As I mentioned before, my wife and I finally pulled the plug on cable. We had gone down to a very basic package but realized we don’t even need that since the signal at our house is so strong. We have been on Netflix for a long time and then, with the cable canceled, added Amazon Prime. There are some movies there we don’t get streaming on Netflix, plus free two-day shipping and the potential for the Kindle Lending Library.

It doesn’t mean we don’t watch tv. Most evenings, by the time the kids are in bed, there just isn’t time for a movie. We usually have some tv show queued up. It has been fun to revisit shows from our youth (some of them anyway) and watch new stuff that we haven’t seen before. When they are streamed we are in great shape as we will sit down and watch 3 or 4 episodes of a 20 minute comedy in a couple of hours. We focus on a series, get into the story lines, and literally watch an entire series in a few months.

So when I saw that Hulu+ had come to Apple TV I got all excited. Hey! A channel specifically dedicated to streaming tv shows! That’d be awesome!

Oh, was I wrong.

To be honest, I am not certain what the benefit of Hulu is. I guess if you missed an episode of a current tv show Hulu+ would be there as a backstop. But when it comes to old episodes, it is really hit or miss. For instance, Hulu+ had the last half a year or so of House but was missing earlier episodes. Seinfeld had the last season but only a few episodes per season for earlier stuff or snippets of shows, all of which were mixed together and hard to decipher what was what. I also have heard that you still have to watch commercials on the paid service, but I didn’t get that far as the incomplete seasons was a deal breaker.

It’s a real shame, honestly, as I was ready to throw money at the service.

Here’s what I’d like to see: a service that says for $10 per month you can watch all the movies and tv shows you want. I know that this isn’t really feasible for the studios so here’s the deal I’d try to make if I was running on my streaming service: I will only make available stuff that is 20 or more years old. The studios get to charge a premium for the “current” stuff and a service for the rest. Each month we’d get new content based on what was released 20 years ago that month. It’d be a great deal and provide plenty of excellent content.

I enjoy using Evernote and am a paid subscriber. I store a lot of notes and information in there, stuff that is very easy to share with my co-workers and others that need to know. It’s a great service and their CEO, Phil Libin, has helped start-ups everywhere by 1) meeting with many of them in person and 2) sharing a lot of data and information publicly that most won’t do.

This is exceptional in and of itself but I want to talk about something else about Evernote that might be exceptional as well: it’s lack of product design. In some ways, Evernote is a throw-back to an era when functionality was vastly more important than form as Evernote’s products are nothing special to look at and oddly rough around the edges in many cases.

It seems in the last few years that the emphasis on form has taken center stage. I’m not certain whether that is because Apple’s iPhone and aesthetic has been dominant. After all, Apple loves some good looking apps. Maybe aesthetic emphasis has to do with trying to stand out in a market of 700,000 apps and growing. But whatever the case, it seems that to get noticed these days your app has to be a beautiful, groundbreaking design. Oh, and be highly functional, too.