March 24th, 2008 | Posted by Dean Lucas 64 comments

Evernote - powerful note taking software for desktop, web, and mobile

Tags: Camera, iPhone, iPod touch, Photos, Productivity, Reviews, Web Apps

Evernote - powerful note taking software for desktop, web, and mobile

We just discovered Evernote, a very slick and powerful note application that offers terrific features including a mobile interface for your iPhone or iPod touch. Evernote has downloadable client software for your desktop that automatically syncs your notes to your Evernote web account. To access or edit your notes, you point mobile Safari to Evernote and sign in, or use the IMAP interface. Of course, you need to be on EDGE or Wi-fi to use Evernote on your mobile device, but if you go between a desktop app and your iPhone, and use your iPhone camera to capture things you want to remember, then EverNote will blow your socks off. We started using Evernote last week and we can tell you that we are absolutely hooked on it. Unfortunately, Evernote is only currently availabe as a invite-only beta, but lucky you, we happen to be sitting on a pile of invites. Read on to find out how you can be one of the first people to get your hands on Evernote.

Evernote provides a ubiquitous note capturing system that is accessible from mobile, desktop, or web. It’ll capture web clips, digital pictures, text, emails, or to-do lists. The Evernote client software is available for Mac OS X (Leopard) and Windows XP or Vista. The client application is not required to use Evernote but you will certainly want to use it if you find that you do most of your writing from your desktop computer. This is especially true of the Mac client which takes advantage of Leopard’s core animation to provide some serious eye candy. Likewise, you can opt to use the client software exclusively without using the web interface at all, but if you think you’ll need to access your notes from other computers or even your iPhone or iPod touch, then you’ll want the client to auto sync to the web for you.

Evernote’s web account comes with a unique email address that you can use to email notes or pictures to. These notes will sync back to your client next time you open it up so you can have access to all of your notes and pictures, even the ones you captured on your iPhone or iPod touch. Every note can be tagged, and you can sort your notes by tag or other attributes such as created date or last modified date, among others. And whenever you capture a clip from the web, Evernote preserves all the links and also annotates the note citing the source URL. This makes Evernote a must-have for bloggers doing research.

Evernote’s most powerful feature is text extraction from images, and it must be seen to be believed. Evernote will quickly, and very accurately, show you images that contain text when you search your notes. This makes it easy to capture notes from whiteboard sessions, or documents, or anything, just by using your iPhone’s camera to snap a picture and send it to your Evernote account. Then you can search on any key words or key phrases to find the image containing that text. Imagine using this to create a database of business cards, purchase receipts, recipes from magazines or cards, concert tickets, or just about anything.

For a beta, Evernote is pretty solid and well worth a closer look for anyone interested in a powerful way to capture information. We do have ten invites to share so if you want one, please leave a comment on this post and be sure to use your real email address. We don’t display your email address so please don’t put it in the body of the comment, just include it in the email field when you submit. The invites are first come, first serve.

Evernote
www.evernote.com