I have 10 free invites for Evernote. If you’re interested please leave your e-mail address in the comments.
Evernote is a cool new service that allows you to clip information and save it for a later date. This is a simple concept, but it’s executed beautifully.
With Evernote you can keep track of little bits of information from anywhere in the world (including Mobile).
Evernote acts as your second brain.
How’s Evernote Work?
For starters, Evernote has many different ways to “clip” information. They have a beautiful OS X application, but they also support the iPhone and other Java enabled mobile devices. This makes keeping clips in one place extremely simple.
To get started you download the Mac version of Evernote and you’ll see the following interface:
These different images are different clips. They scale much like pictures in iPhoto and it’s fairly fast.
The coolest feature I found in Evernote is its text recognition. When you perform a search, not only does it search your text clips, keywords and tags–but it searches your image for words contained in the image.
At first I wasn’t convinced this would actually work well. I was wrong, so so wrong. Evernote performs this beautifully. The only issue is you need to sync to the server before the recognition works.
Below you can see it highlighting the words “think grow rich” which I was searching for in the toolbar:
Even cooler Evernote can recognize handwriting. I had to put this to the test. I have notoriously bad handwriting and if Evernote could read mine I was sold on the product.
As you can see above Evernote correctly recognized the words Ever and note. Unfortunately it didn’t realize it was one word, but this is still good enough for me.
Clipping Information
There are two ways to clip information, pasting and screenshots.
By pasting information into Evernote, you send whatever information is currently in your clipboard as a clip. This is a nice feature, but it seems redundant in many cases.
My workflow for adding clips is to select the text, copy it, then paste it into Evernote. It would remove an entire keystroke if I could paste selected text directly into Evernote.
This was a small annoyance, however, and not big enough to keep me from using the application.
The other method is via screenshots. This it an easy way to clip any image+text into Evernote. Also remember Evernote recognizes text in images (amazingly well) so you don’t have to tag any of this–just clip and go.
Below is a quick video introduction to Evernote from their website:
(Note: E-mail and some RSS subscribers will have to click through to see the video)
There are some other interesting features like new clips directly from iSight and different notebooks for organizing clips.
Real World Experiment
You may have noticed a lack of updates here at MacTips the past couple of days. For me and a couple other writers, it’s nearing the end of the semester–so finals and papers are all due at the same time.
I was slightly behind on the research part of my paper, and thought Evernote would be a great way to make up some time while storing the information I was researching.
It turns out Evernote is great for this task, but I ran into some problems I think need to be addressed:
Organizing information is nearly impossible
I really wanted to organize the information I had clipped in a way that made sense to me. The best way I could find to do this was with tags, and even that was limiting.
I could only sort by Title/Creation Data/Updated Date so sub-grouping ideas was extremely painful using only tags.
It seems to me with all this information being processed there should be better ways to categorize and organize it.
Tags is a start, but there needs to be more control.
Can’t print multiple notes on one page
Often the notes I clipped were only a few hundred characters. This meant I could easily fit 5 or 6 clips on one page. Unfortunately there’s no way to do this.
Clips are printed on separate pages, which wastes a lot of paper.
Can’t export clips
I was sure I was missing this feature somewhere. Surely with all this information being stored in Evernote there was a way to export it.
CSV, Txt, Doc–I didn’t care. Any way!
I couldn’t find any good way to export information short of manually copying/pasting it which was a little frustrating.
Conclusion
If you want a great way to store and reference information, Evernote is your tool. It’s extremely simple to use and stays out of your way. For the most part it’s pretty quick and the text recognition features are amazing.
Currently Evernote is free but still in beta testing. I’m giving away 10 free invitations to the first 10 MacTips users that add their e-mail address in the comments.
Please note you don’t have to enter your e-mail as the comment, but enter it into the e-mail field. This way it’s not publicly visible but I still have a method of reaching you.
Also note if you’re viewing this from an E-mail, RSS Reader or the Widget, you’ll need to click through to the post to add your e-mail.
Update: All invites given away. If I receive more I’ll send more out. You can apply for an invite here.
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bill
Tobias M.
Is it useable as a document management system, too?
I want to get rid of all my paper stuff at home.. April 21st, 2008 at 12:38 am
steven
Dhaya
Pete
SDamas
Nico
Thank you. April 21st, 2008 at 2:54 am
Patrick Cagan
Tristan Kitchin
Samadore
Antony B
Miguel
rrenga
thankyou April 21st, 2008 at 6:52 am
Ken Grazier
Amiel
Admiral H
Matt
Thom Gough
Brian Vasil
Sarah Hartsfield
Adam Bernardi
Chip
Travis Jeffery
For the people that Brad doesn't give an invite to it's not a big deal at all, just go to that site and sign up and you'll probably get an invite within a day. April 21st, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Brad Jasper
As Travis said you can always sign-up for a beta, but I'm not sure how frequently they send out invites. April 21st, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Joey
Samadore, how is Notemind compared to Google Notebook? I'm not so hot on Notebook. Looking for an alternative. April 21st, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Tristan Kitchin