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.

Zoho announced a new product called Zoho Notebook at this week's DEMO conference. Pimped as "the online application for gathering and creating multiple types of content that can easily be shared with others," Zoho Notebook is a little bit of Google Notebook with some Microsoft OneNote sprinkled on top, and finally brought to a simmer with some innovative and powerful web 2.0 collaborative goodness. Read/WriteWeb got to sit down with Raju Vegesna, one of Zoho's developers, to ask a few questions, and indeed found that collaboration is indeed one of the most compelling aspects of Zoho Notebook. Users can choose to share an entire notebook, a single page or even a specific piece of content on a page. Sound complicated? Then check out the demo video Raju put together to strut Zoho Notebook's stuff.

Of course, if you're already salivating, you're going to have to pick up a self-control book or two. While Zoho Notebook was announced today, it won't be out in public beta until March. Still, if it's as handy and powerful as the video makes it out to be, we'll be sure to get our hands on it for you as soon as possible.

Chris Pratley is they guy that is in charge of OneNote at Microsoft, so when he talks about OneNote features, we listen. Today he's got a great post on his blog about the different ways in which OneNote 2007 and Outlook (both 2003 and 2007) are more tightly integrated than ever before. For those of you that haven't had the pleasure, OneNote is a dark corner of Microsoft Office that many people don't know about, but should. It's a note taking application, but to characterize it in that way is to do it a disservice; it's really an information collection and organization framework. Do yourself a favor and acquaint yourself with OneNote, and you'll soon find why it is very interesting to see why OneNote and Outlook have become "best buddies".