s new app store comes online.

The purpose of the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines (requires login) is to help developers create well-designed experiences for the iPhone that also measure up to Apple’s reputation and high standards. The guidelines drive toward a consistency, and to this end they encourage developers to take advantage of a sizeable library of existing components.

Somewhat understandably, they don’t say much about branding… beyond this warning:

Branding is most effective when it is subtle and understated. People use your iPhone application to get things done or to be entertained; they don’t want to feel as if they’re being forced to watch an advertisement. Therefore, you should strive to incorporate your brand’s colors or images in a refined, unobtrusive way. For example, you might use a custom color scheme in views and controls.

Apple wants your application to be a friendly sibling to its core iPhone applications:

The user interfaces of iPhone applications are characterized by beautiful images and lush color. As an application designer, you want to fit into this environment by providing an aesthetically pleasing user interface.

It boils down to the question of how much to use the building blocks that Apple provides vs. whether to invent your own. And the answer is not straightforward. To help designers frame their decisions around this problem, Apple identifies three different application styles:

• Productivity Applications – enabling users to organize or interact with information
• Utility Applications – performing a basic task and requiring little user input
• Immersive Applications – a full-screen, visually rich environment (mainly games)

From Apple’s perspective, the launch icon and the loading (i.e. splash) screen provide sufficient branding opportunities for most applications. Putting aside games (and other “immersive” apps), most iPhone apps are satisfied to take this approach, and most iPhone apps look very “standard” in their use of colors, icons and other elements. But even within what could be described as “refined” and “unobtrusive” there is a range of possibilities.

Most applications (like these examples from Yelp and TwitterFon) have little more than a custom-colored navigation bar, with standard text:

Some applications use a custom typographical image in the navigation bar:

Although, this often reverts to plain text or goes away altogether on screens that require a dynamic title:

A few applications use an image for the entire area of the navigation bar, but it can look a little funny when combined with standard-looking navigation and control buttons:

Beyond the navigation bar, most applications use the basic iPhone styles, icons and controls for the main screen content, although many apps apply some custom colors, fonts and other minor style elements. Nonetheless, these apps still feel “Apple” in the way they look and behave. Only a few apps abandon the Apple guidelines altogether in favor of a branded experience.

In the thumbnails below, the Quantum of Solace app limited its branding to a custom color palette, whereas Lil’ Wayne went stone gangsta on the guidelines (click thumbnails to enlarge):

This is where the lines are fuzzy. Within the Lil’ Wayne app, there’s quite a bit you can do, so in some ways it would qualify as a “productivity” application, but it’s probably more appropriately positioned as “immersive.” Transforming your friends into Lil’ Wayne is a game, of sorts.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that when it comes to branded third-party applications, the iPhone does not differ philosophically from regular Mac OS (or Windows for that matter). Outside of games and other immersive apps, Apple probably prefers that developers work within the Apple styleguide, and for the most part this works to everyone’s advantage. It’s problematic when a standard component – like a dialog box – looks and behaves differently from one app to another.

The desktop operating systems have established themselves firmly enough that most developers happily eschew non-standard branded “skins” for Mac or Windows apps. But iPhone apps are trendy right now in the way that Web 1.0 used to be, and guidelines or not, it’s a bit like the Wild West.

I could almost go so far as to say that Evernote is the best free app period, iPhone or otherwise. In Evernote’s case, it’s iPhone app and otherwise, seeing as it also works via a desktop app (both Windows and Mac OS), Firefox add-on, regular web, mobile web and email.

Evernote has many fans, many vocal fans, so I suppose I’m just joining the choir, but it’s a choir worth joining. At the same time, when I’ve sung the praises of Evernote to my friends and colleagues, I’ve struggled to articulate exactly what it’s good for. There are so many possible uses of Evernote, and I’ve only scratched the surface. Here’s what I use it for…

• Organizing my wine list. I take a snapshot of each label with my iPhone or grab the description from the K & L Wines website (the best wine shop in SF, with an amazing website to boot). Evernote can read text in the images(!), so the labels are searchable.
• Taking notes in meetings. Afterwards, my notes are tagged and searchable, and because Evernote syncs, my notes are immediately accessible across all my devices.
• Keeping track of ideas. When I think of something I want to blog about, I’ll create a note in Evernote and tag it accordingly. Then I’ll build on it over time, adding more notes and often a few bookmarks and things clipped from web pages.
• Planning a vacation. Leading up to my recent trip to New Zealand, I scribbled a rough itinerary down in my notebook, snapped a picture of it and saved it into Evernote. Even my sloppy handwriting was (mostly) searchable. Then, as I booked various activities and intra-country trips, I clipped the important bits (contact info, dates, confirmation numbers) from their webpages and saved these too. As I travelled, all of this was at my fingertips.
• Local business info. I use Evernote to store the contact info, menus and other info germane to the businesses I use – or want to.
• Recipes. I’ll grab a recipe off Epicurious or even snap a picture of a page in one of my cookbooks, and then I’ll access it at my girlfriend’s house – on my iPhone or her laptop – to make us dinner (her kitchen is much nicer than mine).
• Whiteboards. Snapping pictures of a cluttered whiteboard after a meeting is nothing new, but when you do it with Evernote, your scrawlings are searchable!
• Business cards. Who needs a fancy card scanner when you can snap a picture of a business card and save it into Evernote? Better integration with Address Book would be nice.
• House hunting. I can take a picture of a house I see and/or the agent’s contact info (on the sign). Once it’s in Evernote, I can map it (Google maps) with one click, and the note is geo-tagged with the location (if I allow this on my iPhone).

There are lots of possibilities, like auto-forwarding your email to Evernote and dragging all your PDFs into it, and all kinds of other uses like those mentioned here.

Apparently, Evernote has been around a while, beginning with a desktop app. The iPhone app is where it hit its stride. It’s reported more than half of its half million users interact with it via their iPhone. I’m not sure I would have embraced it without iPhone support.

OK, I’m done rhapsodizing.

There are a handful of things I wish Evernote did better, but the only big thing on my wishlist is better offline support.