I mentioned previously that Evernote looks for text inside images. This is more sophisticated than “You are here” obligatory photos of signs at Yosemite. It means that you can photo and then search for the content of blackboards, whiteboards, and business cards. With a little imagination, it’s hard coming up with things that Evernote can’t do.
Interested in the song on the radio? Record some of it and send the snippet to Evernote Web. At home, on your PC or Mac, start the free Tunatic program and play it using the stereo mix feature of your computer. Tunatic will then try to tell you what the name of the song is.
Compulsive about saving every penny when shopping? When you clip and save information from a web page and add it to a note, Evernote preserves all the links (except Javascript-driven links) in the original document. This means that you could add a folder called “Deals” or similar and update it using clippings at home or even send back photos of price tags (via email to Evernote Web) from your favorite big box stores.
Better bookmarks? Why save a link when you can save the entire page and later search for it by keywords for content rather than the page name? This also works great for research projects. Rather than save a list of web pages related to your topic, just clip and save the relevant parts of each to a project folder.
Photo archive? If your digital camera syncs to your PC, select the photos that you want to save and put them in an Evernote folder.
And don't forget actual scrapbooking. If you have a flatbed scanner, you can use Evernote to organize and save your images and clippings.
Although I do use the web interface of Evernote, a primary usage is on my office PC. I keep folders for industry news items - little snippets from web sites - that I want to preserve with their links. I have a folder that has the full text of every article that I've written for Bright Hub. That makes it very easy for me to find information that I've written about before and identify which article it's in.
On my home machine, I actually do have a folder about pepper sauce recipes, as shown in the images on the first page. I also have the components listing for my ThinkPad from the Lenovo website, a PDF parts list for our lawn mower, pictures of old tractors from shows, and notes about iTunes and music that I want to look for.
My usage of Evernote is about 50/50 work and play.
Evernote wants be your “external brain.” Dave Engberg says they “would like to provide a single service to manage your memories for many years.” (Evernote Blog)
The basic level of security is similar to that of email with a trusted provider. Another level of security is choosing what material we leave in our local folders and don’t sync. Evernote wants us to know that their service is safe. The Windows client (and soon the Mac client) offers the ability to select and encrypt text that you want to protect. The password for this is not sent to Evernote.
