/Sven

Since a few months I have the privilege of being a beta tester for the iPhone app MobileNoter. If you go back in time on Twitter you can see that I literally begged to be able to use this application early. Let me give you a quick overview of what it can do and how I use it.

Microsoft OneNote is an amazing product. The Windows Tech guy Paul Thurrott recently mentioned that his sources inside Microsoft expect OneNote to become the “always open, center of my world” application right next to Outlook for the majority of business users. I can wholeheartedly subscribe to this notion. As a matter of fact, the only reason I have Outlook open is so I can transfer to-dos created in OneNote to Toodledo and then sync with another iPhone app I will describe soon. Mail & Calendar happen in my web browser when on the PC.

OneNote is the center of my work life as it allows a very free form way of organizing projects, reference materials and notes. It basically gives you electronic paper notebooks that can hold text, images and all kinds of multimedia content. You are as free as on a blank sheet of paper, but can access all the digital bits of information on your machine. It allows linking between the pages and to/from anything that can be handled as an URL on your machine (in my case that would be a lot of MindManager Mindmaps, Microsoft Office documents and PDFs).

A more detailed description of my OneNote use and all the tools connected will be posted “soon”. However I promised a brief user review of MobileNoter and do not want the developer to wait until I tackled my procrastination regarding this big multi-posting project that admittedly has not the highest prio in my life right now.

Once OneNote is the central hub of all your information, you sure want to be able to look up something or toss in a quick note on the go. Folks using Windows Mobile get a Microsoft app that allows to do that, however it is fair to say that its users seem underwhelmed with the solution. But then that is probably something Windows Mobile users are used to by now.

iPhone users on the other hand have a solution available called MobileNoter. The iPhone app pairs up with a sync client on your PC that can either use Wi-Fi or could storage to sync with your iPhone. The sync client scrapes selected notebooks at a user-configurable interval and transfers their content to the iPhone. On the iPhone using MobileNoter you can then access this information (read-only, for now) and create so-called Quick Notes. Content can be encrypted with a key only known to you, which is important when transferring confidential documents over the air or storing them on the developers cloud storage.

My number one personal use case are conference calls in the middle of the night. Due to time zone differences, I find myself often at 1-3 AM in the morning talking to colleagues on the other side of the planet. That then happens in our kitchen and I do not really need my notebook, but sure do need to note some keywords / action items. For this MobileNoter is perfect. Since the iPhone allows the use of application during phone calls, I simply create a new Quick Note once the call started and jot away whenever I need to remember something or have an action to take.

In the morning, back at the office those notes show up automatically in my OneNote and I copy & paste them in the appropriate project sheets, meeting notes and create to-do’s (usually takes less than a minute).

In future MobileNoter version there will be limited editing for existing Notebooks, something I am really exited about, since the other big use case is reviewing all kinds of documents that I added as printouts into OneNote. When working on the PC, I simply add notes and to-do’s on the fly on-top of the printout. When using the iPhone right now, I have to jump between the reading material and the Quick Notes section, which is a little annoying.

I see myself using MobileNoter even more once the iPad and the respective MobileNoter version are available (e.g. in meetings, customer visits). Those scenarios work well with the iPhone but a bigger screen estate wouldn’t hurt.

MobileNoter is one of the central apps on my iPhone together with Mail, Pocket Informant, 2Do & Docs2Go. More about these “soon” ;-)

If e.g. after installing the Outlook Social Connector, your Outlook does not start, “outlook /safe” is your friend. You can then go into the Options and disable the offending Add-In.