There's a plethora of life-organization, note-keeping apps out there — from the very simple like Google Keep to the endlessly customizable Evernote. Springpad has thus far managed to carve out a niche among these apps by focusing on solid media categorization features, context-awareness, and social collaboration. Now, Springpad has just reached version 4.0 and has gotten a major interface revamp both on the web and in its iOS and Android apps. Aside from a major visual refresh throughout the service, one of the biggest changes is a new navigation bar for the web app — you can now easily access all of your saved content (or "springs"), your notebooks (which make up Springpad's basic organization structure), and a new search area.

The search function lets you dig through your springs as well as other springs publicly posted by other users — so if you're looking for a new book or recipe, you can just ping the Springpad community and see what you can find. Springpad also added a useful, if obvious feature: there's now a prominent yellow box you can click from anywhere on the site to add a new spring.

Users can also "spring" content without having to immediately categorize it into a notebook, another way the site is encourage users to save as much as possible without having to worry about organizing it right away. Speaking of notebooks, Springpad has also developed a new way to share them — beyond inviting collaborators to your notebooks and sharing them over Facebook or Twitter, users can now embed their notebooks right on a website. If you have a topic-specific blog or post, you can easily drop a related notebook right in.

These features have all made it to the redesigned Springpad apps for iOS and Android; the iPad and iPhone app is available now, while the Android app should be available later today. The app itself looks great, is quite responsive, and feels inspired by Google's recent iOS apps, particularly the Google+ app. You can also take advantage of your phone's GPS to add locations and photos to any of your springs. While Springpad's core components aren't unique, it's a visually attractive, flexible, and collaborative tool that's worth a look — it's a nice mix between collaborative Pinterest-style boards and Evernote's link-archiving and note-taking focus.