My grandpa used to say the difference between reading a magazine and a newspaper in the bathroom is the same as using a mallet or a fly swatter to kill a fly. If pressed on the vague analogy he would stop short of crudeness saying something along the lines of “we never had toilet paper in those days.”
We are inundated with the solutions to non-problems. One example is how our media outlets extenuate these non-problems by pushing the wonderfulness of phone apps, and last week’s New York Times article by Paul Boutin is a case in point. Putting aside the naivete (he obviously doesn’t use his camera) that 60 megabytes per month is sufficient storage, or even that a paid gigabyte per month would be enough, he does admit the casualty of putting yet another utility on your phone.
The only real downside with Evernote is that it has so many features, which can make getting started with the app daunting. But once you understand how to do a few things with it, you can get working and worry about the rest later.
Complicating our lives with an ever-expanding array of bells and whistles, feature creep is the scourge of us all.
The worst thing a website can do is to do too much. Companies like Apple and Google have succeeded by stripping down features and relying on interface simplicity. We should do the same with the devices we overlay on our lives. It’s one thing to enjoy the quirky features and fun modes that apps provide on our mobile devices, but it’s quite another to buy into the notion that loading another app on your phone is going to simplify your life.