Everyone has ideas. Some great, some not so much. But often the many thoughts that run spontaneously through our heads never get a chance at greatness due to a common affliction know as CRS (can't remember stuff).

Fortunately, there is no shortage of apps to help provide that mental Spackle that most of us need all too often. While there are many, few have risen to the top of many lists, including our as one of the best overall note taking programs as Evernote.

System Requirements

The first thing to know is that Evernote is about as cross-platform as you can get. This means for pretty much whatever device you're using, there's at least one, if not more than one way to run Evernote, so that stream of consciousness stays flowing no matter what.

Native Mac app
Native Windows app (including Windows 8 touch)
Native iOS apps (different for iPhone and iPad)
Native Android app
Native BlackBerry app
Native Windows Phone app
Even native HP WebOS app (talk about trying to make everyone happy)
Web (with extensions for Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox)
Just in case everything else above doesn't cover you, or if you need to see your stuff on someone else's device.

Lay of the Land

Next, structure. There are two basics units of measure at play here, Notebooks and Notes. The former contains one or multiples of the latter. Notebooks are your high-level buckets, and the notes are the specific containers of your thoughts, lists, etc.

Furthermore, notebooks can be "stacked," meaning to have one notebook be a sub of another notebook (i.e. a folder within a folder). Click on that previous link for more details from the Evernote Knowledge Base.

Rich Content

Each note does not have to simply be plain text. It can be formatted rich text (e.g. you can use fonts, bold, italics, etc.); have lists, hyperlinks and much more. It's also very good at helping you embed rich content such as audio, pictures and more.

Critiques

If there is one major critique we have of Evernote, is a lack on feature and design consistency. For example, the web and Windows versions of Evernote look and act pretty much identically, but the Mac version, while more visually appealing has a very different layout. We expect their to be design differences between desktop and mobile (e.g. iOS, Android, etc.), because the core underlying user interfaces are different. Furthermore, on mobile devices, one has to really manage screen real estate, which is a precious commodity, whereas on a desktop, one does not.

Related, there is a lack of feature parity between the platforms. For example, one cannot create the aforementioned, and very useful Notebook, "Stacks" on a mobile device. One must use one of the "desktop" supported platforms (e.g. web, Mac, Windows) to create a stack.

But overall in the grand scheme of things, Evernote has very few peers; especially when one considers the cross-platform functionality.

Pricing

For most people, the good news, it's free to use. How do they make money? Well, they use a "freemium" pricing model.

The base product is free, and certain things cost extra ($5.00 / month or $45.00 / year). Their "Premium Product" gives you, among other things, the following:

Greater upload bandwidth - They meter your bandwidth and give you 60 MB / month. Plenty for text. If you start adding multimedia content (which they make it very easy for you to do), it can start to add up. Premium users get 1 GB / month of bandwidth.
Offline notebooks - For iOS and Android. Great if you're not connected for long periods of time and need access to your notes all the time. A subtle reminder about the Internet's one endearing flaw: You have to be connected to it.
Collaboration - Allow others to edit your notes.
Document search - Evernote's searching will reach inside of PDF and "Office" type documents.
Priority Support - An automatic bump in line ahead of all the freeloaders.
Revision History - Have the ability to view prior versions of your notes.

Business Version (called Evernote Business)

Evernote Business takes Evernote Premium, one step further by adding shared notebooks. We like it, except for the price, $10 / month / person. $120 / year / person is fairly expensive for note taking software. It's great note taking software, but we're just not convinced it's $10 / month great.

Conclusion

The free app is a no-brainer. Just get it. You'll start winning the war against CRS almost immediately. The premium and business accounts are something to think about. You have to be able to justify the extra expense. By themselves, they are very low cost. But when one considers that just about every app out there is trying to get that modest $5 - $20 / month, it can add up quickly. Put another way, what was the last traditional off-the-shelf software program that cost $50 - $100 that you upgraded every year without fail? Because, remember, with cloud, subscription based software, if you don't pay the bill, the app goes away. That's what makes us pause about Evernote's pricing levels; which in our opinion are about twice what they should be.

Tools of the Trade: Evernote