Do you wish you could keep notes about everything? Wish you could save the events and images that you experience each day? Evernote can help. The latest version has a web interface as well as PC version, and they all interconnect to share your data. It even works with your smart phone.
Evernote is the best personal information keeping and retrieval application and service currently available. It's the popular answer for Microsoft's "One Note," it's actively in development, and is improving rapidly.
Let's look more closely at Evernote's features and options.
Imagine that you crossed a tape calculator with a scrapbook. The tape would have to be large enough to contain the clippings that you wanted to paste in and keep.
The disadvantage, of course, is that your tape would eventually become huge and searching it for data that you remembered putting there would be very time consuming.
Evernote is the computerized equivalent of a tape calculator and a scrapbook. Basically, it has a long tape that’s like a continuous notebook. You clip and paste the data that you wish to include in your note to make up the “pages.” As you scroll through your notes, a slider on the side shows the dates and time the material was added. It also contains a powerful search facility to let you find your data. So powerful is the search feature, in fact, that it knows how to look for text inside images.
Adding information can be done in several different ways. One way is to drag the mouse to select the material that you wish to add to your notebook, then right-click the selected text and select “Add to Evernote.” This works on web-pages as well as in other applications. Image files like jpeg pictures can be dragged into the notebook. The newest version allows you to include and search inside of PDF files. You can even type in your own notes in your notebook.You can create as many separate notebooks as you need to feel sufficiently organized, and you have the option of making your individual notebooks strictly local to your PC or synchronized with Evernote on the web.
And that’s what’s new in the Evernote – Evernote Web service - and that’s how Evernote gets to be everywhere.
It runs on your PC (Windows XP or Vista) or Mac (currently Leopard only) desktop or laptop. There’s a version that works with Windows Mobile (phone) devices and a new version that runs on the Apple iPhone. Thanks to the Evernote online, you can also connect to your data from any web-enabled computer capable of running Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Your home PC or Mac synchronizes the notebooks that you select with Evernote on the internet. Two plans are available. One is free and gives you 40 MBs of online storage. For $5/month or $45/year, you can increase that storage to 500 MB.
You don’t even need to be running the Evernote application on your mobile phone. There are at least three ways to use your phone with your Evernote web service. One way is to use the special email address that Evernote gives you when you sign up for the service. This means that you can send photos, audio files, and notes from your mobile device and then sync them to Evernote at home when you connect later. (Evernote suggests that you add the email address as a contact on your device.)
There’s also a web interface at http://www.evernote.com/m/ that you can access from your device’s mobile browser. In fact, the Evernote application running on my Windows Mobile Smartphone is simply an interface to the mobile website – it starts Internet Explorer in order to show the note. The first two images are taken from a Smartphone. The third is a screenshot from a Palm OS Treo 755p.
Next: A Little Brainstorming, How I Use Evernote, and Evernote Security