EverNote
Capture Every Note and More with Ease
Efficiently Store and Retrieve All Sorts of Information
EverNote is an ambitious attempt to categorize the uncategorizable. The best part about the program is that with a few exceptions, it actually works, especially when compared to the competition. The problem with most organizers is that they are either too global or too restrictive, and they impose either too much structure or not enough.
While the initial release of EverNote isn't perfect, we found the ability to decide what to put in and what to leave out provides a nice control point when compared to the likes of Google Desktop Search, which looks absolutely everywhere during a search, and Outlook, which only looks in specified folders of your e-mail archive.
The Basics
Think of EverNote as a never-ending roll of note paper with digital enhancements. You can transfer information to the interface in a variety of ways, including drag and drop, copy and paste, or by simply typing in the content. You can also write on the "paper" with a mouse, although a digital pad like a Wacom will give better results. You can additionally drag images and audio files into EverNote, and then associate text descriptions with them.
EverNote faithfully stores your entries on its digital scroll and does some automatic organization for you, which is really the client's strongest point. The first organizational point is EverNote's Time Band timeline. Each entry you add is automatically stamped with the date and time of when you initially added it.
As you view the Time Band scroll vertically, you move chronologically through the entries, but in addition to simply seeing the date displayed at the top of each entry, a timeline is displayed along the right side of the page. Entries are marked by blips along a line with the width of the peaks indicating the number and size of entries made at the time.
This feature can be very helpful I know there are plenty of times I can remember the approximate day I worked on something, and the Time Band makes jumping to the entries of that day quick and simple.
Speaking of quick, I found the scrolling to be just as fast as I wanted it to be. Next to the Time Band is an accelerator bar, and pointing farther from the middle of the bar makes the list scroll faster, so no matter how far back in history (or forward), I could quickly get there by a combination of clicking on the date in the time band and then scrolling through the notes to the area I wanted to see.
Now The Magic Begins
But the real magic of EverNote is in two areas. The first is the handwriting recognition function that is the best and fastest I've seen. My handwriting is pretty terrible, and it's worse when I attempt to use a mouse to write text. Even so, EverNote did a strong job of turning my marginally readable scribblings into editable text. But when I used a drawing pad like the Wacom, and made just a little effort to write clearly, EverNote was uncanny in turning both my block and script into text ... and without needing any initial training.
EverNote's second magic trick is its indexing and searching function. Everything entered into EverNote's scroll is indexed for full-text search. In addition, EverNote automatically assigns notes to its own pre-defined categories. You can also add your own categories to the list to suit your needs, and in addition to the automated categorization, you can "stamp" each note with as many categories as you like to create quick groupings of logically related items.
Even without assigning stamps manually, I was able to find exactly the entry I wanted within a few clicks almost every time. I found the most direct approach was to use the text search function. Text search is interactive, meaning EverNote searches its entire database and narrows its target with each keystroke.
My 8MB EverNote database is still relatively small, but each letter I typed into the search box reduced the number of qualified notes (displayed at the bottom of the window) instantaneously, giving me immediate feedback about how much more specific I needed to be in order to narrow the list of possible entries to a reasonable number. And handwritten notes were also included in the search because they had already been converted to text.
Ready for Public Consumption
EverNote Basic is now available for free in 1.x release for Windows 2000/XP/XP Tablet, and is absolutely useful and quite stable in its current incarnation. An EverNote Plus edition is also available for $39.95. The Plus version includes handwriting and shape recognition, advanced note recognition (ANR), and ink-note search, among other features.
Thanks to Evernote you can get used to being able to actually find the note you scribbled six months ago that you knew you would need later but weren't quite sure how you would use it at the time or save it for later use.
Pros: Quick and easy way to save all types of information, including text, audio, and images; sophisticated handwriting recognition technology; powerful search capabilities; free release
Cons: Only available for Windows XP/2000, some features not completely implemented in beta releases, current edition lacks synchronization support for smartphones and PDAs
