28 May 2009, Posted by christie in Misc Bytes, 8 Comments

Evernote: Capture and sync notes – even tweet them!

Image by mikelpc

I’ve used Google Notebook for quite a while, but back in January, Google announced that it would no longer develop Google Notebook and there will be no more users added. Those of us who already have Google Notebook will not lose our notebooks; we can continue as usual. Google points out that we have Google Docs and Gmail, so it’s not like we can’t make a “note to self” using Google products.

Another cool free product for notes is Evernote. Evernote has a premium version, but the free one is really everything I would need. You can capture notes just about any way I could think of, from a camera, clipping from the web or dragging/dropping using the MAC or Windows client, recording audio, scanning into Evernote, emailing to your own special Evernote address, or even Twittering. In the case of Twitter, you just need to follow @myEN, then you’ll be prompted to click a link and synchronize your Twitter and your Evernote accounts. Once that’s done, anytime you send a tweet (even including a twitpic), if you include “@myEN” anywhere in the message, the message will be saved in your Evernote notebook.  

You can use Evernote on the web anytime, or you can download clients for desktop, mobile, or even SanDisk U3 flash drives! In the latter case, the full version of Evernote is on the drive and runs off of it, but that is for Windows machines only. When you use a client like that, then you’re able to synchronize your Evernote notes to the web and to any other desktop, phone, etc., so that you have access to your notes from whatever machine you want to use. A couple of weeks ago, Evernote announced that Evernote for Blackberry is now available.   Apparently that was a long-awaited announcement! One cool thing in Evernote: the text in image notes is searchable, whether you’re using EverNote online or off. Notice in the picture the guy had searched for “villa” and it is highlighted in the image.

I’ve just been a user of the free version for a few weeks, with the client on my laptop, and so far I have really enjoyed it. It’s a great way to create, tag, and organize some notes using almost any device, and have them ready to look at and edit no matter where you are.