Which device do I use?

I have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 6s (regular size). Smartphones have gotten so good that there is now so much overlap between the two devices that it can be confusing what to do on what device. Here are some guidelines. 

iPhone 

Siri is a still a gamble, but it is good for exactly one thing. Press and hold the home button and say 'weather'. 

What about 'call so and so'? Sorry Merlin Mann. I tried to use my telephone like it was 2015 but it thought I wanted to 'call restorative yoga' instead. 

Let's get back to hey Siri, enable it. Check. Say hey Siri. Check. Have a brand new iPhone 6s understand that you are initiating a query, sometimes. Meh, maybe I have to retrain the voice model, or better yet just give up. 

Evernote

Thank god for the iPhone being able to run any and all of the common calendars tasks and email servers. Productivity apps are still in their infancy and have cross platform repercussions that heavily effect how you use your (laptop) computer or computers. 

Say you like iCloud mail? Well it looks like you are enabling your iCloud account and setting up a profile in Mail.app on you El Capitan system. Like gmail? Well you can pipe that through your Mail.app as well, but what if you like Contacts not getting imported and strange new fields co mingling between you iCloud account and gmail account. Well you shouldn't have checked off that switch. Hmmm.  Verdict avoid and use Google Chrome. Does this remind you of your parents broken Windows PC with Firefox installed on it because Internet Explorer mysteriously stopped working one day? Probably, but what does that tell you?

Let's get back to Evernote. It's entirely its own ecosystem and runs identically on whatever device in which its being used. Things are in the same places on iOS OSX, webapp and Windows. I haven't looked for it on Linux. Their EULA states that they don't data mine, but even if they do/did I would feel comfortable using it. I have camera phone pictures of receipts from at least four years ago still showing up in the Evernote "file system" I cobbled together years ago. Which is a pretty game good track record considering the following: 

I have screwed up and lost files in my Dropbox account tens of times over in that timespan. 

God knows what has happened in my OneDrive account. 

OwnCloud installation that I kept for all of one day. 

GoogleDrive has things in it, but what they are or how long they have been there is something of a mystery to me. 

Flickr, which I tried but gave up after an album or two. 

iCloud Drive because on El Captain they promised us it would be different this time. Hello $.99 a month sign up to utilize. I could write another post on this scam alone. Does apple really need $12 a year from everyone?

So all and all that leaves us with Evernote

It works because it's a closed system, it works cross platform because it's the same everywhere. It works because you control what you put in it. Let's elaborate on that. 

The Gmail problem. 

Remember ten years ago how you used to send your self files as attachment to your gmail account. That was fun and slick and innovative right? Kind of. But then you got six trillion spams and applied to 12 jobs, and won some crap on eBay (or sold some crap on eBay ) and then couldn't find your awesome file or note you sent to yourself anymore. Probably because you deleted it because you realized you overwhelmed yourself.  Well you did the right thing by doing that, that was a stupid idea in the first place, shame on you. 

Would you out you important photos, scans of receipts, noted you took while on the phone with a client comics you wanted to read, hot babes phone numbers in with an uncontrollable stream of information? No. That's why you don't put that stuff in your Gmail. Win Evernote. 

What about NVAlt and Notational Velocity and DevonThink?

NVAlt is very neat and fast from a end user perspective. But I have a computer and a phone. And wtf does the NVAlt database do? And what happens if I sync to Dropbox wrong. And what happens if I move things around in the NV alt file folder the way I want them. Well chances are any of these slips of the knife could completely fuck up all of your notes. No thanks. If your a zen master when it comes to self control and don't really need your notes on you phone in sync with your OSX computer then maybe this is for you. 

DevinThink. 

I originally learned of this from MacPowrUsers podcast. And in theory it's awesome. But in reality Evernote makes more sense. 

Evernote is free in most cases. $5 a month for high use. (Which is something like a 2-3 year payout after purchase using DevonThink for all of your platforms and then getting it to sync.)

Evernote syncs with all your devices because their sync is obvious. When you create a new notebook you are asked, "do you want it to be a cloud synced notebook?" If you don't you can use the software to store however much your computer can hold for free. I'm not entirely sure how you would go about backing up that info (manually, outside of Evernote's  cloud) but it would be a cool thing to look into. 

DevinThinks UI makes me feel like I am working on some sick hybrid of that MacOS7.5 Lotus CC Mail program from 1995 and Macromedia Director.