I have often sought the latest and sometimes the greatest of note taking tools. I despise paper for many reasons; its impermanence, “losability” and “unsearchableness”. Above all though, paper is not available, on a general basis unless you want to carry reams of it everywhere you go. My handwriting skills are also pretty poor on account of an IT career…
Some of my favourite tools have included mindmapping tools, standalone wikis, brain replacements and most recently Microsoft OneNote. At least with these you are carrying a uniform weight around, a laptop. But still, your notes are locked away inside unless you take it everywhere too.
So, armed with my new iPhone I was happily browsing the Apple App Store and came across Evernote. Initially I thought “nice, mobile note taking” but no, it is more than that. Evernote has various versions. It has a client app to install on your computer, a “portable” app for installation on portable memory or devices, an iPhone app and full web access too. For me, this allows me to take and access my notes from anywhere and the “freeform” mode works a treat with my Tablet.
The searching and indexing also seems to use OCR and handwritting recognition for images and handwritten notes which is good for imported OneNotes as these come across as images during the special OneNote import option.
Doubtlessly I will find another fascination in due course but for now, Evenote does it all for me.
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October 6th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
So, it’s been two months how are you finding Evernote now? Personally I’m loving it and finding more uses for it everyday.
Also, have you seen that Evernote now have a published API? That could enable many more tightly coupled scenarios for Evernote – e.g. a send from MSWord or Excel or even OneNote
I also think that it could enable more collaborative notebooks or project based Evernote books, like you might have a blog or a SharePoint site etc, a notebook with public elements could well just as, if not more, useful?
October 6th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Take 2:
“a notebook with public elements could well be just as useful”
October 7th, 2008 at 9:58 am
I’m using Evernote daily for work and personal information. The availabilty of it is just fantastic. The integration with the iPhone is a little basic, i.e. no caching of notes, but I suspect they will solve that with a webapp version and a native iPhone App with configurable local storage.
I also use it a lot for recording audio clips, great for remembering killer guitar snippets you always forget and tagging with the chords.
So it ireally is a notebook and a half, in my opinion.
May 6th, 2009 at 11:47 am
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