Evernote: Forever, forever, ever.
From Evernote:
Remember everything.
Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.
What does that really mean? In short, Evernote wants to be your mobile brain. Pretty ambitious of them since my brain has a lot stuff in it; granted, a good chunk of that will only win me bar bets or games of Trivial Pursuit… there’s work stuff too but NDA’s say ‘no’ about posting that sort of thing. At it’s core Evernote is essentially an online filesystem like MobileMe’s iDisk or Gmail’s GDrive, but with a few nice extras.
Thanks to Web 2.0 we have been graced with bookmarklets and our browsers have been more useful since. Evernote’s bookmarklet allows you to clip entire web pages (if there is no selection) or highlighted content as a taggable and indexable entry into your notebook. Once uploaded image content is passed through an
Your browser is not the only way to get content into your notebook. Since the release of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 firmware a mobile version of Evernote has been available. Granted, there is a Windows Mobile (for versions 5.x and 6.x) but being a non-Windows (except for gaming) user I won’t be speaking of the relative ability on that platform. The iPhone/iPod Touch client lets you create text, photo (active or passive) and audio notes to be uploaded into your notebook. The ability to take a snapshot and upload it (active) or use a photo from your library (passive) is a great feature when wanting to tag and store while in the real world. If you’re like me, constantly trying to remember the great wine you had while out to dinner or wondering what the title of a book was you saw but couldn’t, real-time capture justifies having the application alone. A simple snapshot of a cover, spine or label and you’re done. The beauty of the mobile client lay not in being able to tag and name a note in real-time but being able to capture and store. This is the use case that truly allows Evernote to gain a step towards being your mobile brain. Since notes are editable after they’ve been uploaded you can easily change tags or names later! While you can add names and tags using the mobile client, unless your thumbs have the conditioning of Olympic athletes, it takes to long.
When it comes to editing and creating notes while at the comfort of a computer you have two choices, a full-featured web client and equally robust OS X Leopard or Windows client… sorry Tiger users. With either the Mac or web client, Windows was not tested, changing the names and tags of notes was easy. Since note organization is tag based, if you’ve not gotten into the usage mindset you’ll have a slight learning curve. Though once organized there are many ways to view your notes; additionally, sharing notes is made easy by allowing you to publish your notes in publicly available notebooks as well as one click email generation with selected note content.
Unfortunately Evernote’s features are not all sunshine and roses. One of the drawbacks is the slowness of the OCR. Basic testing using typed text took a great number of minutes for even basic in image indexing to available; additionally, the OCR-ed text that was available to index searches was inconsistent. In some cases text that was illegible in the image was indexed while large clear blocks appeared to be ignored.
One major problem is no SSL encryption without Premium service. At the very minimum protecting the login process should be par for the course of any web application that expects to be successful. Seeing there is no encryption at login or during note transfer, a strong password is your only defense unless you shell out $5/month or $45/year. Frankly, this is the biggest ‘feature’ of the Premium service, I’m disappointed that this is this the best they could do on the ‘value added proposition’.
From Evernote:
What Evernote Premium users get
* Monthly upload allowance increased to 500MB*
* Stronger security through SSL encryption at login and note transfer
* Priority image recognition
* Premium support
* Ads removed from public notebooks
The other major issue is Google Checkout. I don’t want my shopping habits trended by the same company that is trending my search habits so I don’t use Google. Though, distrust aside, not including alternatives is lazy implementation. PayPal, for example, only differs in .9% + $0.10 in overall fees and it available to much wider user base as and has as many more funding options for those users.
Despite a few niggling problems with the server side features and a glaring omission, SSL, Evernote has a decent service going. If you need a place to upload and store varied content types, text, html, jpeg, gif, png, wav, mp3, and ink (Evernote format), and have them accessible from a number of machines or devices then Evernote is a way to go. The service has some clear advantages over would be competitors like MobileMe and Google even with no .evernote.com email address. Even though you don’t get much, IMHO, with the Premium service the lack of security otherwise is worth the $45/year if you can stomach Google.
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