Evernote – remember everything

The latest buzz in techland is Evernote. It’s basically a note keeping application. What’s so special about that? you wonder. I too was wondering, why this would be any better than basically anything else on the market (I was using a combination of Google Docs and local folders which works pretty well for me). So I took the plunge and have been trying out Evernote for a few weeks now.

photo credit: libbyrosof

First there are the features any one is raving about

• Evernote tries very very hard to make adding notes as easy as possible. There are many ways to add them, but I must confess I only used about two, namely, entering them in the Evernote rich client application and using the web clip option inside Firefox. All the other stuff, I either couldn’t use (iPhone, audio clips) or was just not very useful to me (email, MMS)
• Optical character recognition (OCR) even for handwritten message. I assume this might be handy if you’re importing much “real life” notes, but I didn’t really need it.
• The “ink” feature looks pretty spiffy, but it’s pretty much unusable on the go with a trackpad (or the little knob)

And for me the killer feature is:

• Easy synchronizing. I tend to write a lot on my laptop when it’s not connected to the Internet. Until now I always used a basic text editor (PSPad is great) but it left me with an uneasy feeling. What if my hard disk crashes? Making a backup to memory stick or the net was a manual affair (so it never happened). Now it’s just the click of a button. If you’re very text oriented: Google Docs can be used offline.
• Also important to note, for a product in beta, the help is very good. It’s certainly worth a bit of your time. However, I couldn’t find any info on entering geographical data.