Spring Break
Evernote: a great computer organizer for the data-obsessed
Issue date: 10/9/08
How much stuff do you read and collect every day on your computer? If you're like me, you probably have a lot of things you want to save, like contact information from e-mails, tips on how to do something from the Web or pictures from a party.
But it's easy to lose track of everything on our computers, especially when we want to go back and find it. Luckily for us, there's a new application called Evernote that solves that problem.
Evernote is a program that allows you to capture tasks, to-do lists, notes, Web pages, pictures and business cards and store them all in one place. It's available both as a desktop application (Mac and PC) and a Web-based client.
You can input stuff into Evernote in several ways: You can add a picture, take screenshots of your computer, add html links, drag and drop stuff into the desktop clients or even e-mail them to your Evernote client. You can tag each thing you input and create notebooks to help organize all the files.
The cool thing about Evernote is that when you take a picture, let's say of a diagram of some great plan you wrote on a napkin at dinner, Evernote's software can detect writing on it and index it so you can search for it later.
It sure beats looking through file names like Picture001.jpg to try to figure out what's what. And from my testing, this feature works very well even with hand-written notes, except for, well, those of you who already have doctor's handwriting.?
If you're using any of the clients, the interface is clean, and it's very easy to sift through all your files quickly. If you have either of the desktop clients, saving a note or something you see on your browser is as easy as highlighting it and hitting the keyboard shortcut, and it will get uploaded to Evernote automatically.?
For me, someone who looks through a lot of Web pages and wants to remember a bunch of random stuff, Evernote is really handy once you get the hang of "clipping" things and storing them on Evernote. Especially useful is the application for my iPhone, which allows me to take pictures and upload them directly to Evernote. But I should warn, it does take a bit of getting used to before you can get the hang of the application.
Since Google has about every application we use on a daily basis now - documents, spreadsheets, Picasa, Gmail, Chat - it's not surprising that they have their own notebook clipping software as well.
It's called Google Notebook. Built on the same premise as Evernote, Google Notebook allows you to clip data and paste it into notebooks.
However, it's much more basic than Evernote and doesn't have features like picture uploading and handwriting recognition. Obviously its strong points are the integration with all things Google, meaning its built-in search engine is going to be rock solid. But Google Notebook is still very primitive.
If you're really going to pick a note-taking software, I would choose Evernote because of the wide variety of platforms it's built for and the sheer number of features it offers.
But it's easy to lose track of everything on our computers, especially when we want to go back and find it. Luckily for us, there's a new application called Evernote that solves that problem.
Evernote is a program that allows you to capture tasks, to-do lists, notes, Web pages, pictures and business cards and store them all in one place. It's available both as a desktop application (Mac and PC) and a Web-based client.
You can input stuff into Evernote in several ways: You can add a picture, take screenshots of your computer, add html links, drag and drop stuff into the desktop clients or even e-mail them to your Evernote client. You can tag each thing you input and create notebooks to help organize all the files.
The cool thing about Evernote is that when you take a picture, let's say of a diagram of some great plan you wrote on a napkin at dinner, Evernote's software can detect writing on it and index it so you can search for it later.
It sure beats looking through file names like Picture001.jpg to try to figure out what's what. And from my testing, this feature works very well even with hand-written notes, except for, well, those of you who already have doctor's handwriting.?
If you're using any of the clients, the interface is clean, and it's very easy to sift through all your files quickly. If you have either of the desktop clients, saving a note or something you see on your browser is as easy as highlighting it and hitting the keyboard shortcut, and it will get uploaded to Evernote automatically.?
For me, someone who looks through a lot of Web pages and wants to remember a bunch of random stuff, Evernote is really handy once you get the hang of "clipping" things and storing them on Evernote. Especially useful is the application for my iPhone, which allows me to take pictures and upload them directly to Evernote. But I should warn, it does take a bit of getting used to before you can get the hang of the application.
Since Google has about every application we use on a daily basis now - documents, spreadsheets, Picasa, Gmail, Chat - it's not surprising that they have their own notebook clipping software as well.
It's called Google Notebook. Built on the same premise as Evernote, Google Notebook allows you to clip data and paste it into notebooks.
However, it's much more basic than Evernote and doesn't have features like picture uploading and handwriting recognition. Obviously its strong points are the integration with all things Google, meaning its built-in search engine is going to be rock solid. But Google Notebook is still very primitive.
If you're really going to pick a note-taking software, I would choose Evernote because of the wide variety of platforms it's built for and the sheer number of features it offers.
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