Fog of Eternity | Website design and discussion

Evernote is a potentially excellent new application that’s currently in beta stage. I’ve been taking an initial look over the last couple of days and have been quietly impressed.

Evernote is a bookmarking tool that extends beyond the internet. It lets you capture information in a variety of environments - web pages, snippets of web pages, email, photographs, audio and videos - and stores them in a searchable format. Anything you can copy and paste you can store in Evernote.

This data is synchronised across any platform where you have the Evernote application installed - currently Mac OSX, Windows XP/Vista, and Windows Mobile - plus on your web account. You can add to or access your data from pretty much anywhere and email directly to your notes as well as adding any free-text you desire within the application or the web account.

Snippets of web pages that are captured have automatic links back to the full web page, and the installable toolbar button (for Firefox, IE and Safari) makes capturing either portions or full web pages a breeze. Evernote also synchronises with Outlook so that you can directly add emails to your notes with one button click, while photographs, audio and video files can all be easily dragged from a folder into the Evernote application.

So far so good, and I’ve been enjoying using the application. It makes life easier to have a one stop shop to make various notes and “bookmarklets” accessible on a much wider basis. Evernote is certainly offering an application in response to a need.

Evernote also claims that the it makes text within images searchable through text recognition software. I’ve had mixed results with this. When searching in my online account the text recognition has been reasonably successful in identifying more traditional or clear fonts within images. But it’s failed consistently to identify unusual or decorative fonts, text that is at an angle in an image, or handwriting. And the desktop application has been worse than the web account in terms of recognition.

The idea behind this text recognition functionality is excellent - it would make snapshots of business cards, train timetables, receipts etc a legitimate source of information - but it’s not quite working at this stage.

Tagging and searching is otherwise a breeze. When browsing and searching on the web it’s easy to get an at a glance view of the search results with a thumbnail view. This is not yet implemented in the Windows desktop application and this could potentially be an issue once the number of records is such that a search returns a large number of results. That being said, I understand from the Evernote development forums that implementation of the thumbnail view in the Windows app is in the pipeline.

I like the concept of Evernote. The facility to massively widen the ability to “bookmark” is something I’ve been looking for. The application is user friendly and accessible but it is clearly still a beta version and there are areas of improvement. Overall though I’m positive on both the current application and the long term potential of Evernote.

You can read an alternative evaluation of Evernote at ‘Somewhat Frank’.

Filed under: Review, Tools and Apps by Robin Cannon

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