Evernote is a cloud based note taking system. A central store of notes is kept on Evernote’s servers and may be accessed via a special web client. Evernote also provide software clients for a myriad of platforms including Windows, Mac, Android, iPod/iPhone/iPad, Palm and Blackberry. Changes are synchronised from client to the cloud and vice versa (depending upon platform and account type in some cases).
Almost every day (and typically several times a day) I’ll enter data into Evernote and synchronise it across several devices. I have access to my information pretty much everywhere and from everything. This leaves my mind free to focus on more important things and not worrying about remembering every little thing - that’s all in Evernote.
Because Evernote is so versatile and useful and I use it so frequently, I have come up with a number of tips, tools and strategies to help me use the software.
I’ve been a long time Evernote user and while the application and services have certainly seen a lot of issues arising in the last decade, I still rely on it for some of my workflows. One of these is my daily journal, and this is a topic I have written about several times before. I recently had a bit of a change to this, and it is time for another quick write-up.
Alfred is an essential app for many Mac users, myself included. It is so much more than an application launcher and as of this last weekend, version 2.0 has been released to beta testers.
A little while back I was scanning through some questions on Quora when I spotted one relating to Evernote that I thought I could help with. The question was “Is there a shortcut to copy the note URL in Evernote on Windows”….
Clearly is a browser add-on created by the team at Evernote. It allows you to reformat the content of a web page into a cleaner simpler one for easier reading (like Readability) and of course also integrates seamlessly into Evernote. This application fits my way of consuming and saving interesting articles almost (see later) perfectly and I thought I’d share with you a few features you may not be so familiar with.
I use my iPhone for keeping up to date on a number of social media platforms. It’s how I consume news and what’s going on in my areas of interest. I’ve pretty much abandoned RSS feeds these days for the curated content of Twitter, and I now would find it had to operate as effectively without my nice ordered Twitter lists. The problem is the information I often require is in linked to articles and posts. This involves my Twitter client either using it’s internal browser or spawning out into mobile Safari. Not too bad in the main, but some sites are poorly formatted for mobile browsing. Either I get a desktop experience crammed onto a tiny screen or a poorly styled (usually some odd WordPress theme) mobile page that doesn’t actually let me scroll the whole article onto the screen. Clearly what’s needed is a better mobile web browser.
For some time now I’ve been hampered by Evernote’s e-mail in service. Let me re-phrase that; I’ve been hampered by the limitations of e-mail in making the best use of Evernote’s e-mail in service. Now however, I’ve found a service that lets me overcome the limitations and open up a wide range of opportunities for today and unimaginable ones for the future.
I recently had an e-mail about one of my posts on Evernote templates on Windows. I’ve previously recommended using an application launcher to provide a list of evernote imports, but the e-mail was asking if there was an easier way to import templates directly? Well as it happens there is.
Recently I was contacted by Stephan Heuel about a new online application he had created. I’ve written several posts about how you might want to use Evernote files saved to a local machine (or attached storage) as the basis for template notes. These have involved editing the note files in a text editor to produce various effects. Even changing the background colour of a note in Evernote. It was this post that inspired Stephan to think - what if you could edit them in-place, online?
At the time of writing, this new version of Alfred really is hot off the keyboard. It may be by the time you’re reading this post that the new features are on general release, but if not I grabbed my copy of Alfred 0.9.9 dev 1 build from the dev download page. The feature you’re going to need available is that of importing an extension in order to use this Evernote Search.
Evernote is my ubiquitous deposit spot for the overflow from my brain and everyday (unlike my brain) it grows in size. Being able to access the information held in Evernote in as easy a manner as possible is a key part of the way I work and I recently wrote a little script to make it that little bit better. The script allows me to search Evernote from Alfred (a keyboard driven app launcher on my Mac) which is always just a hot key away.
I had a comment recently relating to my post about a templating system for Evernote. The approach is that on Windows a system tray/notification area menu utility is used to call a batch script with some parameters and this uses a command line tool for Evernote (ENScript) to create a new note based on a template file based on an exported and amended note in Evernote. The comment noted that the new note that was created was not selected automatically in Evernote and asked if there was a solution. Well, there is….
Several months back (March 2010 in fact) I posted how to create a daily journal in Evernote on Windows using a bit of script. The script creates a new note in evernote with a dynamically generated title (the current date) and pre-populated with an Evernote tag. Whilst I use this to log everything I do at work, at home I have an Apple Mac that I use most of the time and I hadn’t quite got around to porting the script to OS X … until now.
So for some time now Evernote users have been clamouring for a way to work with rich text (e.g. bold, italics, fonts) on their iOS device (iPhone/iPod/iPad). The issue has been that iOS at a base level does not functionally support rich text editing. To implement this sort of function would require the Evernote iOS developers to develop an entirely new text editing interface and given the complexity/flexibility of the note format this could be quite challenging (and there are lots of other pulls on their time for develpments such as access to shared notebooks in the client (… which they did say would be this year and there’s only a month left).
For ten or so months now I’ve been clipping web pages from Safari on my iOS devices into Evernote using a one touch bookmarklet. Whilst Evernote’s own bookmarklet works for this activity, you have to enter some details for the note, maybe even login. For me this was just too much to be concerned with when I’m browsing on the move. My solution simply pushed the whole page into my default Evernote notebook for dealing with later.
Do you suffer from finger prints on any of your touch screen devices? Do you ever forget things and wish that you had a photographic memory? Well maybe Evernote has the solution…
A little while back, Evernote launched a new feature known as the trunk. It is a platform through which Evernote promoted partnerships and integrations with the Evernote system. Whilst it is a new system I have three ideas on how to make it even better.
Offline access to notes in Evernote is a must for me. Whilst much of my time is spent in areas with a good enough reception for my phone or with access to a WiFi network, there are occasions where getting online and connected is not so easy if not impossible as anyone who travels the UK rail network will attest to for example. Now whilst the Mac and Windows clients have offline access by default, the mobile clients are not so fortunate.
Do you use Evernote on Windows? Do you ever put files into Evernote notes? I’d like to share a little tip with you for making your life with files and Evernote bit easier.
Evernote is one of my favourite applications on any platform and I use it on several for a huge variety of things. The nature of Evernote is to provide a system that can hold any information and be accessed anywhere. This lends itself to storing just about everything in it. I certainly try to keep as much as possible in it, but this innate power and flexibility also makes Evernote potentially dangerous to use and so I thought I’d write something about securing Evernote. This won’t necessarily be a definitive guide of making your Evernote account into Fort Knox, but it will hopefully give you some options to consider in terms of how you use and access Evernote.
The big day finally arrived for Evernote today. They revealed the second phase of the big Evernote plan and revealed the secret they’d been keeping up their trunk.
The latest release of Evernote for the iPhone is 3.3.5 and it includes an elegant yet simple solution for what was previously a frustrating oversight around taking photos.
A chance look on Twitter today lead me to discover what I can only describe as a quaint partnership with Evernote in Japan. I had thought that everything was digital in Japan these days and Evernote has certainly taken off in a big way this year. However I was surprised to discover that abrAsus seem to have released what I assume is a notepad holder for use with Evernote.
Over the weekend, Evernote have announced that they have a secret to share on July 14 2010 at 10 AM. So I guess the big question is what is the secret and are elephant’s good at keeping them?
Whilst working on another Evernote related post today I came across a suggestion from someone that I thought I could help with. Would you like to be able to colour code your notes in Evernote?
A couple of months back Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) did another public Q&A session on the Evernote blog. During the course of this session he set out a range of updates that would be carried out in the Evernote-sphere over the course of the rest of the year. I’ve finally managed to get a few hours to filter the whole question-response set and categorise them into mini-road maps of what’s coming for Evernote users.
Today Evernote released the 3.5.4 update of the Windows client. Evernote’s blog post on the release covers many of the new features, but there was one notable absence of one of the new features that also reminded me of another obscure feature of Evernote I discovered a while back.
Spell checking is one of those things that most of us take for granted these days in our applications. Those familiar wavy red lines are all too familiar to most computer users. You may even have noticed them in Evernote, but like many people I need to use technical jargon and in my notes and these are not part of the default English dictionary in Evernote which is a US English dictionary adding further issues for me a UK Evernote user. So let me explain how to update your Evernote dictionary.
Following on from the send to Evernote addition for Evernote I also wanted to reproduce the Windows Evernote watched folders feature. This allows a file moved to a specific folder to be automatically imported into a new note within Evernote and again can be accomplished with AppleScript.
Being able to add files into Evernote is a particularly useful feature. On my Windows PC I have an option when I right click on a file to send it to Evernote. By default my Evernote installation on my Mac doesn’t provide this option, so I decided to address this shortcoming with a service.
A little while back I posted about an improved template system for Evernote. This system was based on exporting a note from Evernote, tweaking it in a text editor and then importing it back again whenever you need a new note based on it. The post was focussed on how to do this in Windows as this is the platform I commonly work with. I’m now starting to use Mac OS X a bit more and I’ve extended the system to work on this platform too.
It has been a little time since I posted my improved template system for Evernote and now that the new web site is starting to come together (still lots to do) I can finally share just a few of the sample templates I’m now starting to use.
So it’s just a matter of hours until the iPad is released in the US (over here in the UK we’ve got a bit longer to wait), and I got to thinking about the future of one of my favorite applications on this new platform - Evernote. Ever since Phil Libin posted …
For some time now Evernote has supported thee-mailing of notes into Evernote to automatically create a note. This has been fantastically useful in terms of automation of things like automatically feeding tweets into Evernote or just quickly getting pages from the iPhone Safari browser into Evernote. Today Evernote took a big step forward with this and added functionality to the e-mail processing to allow you to specify a notebook and one or more tags for the note generated by the e-mail.
Building on yesterday’s post on an improved template system for Evernote I’d like to share with you how I use a variation on this system to create a daily journal template.
One of the things that people have frequently asked for in Evernote is for the inclusion of templates. I wrote a post in November 2009 about how ENSCRIPT could be used to automate the creation of notes in Evernote based on a template. I’ve now taken that post which was more a proof of concept and created what I think is an improved system for using templates in Evernote.
I love Evernote and the flexibility it gives me to carry my information with me everywhere. What I also make use of from time to time is the option to share information with other people. Typically I share it with other individuals by sharing a notebook with them specifically or simply by e-mailing the content of the note directly to them.
Evernoteis a tool I use practically every single day. I love the versatility of the system and its cross-platform availability as well as the fact that you can use it for free. One of the features I now take for granted are the variety of ways you can get information into Evernote.
For some time now Fujitsu ScanSnap has been a well publicised way to get your scans into Evernote with a minimum of fuss. I don’t have a Fujitsu scanner, but I did have a desire to get my an all-in-one print/scan/fax unit to fit into some sort of scan to Evernote work flow. Thankfully it was surprisingly easy.
I was going to spend some time today compiling a list of keyboard shortcuts for Evernote. I’d had a look around some time ago and been unable to find much out there, but before I began I thought I’d have another check. This time I found a link to a PDF on site mistywindows.com that does a superb job of describing the available shortcut keys. Download mistywindows.com Evernote Shortcuts PDF.
Currently Evernote does not currently support outline structuring for notebooks. This means that you can’t group notebooks into collections (e.g. folders) or have sections/sub-notebooks. Recently I posted about why in many cases it is often better to use tags rather than notebooks as this allows you to better mark-up notes for searches and the like. However there is a desire to sometimes have information hierarchically organised and this is where an outline structure for notebooks in Evernote would be useful. Until the Evernote developers catch up on this popular request across all of the software platforms tags can provide you with a workaround.
This coming year I’ve decided to take a different approach with one of my core applications, Evernote. It’s based around reducing the number opf notebooks I’m using whilst increasing the number of tags. This is the opposite to what many Evernote users are doing, so I thought it might be useful to explain what my reasoning is behind this.
Evernote is a great application for jotting down a quick note about something new, but occasionally I find that I want to jot a note that’s very similar to an existing note. I predominantly use the Windows 3.1 version and whilst it looks as though copy and paste is enabled for notes it isn’t. So how do you do it?
I regularly make use of Evernote from my iPod touch (effectively an iPhone without the inbuilt communications) and I frequently look to add information from a web page in Safari to Evernote. As I’ve written about before, the standard Evernote bookmarklet can be added to the iPod/iPhone Safari app and this will then provide an option to set a title for the note as well as providing an option to add tags. I find this useful but invariably it is quite slow.
I really like Evernote and the more I use it the more I like it. For anyone who hasn’t used it, Evernote is a free piece of software that allows you to capture notes in a variety of formats and synchronise the electronic notebooks it creates with other machines via ‘the cloud’. It has lots of other features, but one thing it doesn’t do is templates.
The default browser on the iPhone and iPod is Safari which is a built in application. As it currently stands inbuilt applications on Apple’s hand held device operating system doesn’t give much to developers who would like to be able to add extra functionality (at least not without jail breaking). The option to send page content to Evernote from Safari is something I had hoped would be easily available, but found myself having to manually copy content from Safari to Evernote.
Since Google Notebook went out of development earlier this year I’ve made the migration over to Evernote. It has many cool features one of the coolest being the ability to upload images and have Evernote run OCR to index the content of the image. The mobile phone Evernote applications allow a phone’s camera to be used to take a snapshot image and to upload it to Evernote over a 3G connection. Unfortunately the Windows desktop application has no functionality for capturing images in the same way through a web camera and with the proliferation of netbooks I feel that this is a feature that is sadly missing - well for me anyway. So after a bit of research I embarked on a quick weekend VB.Net project to put together a little application that could do this - and so I created “SnapIT”.
I’ve spent a little while today looking at putting something together for Evernote. Hopefully I’ll have it finished pretty soon and I’ll probably share it with you when it’s done, but whilst I’ve been experimenting, I’ve also been looking at ENScript a command line utility that allows you to interact with an Evernote database.
| Template | Description | Published | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Code Snippet | A template to keep details of programming code. | 06/05/2010 | Example; Blank Template |
| Coloured Backgrounds | Blank notes with simple background colours - see colour coded templates post. | 07/05/2010 | Blue; Brown; Green; Grey; Orange; Purple; Red; Yellow |
| Journal | A blank template with automatic date/title building | 15/03/2010 | Creating a daily journal in Evernote |
| Lesson Plan | A template to form the basis of a generic lesson plan | 06/05/2010 | Example; Blank Template |
| Meeting Minutes | A template to record the attendance, decisions and actions of a meeting. | 06/05/2010 | Example; Blank Template |
| SQL Snippet | A template to keep details of database queries. | 06/05/2010 | Example; Blank Template |
