At first glance it might look as though Evernote on the Pebble is a simply a clone of Evernote for the desktop.

That would make absolutely no sense whatsoever, given that the Pebble has an entirely different form factor, with very different uses.

I’d like to share some of the ways in which Evernote on the Pebble has been tailored to the wrist-based experience, and what you can do to get the most out of it. But first …

A step back … why wearables?

Earlier this year at the MCE conference I presented a hierarchy of uses for wearable devices:

Notifications, especially smart notifications based on your context, for example based on your current location, or who you are with, such as those provided by Google Now;
Sensors, especially health sensors, but also environmental sensors. Very soon we will examine the devices of someone who just died, as a kind of black box to determine what happened.
Control of the environment around you, such as the music playing on your phone or your house lights. The key is that you have to be able to do it without thinking about it … maybe gesture-based controls.
Capture of information, such as taking audio notes, or photos from your watch or Glass.
Consumption of information, such as viewing Evernote notes. The key to this being useful is that the effort to view the information on your watch must be significantly lower than the effort to pull out your phone, unlock it, start the appropriate app, and navigate/search for the information. Ideally the information should be pre-prepared for easy consumption based on your context, such as where you are, or what you are doing.

How does Evernote fit in?

Notifications work without the Evernote Pebble app

The Pebble already provides notifications from apps, so that when an Evernote reminder notification fires on your Phone …

… you’ll see that notification on your watch…

As the Evernote phone apps become more sophisticated about providing smarter, context-based notifications, you’ll get that for free on your watch.

The Evernote app for the Pebble is very much focused on the last item in that list: consumption.

Easy access to your most important information: Your Shortcuts

On the desktop and mobile versions of Evernote, you use Shortcuts to give you easy, instant access to your most important information. Perhaps its information that you always need to have at your fingertips, or that you are working on right now.

It stands to reason that on the Pebble we’d give you an easy way to access those Shortcuts, and we do:

But wouldn’t it be cool if you could access your most important information, your shortcuts, as soon as you start Evernote?

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We thought so too, which is why you can put your Shortcuts at the top level menu, before all the other Evernote menu items, so that you can see your most important stuff instantly:

Context-sensitive information: nearby notes

If you are about to walk into a meeting, or into a restaurant, then nearby notes are your friend:

This shows the notes that you created closest to your current location (yes, you can toggle between miles and kilometers), so that if you are about to go into a meeting with someone …

… you can quickly remind yourself about the person you are about to meet:

Activity-sensitive information: a custom checklist experience

Ideally Evernote for the Pebble would automatically detect that you are in the supermarket, and present you with your shopping list. It doesn’t do that yet, but it does make it easy for you to check and uncheck checkboxes.

Specifically it looks for all your notes that have unchecked checkboxes in them, and presents them as a list. If you choose one, then it just displays the checkboxes from the notes, and lets you check/uncheck them.

This makes for a super-convenient shopping experience. If you’ve ever had to juggle a small child in one hand, a supermarket trolley in the other hand, and a mobile phone in the other hand, you’ll really appreciate being able to quickly and easily check items off, as you buy them:

What’s more, if you remembered to use Evernote on your phone take a photo of the yoghurt pot back home, because you knew that you were likely to be overwhelmed when faced with a vast array of dairy produce at the shop …

… then you can navigate to that note on your watch, and glance at the photo:

The Pebble’s screen is quite small, and black-and-white, so you may need to squint a little to make out the photo!

Easy access to your most important notes: Reminders

If you don’t make much use of Reminders, then you might be a little puzzled to see a dedicated Reminders menu item on the Pebble:

The reason is that many many people use Reminders as a way of “pinning” important notes to the top of their notes list. Reminders are always shown at the top of the note list on the desktop apps:

On your Pebble you have quick and easy access to these important notes:

You can view a reminder:

And you can mark it as “done” by long-pressing:

Information at a glance. When is it a chore, and when is it a glance?

The ideal Evernote experience on your watch gives you instant access to your most important information. Evernote on the Pebble does this by giving you quick and easy access to your shortcuts, nearby notes, checklists and reminders.

But sometimes, that isn’t enough. Then you have a choice: do you pull out your phone, unlock it, start Evernote, and search or navigate to the information you want? Or, if it is a small text note, might it be easier to navigate to it on your watch?

Depending on what kind of a person you are, and on how you use Evernote, the idea of navigating to your notes on your watch, by drilling down using Tags (for example) might seem either laughably complex, or super-cool and powerful. If you are an early-adopter of wearable technology, for example if you were a Pebble Kickstarter backer, then chances are you fall into the second camp.

This is the reason for the other menu items I have not discussed above: Notebooks, Tags, and Saved Searches. For some people, it would be much easier to quickly drill down to a note on their watch, than to pull out their phone.

Glancability may not be a real word, but if it were, it would be in the eye of the beholder.

The future of Evernote on wearables

By providing you with a customized experience on the Pebble, Evernote serves you information based on what is most important to you (shortcuts and reminders), what makes sense based on your current context (nearby notes, checklist notes) as well as the more traditional ways of accessing your notes (notebooks, tags, saved searches).

These are very early days for wearable technologies. Evernote for the Pebble is a start … as the capabilities of wearable devices evolve, so will your Evernote wearable experience. Evernote is very much about working in symbiosis with you, completing your thoughts for you, providing information to you before you even know you need it. There is so much more to come.