EverNote: Capture Every Note and More with Ease Now The Magic Begins Scott Koegler
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
