Recently our sister publication, TUAW, did a series of posts about each blogger's favorite iPhone and iPod Touch apps. We thought here at Download Squad that we'd take that same approach and apply it to our favourite Windows applications. This first post is my first of three in this vein that will cover Evernote, FeedDemon, and MindManager.

Evernote

It seems you can't go very far online these days without someone extolling the virtues of Evernote. While this note-taking application has been around for a long time, it has recently been reborn as a cross-platform powerhouse. The original concept behind Evernote was that you had one scrolling piece of note paper that you could continue to add notes to, then easily search within them both based on content and based on a timeline of when your notes were created. While this paradigm still exists, it's no longer Evernote's claim to fame.

Evernote now has a powerful web application that serves as a central nervous system for your note taking. All of your notes that are created in the local Evernote client on your Windows (or Mac) computer are synchronized to Evernote's servers, where they can apply OCR (optical character recognition) to any images that you have included in your notes. This means that you can search for a word that is visible in a photo, and Evernote will find it.

Evernote's interface has been refined over the past few years and is very easy to navigate and use. On the Windows platform most people seem to pit Evernote against OneNote from Microsoft, and in my opinion with the advent of Evernote's server-based system and reliable synchronization, it's no contest.

A free account at Evernote is enough for most users, offering up to 40 MB of file transfer per month, but if you find you are a heavy user you may need to upgrade to a Premium account, which offers 500 MB of transfer per month, plus other features.

If you're not one of the 125,000 people who got a chance to try out the cross-platform note capture app Evernote during its private beta, don't despair. Evernote has launched an open beta, so now everyone can give it a try. If you were already in the beta, does this change anything for you? Yes, indeed it does: there are now two types of Evernote accounts, free and premium.

Free users keep all the features of the closed beta, with the caveat that you're now limited to 40mb a month of uploaded notes. If you're a power-user, or someone who's really sold on the Evernote lifestyle, go premium for 5 bucks a month or $45/year and get rid of that cap. Premium also comes with the option of SSL for all your uploads (for all those pictures of the enemy base, we guess) and priority access to the queue for Evernote's text-recognition features.

How many of the applications you use on a daily basis are web-based as opposed to locally installed native applications? For me, the answer is way more than I ever would have expected.

Had you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have vehemently denied that the future of development is on the web. As much as I could see and understand the value of a ubiquitously available web-based application, there's just no way to approach the level of power and integration (not to mention the ability to be always-available) that is possible with well conceived and developed desktop software.

Of course, back then I didn't imagine that web applications could become as useful as Google Calendar or Remember the Milk. I also didn't imagine that light - yet still useful - versions of these apps would be available from my mobile phone almost wherever I was.

In fact, and much to my surprise, today most of my personal data today is tied up in online services: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Backpack, Remember the Milk, Facebook, Newsgator, and Evernote to name just a few.

Most of these are probably pretty familiar names, but one is a newcomer in the web space: Evernote. Still in beta, the new version of Evernote contains a full-featured web version, but synchronizes seamlessly with desktop software on either Windows or Mac platforms. And it's a breath of fresh air.

Note taking and organization application Evernote comes in a few forms. There's a Windows Desktop application, a mobile cleint, a web client, and a beta Mac desktop client. The Windows app would normally set you back $50, while the Mac version is in private beta, meaning you can only download the software if you have a beta invitation.

While we have a few invites to give away, Giveaway of the Day has an unlimited number of beta invites. But you have to sign up today. You probably figured that out once you read that the site was called Giveaway of the Day, but we thought we'd make it clear.

Oh, and if you're a Windows user, you can download and install a full version of the Windows desktop client for free today only as well. Just makes sure to follow the download links and instructions available at Giveaway of the Day.

This week saw an odd migration of geeks in and out of Austin. Early this week the tech geeks all left the capital of Texas en mass, while music geeks all boarded trains, plains and autos headed for Austin. And if you're still suffering from jetlag and whiplash, here are a few stories you may have missed.

Download Squad SXSW2008 coverage continues

Southy by Southwest Interactive may be over, but we scored some amazing interviews with movers, shakers, and up and comers. Check out our interview with Guy Kawasaki where he discusses his new startup on a budget, Alltop. And keep checking back for more interviews and special coverage from SXSW.

Who needs IE8? Get WebSlices and Activities in Firefox

Last week Microsoft released the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8. And while it's still a pretty early release with serious compatibility issues with many web sites, IE8 does have a few pretty nifty features. And it only took a couple of days for Firefox extensions emulating those features to pop up.

We recently previewed the new Evernote clients -- for web, mobile and Mac -- and now we've got even more details about what's in the works for this popular cross-platform capture tool. Evernote's CEO, Phil Libin, talked to Download Squad about Evernote's expanding catalog of features. The biggest news is today's launch of a desktop client for Mac. We also have 2000 invitations to the beta to share with Download Squad readers, so make sure you read this whole post to get yours!

Libin says the Mac client has been improved a lot even in the short time since demo videos were released on the Evernote website. We were already impressed with how nicely Evernote played with Apple's Photo Booth -- snap a picture of some kind of text, like a handwritten note or a business card, and Evernote will be able to recognize it and make it searchable. Libin says that, although Photo Booth works well for this, Evernote also has direct support for Apple's built-in iSight cameras.

As with the Windows client, all the memories you save in the Mac version can be automatically synced to your phone, your Evernote web account, and your other computers. This opens the door for some creative use cases: Libin says he gets around his poor sense of direction by saving his trip itineraries and Google Maps before he leaves the house. Another staff member took pictures of his prescription medications, so he could remember what they looked like and make the labels searchable. The Download Squad team down at SXSW could no doubt have used Evernote for another neat trick: taking pictures of people you meet at conventions -- Evernote will search the text on their nametags!

Looking for a good solution for organizing all the notes in your life? EverNote is an application for saving web articles, snippets of Office documents, to-do lists, images, and other notes all in one handy package.

There's also handwriting recognition for Tablet or UMPC users, an OCR that lets you search for text inside of images, and a Google Desktop indexer, making it easy to search for notes stored within EverNote.

An EverNote license will normally set you back $50, but Giveaway of the Day is offering up a free copy today only. You'll have to download and register EverNote 2.2 before the end of the day in order to get a free license.

[via jkOnTheRun]

EverNote is the note-taking program we have featured here on Download Squad a few times before. It can be compared to OneNote from Microsoft in some ways. EverNote's approach is a bit more simplistic, but still very usable and has good integration with Firefox and Outlook. The EverNote 1.5 beta is available for a free 60 day trial, after which the program costs $34.95. The program will revert to the permanent free version of EverNote if it is not purchased. This new beta has better Outlook (even with 2007 beta) and Thunderbird integration, with the ability to sync your EverNote databases with your USB flash drive. Just a few hours using EverNote 1.5, and I am already thinking about buying it. It is great to be able to take all my notes and then sync them to my flash drive and take them with me.

While Tablet PC software isn't something we typically cover, this particular offer is hard to ignore. EverNote is offering a free license to either EverNote Plus, or ritePen 2.5 (a Tablet handwriting recognition utility) for a sample of your handwriting. And although the offer in and of itself is quite interesting, to me what I found most interesting was the list of sentences that users must submit to meet the qualifications for the free offer. Here's the list:

1. Sympathizing would fix Quaker objectives.
2. Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs!
3. The July sun caused a fragment of black pine wax to ooze on the velvet quilt.
4. How quickly daft jumping zebras vex?
5. Just keep examining every low bid quoted for zinc etchings...
6. The explorer was frozen in his 'Big Kayak' just after making queer discoveries.
7. Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dogs.
8. Jackdaws Love My Big Sphinx Of Quartz!
9. Six Big Juicy Steaks Sizzled In A Pan As Five Workmen Left The Quarry.
10. The Five 'boxing' Wizards Jump Quickly Up.
11. While Making Deep Excavations, We Found Some Quaint Bronze Jewelry.
12. Whenever The "Red Fox" Jumped, The Squirrel Gazed Suspiciously.
13. Quick Zephyrs Blow, Vexing Daft Jim.
14. ~45% #342a $87 €60 <D&G> 7*(2^3) = 56 {27/9}=3
15. Nora@comcast.net; www.slashdot.org; Cecil@hotmail.com; c:\temp
16. [94085] 12:45 +1 (924) 572-3601 © EverNote 2006

Web addresses, email addresses and file paths make the list, which is not surprising, as do currency values and formulas. More surprisingly are some of the regular sentences that are apparently difficult to detect, such as "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs!".

[Via Black Belt Productivity]