Hello Evernote Hello

Back before I went on maternity leave, I was having some pretty severe baby brain. Like, I could have a brief chat with someone up one end of the room, and if I didn't write down what we'd discussed I'd have forgotten most of it by the time I was back to my seat.

(Baby brain is a real thing - it's partly that you spend months without enough sleep before and after the birth, but also your brain is bathed in hormone soup and shrinks a bit.)

I normally have a bit of a problem remembering people by their names or faces, but usually no issue recalling them by what we talked about months or years later, so I was starting to worry that I'd get back to work after a year away and not have any memory of who various library vendor reps, people on campus, or workmates were...

Enter Evernote Hello, an app which records who you've had meetings with, including their contact info, a photo (very important!), and notes about them so you can remember to ask about their child/cat/new house. It can capture info straight from LinkedIn, finally a use for that website! Unfortunately the professional photos that people put up on things like LinkedIn tend towards the rather intense sort (shown below) or a blurry picture of their cat because they don't like photos of themselves.



Benefits:

• Free app for iPhone, works OK on iPad
• Grab details straight from your calendar on the day of the meeting 
• Capture info from their LinkedIn profile or Facebook account (though I'm not sure of the benefit of recording info about your Facebook friends)
• If you ever have a meeting with someone else who uses Hello, you can get their information magically through the ether.
• Remember when and where you met people
• All the details save to Evernote as notes. I now have a searchable Evernote notebook called 'people' which is full of folk who I've met once or twice, including tradesmen who I've had in to fix the plumbing.

Issues:

• It isn't happy with you putting in information about someone unless you've had a meeting with them, this is a philosophical choice they've made. I have a lot of meetings called 'email' which occurred at my house because I want to be able to remember something about genealogists who've written to me. 
• When you add someone, it automatically sets a meeting location of where you are right now. I guess you're meant to be tapping on your phone while in the actual meeting. You can move the location, but it's annoying and also 'powered by Foursquare' which can be rather flakey.
• Don't have a meeting with anyone who has an apostrophe in their name, it renders as &amp... (Guess I should report that to them)
• You may end up spending some time hunting for photos of people after each meeting, unless people mind you taking their photo.