When I first purchased my Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet, several years ago, I dabbled with an earlier stand-alone version of Evernote. It presented a never-ending scratch-pad of sorts that I could write on with the tablet’s stylus. It was nice, even useful, but it didn’t supplant OneNote as my primary note-keeping software, until recently. The new cloud-based Evernote blows both the old Evernote and OneNote out of the water.
Evernote Benefits
- It’s free. Free accounts permit up to 40 Megabytes of new notes to be added / synced per month. I haven’t come close to using my monthly capacity in the two months I’ve used it (I have used, perhaps 1/4 of that).
- More than Text Notes: With the free version you can keep text, photo, audio clip and handwritten notes (in my case, written with a stylus on my tablet laptop). You can also import PDF files into notes in the free version.
Multiplatform Syncing: These notes are continuously synced, accessible and editable across my three primary PCs (Thinkpad tablet, Dell XPS desktop and my iMac) and my iPhone.- Accessible from the Cloud: I can access and edit these notes through my Evernote account in the cloud.
- Notes Backed Up: By virtue of its syncing across multiple platforms and a copy of all notes residing in the cloud, my notes are continuously backed-up across my systems and off-site.
Tagging & Search: You can tag notes, structure the tags in a hierarchy (if you like – see the picture of part of my tag hierarchy on the right) and sort them how you chose. Or don’t. Instead, you can rely on its formidable search engine to find your notes. Either way, notes I wrote years ago (imported from OneNote) are as easy to find as notes I wrote yesterday.- Indexes Text in Images: Surprisingly, Evernote can index text in images. If I take a picture of a bottle of wine, a business card, a plane ticket, or even hand written notes on my tablet, it will scan and index that text. That text then becomes searchable when looking for the note containing the image at a later date.
- Clip From Anywhere: Evernote adds toolbar icons in Firefox and IE that allow you to clip webpage contents, text, columns or images into a note. You can clip entire pages or just a few paragraphs. Additionally, pressing Print-Screen on a PC (Control-Command-C on the iMac ) fires up a screen ‘Clipper’ app that can grab a screen shot of any running app or the entire desktop (or portion thereof). You can cut and paste from any app on an iPhone into the Evernote app.
Evernote is the latest of several cloud-based service that I have been experimenting with. See my prior posts on Google Apps Gmail with IMAP, xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) and Dropbox.
About a year ago I was dabbling with SugarSync and Evernote. I thought SugarSync would replace several apps/services, but the reality didn’t live up to my optimism. Whereas Evernote did much more than I needed, but after reading how you’re using it I’m thinking I should give it another look and see how I can improve my workflow and archiving. Related, my Pogoplug review loaner just arrived. Hope to try it out and report back by the middle of the month – although I’m notoriously slow when it comes to reviews.
I’ve been using it almost two years now. It really works great, and I find myself just putting more and more stuff in it, which I can find easily with my iphone (okay, iphone search DOES need some work) or on the web. I like the fact that I can make files and folders available to others, so they can reach that information as well. I’ll use it for client working documents that we all need to get access to, or screenshots of strategy and brainstorming sessions.
I’d REALLY like to see some referral program developed, not so much for me as a user, but for EVERNOTE since I think it is the referral from the what, 14K paying users who really enjoy the product that gets others to not only TRY but the buy. I just read something like their free user adoption after 1 year is 4%? that sounds pretty darn good.
Love Evernote, one thing I hate:
If you manipulate the text just slightly, maybe make one word bold, you can’t edit it with the iPhone app – it says:
“(You can’t edit this text on the iPhone because it contains images, audio or styled text…)
If they fix that, it’d truly be gold.
Big John … if you jump to the rest of the story I mentioned there that I too dislike the inability to edit other than plain-text items on the iPhone. And, yes the iPhone search and overall app is slower than I’d like. But, heck, its accessing tons of data so I can’t complain that much.
tivoboy … you would have read your 4% statistic in this NYT Piece on Evernote. It’s a good article.
…Dale