I’m a child at heart, and I love playing with new software. Occasionally I discover new toys that seem too important and enjoyable to put aside. About three weeks ago I discovered Evernote and have been using it (playing with it) ever since.
I was sceptical at first. ”After all,” I thought, “Evernote is only an electronic scrapbook. What would I want with one of those? I have toyed for a few seconds with Microsoft OneNote, was vaguely impressed with the software, but the idea of having to be at my desktop to collect things made it a bit impractical for someone always on the run. And anyway, it didn’t immediately fall into the need-one-of-those category.”
However, Evernote is so flexible and ubiquitous, that I am now finding it indispensible. There are four features of Evernote which make it an extremely powerful and useful electronic scrapbook.
The first is that you can carry this collecting device anywhere with you in your pocket. The documents are not stored on your hard drive (though you can select that option) but are encrypted and stored online. And free applications available for the iPod and iPhone, the Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and the Palm Pre mean that you can always capture documents and ideas, which are then synced with the desktop and online versions of Evernote.
The second powerful feature of this electronic scrapbook is in the way it can collect things. Not only can you drag and drop documents, pictures, sound files and video, snip screen captures, and type text from your desktop, but the mobile phone applications mean that you have other ways of collecting material. In addition to taking text, the phone applications allow you shoot pictures, draw handwritten notes, and record WAV files. 
I recently attended a two-day conference. Each day was crammed full of sessions. I wanted to record my impressions of being there, and didn’t want what I was learning to evaporate into the ether. In addition to taking a few snapshots on my phone to record memories, I also grabbed the odd moment to record sound files of my impressions of some of the sessions (there was no time for typing). These recordings enabled me to type up more important notes when I got back home.
The third powerful feature of Evernote is its integration with other applications. This feature is the one that has surprised me as I find myself using it often. Once you sign up with Evernote you are given an email address linked to your account. This address will collect anything you send to it in your electronic notebooks. This is really useful for forwarding emails that you want to keep and have easily available on your phone at any time.
Evernote also integrates seamlessly with Twitter. Once you have linked your Evernote account with your Twitter account, all you have to do is type @myen anywhere in the text, and that tweet is then captured in your scrapbook. As Tweets often include links to useful websites, re-tweeting and including @myen records that Tweet.
On my iPhone also have an application called MyScan that ’scans’ documents (by photographing them and enabling editing). I was away from the office and needed to keep a copy of an important certificate. Having scanned it into my phone I was delighted to see that one of the options available to me was to save it directly to Evernote. Of course, I could have saved the photo as a JPEG and emailed it, but the integration considerably eased the process.
Evernote also integrates with my other favourite app - ReQall. Now, whenever I am given a reminder of something to buy or an appointment in ReQall, ReQall searches Evernote for any relevant information and presents it with the reminder. So, for example, a reminder to buy an iPhone cover on Saturday would not only remind me on Saturday, but pull up the websites I had clipped into Evernote in researching the product I wanted.
The fourth powerful feature of Evernote is the flexibility over what happens to your notebooks. For me, it makes sense for most of my notebooks to be stored privately online, as this enables me to have them readily available on the two computers in different offices that I work on, and on my mobile phone. One extra feature available is the ability to encrypt certain notes, and I use this where documents may contain sensitive information.
There are also two other storage options available. One is to store the notes on your machine, and this is easily set up. Hard copies of notebooks can always be emailed to other destinations and imported into another desktop Evernote. A second option is to let Evernote publish any notebook you select online so that simply by passing on a URL, the material easily be made available to anybody. I used the latter option to make selected photos and sound files from the conference I attended available for other delegates to see.
In addition to gathering random scraps of humour, and amassing collections of interesting articles and websites I want to keep, I have so far used Evernote for:
- Keeping all the documents relating to a forthcoming holiday in one place - the emails about the flights and hotels, the maps and websites about the venues.
- Recording subscription details to various services all in one, easily accessible place.
- Recording ideas and future plans by just speaking into my phone.
- Keeping notes from a conference.
- Keeping a list of websites with ideas for gifts for people.
- Collecting folders containing articles, sites, tweets on topics that I intend to write about in the future.
- Gathering material for an academic essay.
- Collecting important documents that I often use in my business so that they are easily available on my phone and can now easily be emailed to potential clients from my phone.
- Storing backups for my Accounts program.
- Collecting song lyrics and jokes.
- Having a Dump file for stuff that I want to keep but don’t quite now what to do with.
Evernote is free, but with a subscription option ($45 a year or $5 a month). In the free version there is a limit of 40MB a month upload. This is usually more than enough for most people, but the subscription version upgrades this to 500MB. That amount of space is probably only of use to medium-sized businesses. The main reason for upgrading for some users is that the free service has some restrictions on the type of file that can be uploaded. For example, WAV files can be uploaded but MP3s cannot; PDF files can be uploaded, but DOC or DOCX files can’t. Many people can partially get round the latter restriction by saving their WORD documents as PDF files.
Evernote is a flexible, powerful, free application that works on many platforms. I recommend it to you.
Your photos seem to have disappeared? Or is it just my browser?
I too have been won over by Evernote. I am the opposite to you. I hate having to mess around (play) with new applications. I like to start using them straightaway. And I found with Evernote that I could do that - the way it works makes sense to me and I was up and running with it almost immediately.
I use it to help me with my planning. I always use the half hour walk back from the school each morning to plot and plan my day and Evernote means I don’t now forget any of what I plan - I speak reminders into my phone and as soon as I get home and re-open my laptop the reminders are synched onto my desktop.
It’s fab! Thanks for telling me about it!
Reluctant Blogger
I too like the ease of it. It is enabling me to collect things so easily without having hoards of printouts on the table at home. The only thing so far to disappoint (everso slightly) is the screen clip thingy. I can get it to capture whole screen easily, but haven’t yet mastered the knack of successfully capturing part of a screen. Obviously an essential skill to master over the Christmas holiday.
Oh, so this Evernote, one of my twitter contacts has suggested I get one of these. Makes sense now, why ever did I not pick this one up before?
[...] from my phone (iPadio), and about the app which enables the phone to store and organise everything (Evernote), including the kitchen sink (well pictures of it, descriptions of it, and songs and videos). I [...]
[...] For some time I have been speaking to ReQall to make diary appointments and shopping lists, and Evernote to (amongst other things) record miscellaneous notes on the hop. I also occasionally used the [...]