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I have been using EverNote for a fair few months now and over that time
it has become my virtual home for tasks, financial details, snippets of
web information and more recently it is collating everything I need for
an upcoming house move. For years now I have been looking at
applications which can house all of your information in one environment
and always felt dissapointed by the results. OneNote is too bare bones
for me and expensive and some of the other products available are VERY
expensive. We are talking $100's for one application or an annual
subscription fee. For me EverNote is the most visually pleasing of all
the variants and this is something I need badly. In my discussions with
various site visitors I realised that I am far from the only person who
requires a visual environment with which to absorb information quickly.
If you are ever
unfortunate enough to have to make a presentation to me and it's all
words I will be the one in the room staring out of the window, chewing
my fingernails or just sighing loudly to express my boredom. Include
some none graphics and icons and I am the swotty kid at school who
stared and copied everything the teacher wrote on the blackboard 100%
of the time:) I think this is the reason I have never been happy with a
lot of the organisational tools like OneNote and on the PDA there are
no applications which can organise you in an environment that is
visually a joy to look at. Although a PDA version of EverNote is not
available at this time this is the main reason I got interested in the
PC version- the promise of something that will increase the usefulness
of my PDA ten fold.
Let's look at some of
the functions within EverNote. I have probably not scratched the
surface of what it can do so will concentrate on what it does for me.
Feel free to try it for yourself and get drawn into your own EverNote
world:)
On the left hand side is
the now standard hierarchical groups
which you will recognise from PDA applications such as Bonsai. These
are fully customisable and work well for navigating to the notes and
tasks you need to see in a hurry. Adding new child groups is as simple
as right clicking one and typing in the title. You can choose to hide
certain child categories within a group (again, right click) and you
can add icons and choose the font for each title. This helps you focus
on what's important in your life or the sections which you use the most.
I asked for a better
explanation of the groups from EverNote and within 2 hours had the
following reply- guess that's what you call good service.
"We
consider categories broadly divided into three classes by their design
and purpose:
Auto-categories
(the ones on the screen shot) are automatically assigned using
pre-built
algorithms. They pre-classify any incoming info essentially for the
purpose of "assisted search". Imagine you have 5K notes and look for
one where you don't remember any single word but remember it had an
image and was clipped from the Web. Then you can click on the Web
Clips, open the "Category Intersection Panel" (see
Options>Category>Show Category Intersection panel) and select
"Web clips with images" as shown on the screen-shot, thus substantially
reducing the search space.
Manual
categories - the ones you build
and tag notes with according
to your personal projects
and lifestyle. You can assign any number of them to any note manually
and they can have any hierarchy. Here is an example above.
BTW, when the tape is filtered by a manual category and you
create a new note, it can acquire this category tag right away (this is
an option, which is "on" by default).
"Smart categories" (we call them for
simplicity "Keyword categories"; they are manual by birth (i.e. you've
built them rather than they came pre-built with EverNote). But you have
assigned to them certain keywords or other "filters" in order to
automatically tag your past and future data. Category names can be
displayed on the note bars in italic. The example above shows the same
PDA247 category which I assigned manually to three notes, and two of
them have acquired the category automatically as they include the
keyword "Shaun" included in the category filter. Found keywords are highlighted..."
When you are creating a
new note in a category the range available is impressive. From simple
text notes to full to do lists with dates, most of what you need is
already catered for. The ability to create new templates is
possible using XML- that means nothing to me (!) but we should see many
templates coming from users as the product's market grows. All of the
templates built in look good as is the EverNote way- they fit in with
the overall design and are extremely easy to use first time.
If you install the Web Clipper
you get something very special. A button appears in IE (other browsers
are now supported as well) which when clicked adds the whole page as a
note in EverNote. Graphics, links and all other parts of the site are
reproduced perfectly. If you require only a certain part of the page
just copy/paste the bit you want. Below is an example from rohdesign. I
love Mike Rohde's sketches and had to include them in my database.
I simply click the
EverNote icon in IE and there it was in all it's detail- 25 of Mike's
sketches in one note. When you click the button it feels as though
nothing has happened but trust me, when you go to your EverNote
database
it will be there. This works well for every web page- if you see
something you really want to read but don't have time for (like links
from PDA247 news articles:)) just use the button and you can read it at
your leisure.
In theory this could be
a good way to grab daily news and updates from your favourite web
sites. If someone could build a macro to visit each page, click the
EverNote button each time you would have the latest news loaded in
EverNote ready for you to read later in the day. When EverNote is
suitable for PDA usage that would appeal to many people- no longer
having to read text based mobile sites and RSS feeds- why not read the
whole page in all it's glory?
The Ink Features
are superb and especially useful if you own a tablet PC (or a PDA when
it becomes available- do I keep mentioning that point?:)) It's not just
a case of creating handwritten notes because it will recognise
handwritten words and display them at the bottom of the screen, it can
recognise shapes and display them perfectly and includes the expected
pen thickness, colour palette and even a choice of pen or pencil to
suit your desired look. You can also move selected parts of the text
using various in built tools and this is in fact very useful for
arranging your notes.
The Ink Feature alone is
worth the money for the Plus version because it includes the above
mentioned word and shape recognition, advanced not recognition and
ink-note search. When you consider that the standard version is free
it's just plain daft. How can something this good be free???
I mentioned the web
clipper feature above and that is my personal favourite part of
EverNote BUT you can copy /paste data from 'any' application that
supports the Windows
Clipboard. This means Word, Excel, Notepad, PowerPoint and my
guess is almost any other application you care to mention. This really
does mean you can hold all of your data in one place.
The Endless Tape
takes a bit of getting used to but once figured out makes it the
central
part of EverNote for the user. New notes are automatically added to the
end of the tape and date/time stamped accordingly. Sounds simple but
this provides an accurate chronology of your notes and this is a must
when you have lots of notes stored.
In the image above you
will see the Time
Band (on the right) which lists all dates from the very first
note to the latest. Just click on it to jump to the date required,
clicking the top or bottom takes you to the first and last note
respectively. The Accelerator Scroller
(also shown above) provides a means quickly scroll through all of your
notes. Move your mouse or pointer away from the centre and the further
you move it the quicker it scrolls- nice:)
Searching for text is
easy as well- just use the search box at
the top. I found this to be extremely quick and the easiest way for me
to get to the note I require. Text in we clips and other imported media
is found so for a journalist or researcher we are looking at a decent
project management tool and an easy way to store and find research
material.
The above are just some
of the feature found in EverNote and I will conclude the rest at a
later date but the real beauty of this application is that you can use
it for whatever you want and in any way you like. For example- expense
reports, letter templates, article writing (this review was written
over a few days in EverNote), photos and personal items (see image
below) and any other data that's useful to you. Using one application
saves a lot of time and reduces the need to hunt through various
programs just to get something that takes seconds in EverNote due to
it's multitude of search and navigation tools.
I have written many
reviews and articles for PDA247 and freelance for technical magazines
but never have I enjoyed writing one as much as for EverNote. As I said
at the start it has taken me years to find an application to store
everything I want in one place and at last here it is. The potential of
EverNote knows no bounds and it is a testament to the programmers that
it is stable, incredibly quick to use and probably the only application
I have seen that I can think of no extra features for.
Now, consider what
EverNote can do (just about everything), consider how much time it will
save you, consider what you can do to make the program your own and
then consider how much you would pay for something like this.
YOU PAY NOTHING! There is no charge for the
standard version of EverNote. If you need the advanced Ink features you
still only pay $34.95 for the Plus version. Am I missing
something here? Without doubt this is the best value piece of software
I have ever seen, indeed it is the best piece of PC software I have
used in my life- EverNote is remarkable in so many ways that I ill stop
now before you think the EverNote team came round to my house and stood
behind me with loaded guns while I typed this:)
If the above has
inspired you to find out more about it just go to www.evernote.com and download it- I
promise you it will be a worthwhile few minutes of your time. Once you
have tried it please have your say in our EverNote
Poll which I will pass onto the developers once we have a few more
votes to show them how much we want a PDA version of this program. You
have no idea how much I want to see this running on my PDA!
Since writing this
review we managed to get an interview
with Stepan Pachikov
who is the creator of EverNote (you can read it here).
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