Evernote, How Did I Ever Live Without It?

Posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 2:55 PM by Chris Lentz

I first heard about this program on the TWiT Podcast. It sounded pretty interesting so I decided to check it out. It is currently in private beta mode; this means you have to get invited to use it. After my invite came I installed the Windows XP version of the program which also installed a Firefox button.

This program allows you to make notes in many different ways and share it across platform and hardware. You can make a note in a Windows Vista machine and view that same note on your iPhone with one click of the synchronize button. It works with Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X, Windows Mobile, iPhone (currently a web application, but soon to be an on phone application), and Blackberry OS (coming soon.)

I use this program daily, anytime I see a interesting article I would like to remember, or need to finish reading later, I don’t bother adding it to my, already bloated, favorites in Firefox. I just clip it into Evernote and save it. Then when I get home it is on my desktop, and if I am on a public computer I can also get to it through Evernote.com.

I save news articles, contact information, images, and even full web pages. It takes a lot to impress me when it comes to computer software, but this is one of the most useful programs I have ever come across.

Evernote has a few different ways of clipping information. I have attached screenshots of the ones I use the most. Above you can see what it looks like when you highlight a specific section of a web page and then click the clip button. It includes links, images, and general formatting.

The next way of clipping content is to take a screen capture and paste it directly into Evernote instead of having to hassle with an imagining program.

One of the greatest functions of this program is the image indexing. What I mean by image indexing is that when you add an image to Evernote, it will scan the image looking for readable text, and then it will index it into a search friendly manner. Click the image above for the large version of the screenshot and you will see I searched for “To Be A Geek” in the search box and it highlighted where it says To Be A Geek in the image. This function works very well but it is not perfect. Sometimes not all the text in the image is indexed. I know Evernote is really trying to develop this area of the program.