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I have to admit, my head is like a strainer. You can dump in anything, but only a small percentage remains in there. I used various notepads, reminder tools and my wife to remind me of things, but since I’m using Evernote, finding memories is a lot easier.

What it does

Evernote is a program that runs in the background of your Mac, PC or even on your iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile device. It has a little elephant icon in your taskbar, so you can open it quickly when you need it.
To put it simple: It takes notes, but in an awesome way!

Let’s say you see a website that you want to remember. You could bookmark this site, hoping you’ll be able to find it in the deep dark forest of the rest of the sites you’ve bookmarked. And a lot of the times you bookmark a page, you only need to remember an excerpt of it.
In comes Evernote: Select the text or image you want to remember, click on the little elephant, and hit “paste to Evernote”. You can add a title and/or tags if you wish. It will synchronize with Evernote’s website and store the note on their servers.
Of course, you’ll be able to search the text later, but here’s the awesome thing: Once synced with the website, it also recognizes text in images, even handwriting!

The handwriting recognition works great, and can even recognize my “doctor’s handwriting”.

Here’s a scenario:

(If you’re a woman, think the other way around, please) You’re out drinking with buddies, and you managed to talk to some hot chick. You’re brave enough to ask for her phone number, which she surprisingly gives to you. She just has a pen, but no paper, and you left your iPhone at home, afraid it might get stolen. So she writes her name and number on your hand.
After a few drinks she goes to another bar with her friends, and you’re going home, because you have some deadline tomorrow.
You come home, open up your MacBook, start Evernote and click on the “iSight note” icon. Your webcam starts and you hold your hand with the phone number in front of the camera to take a picture. Done! Now you’re off to a good night’s sleep, because Evernote has you covered.
You forget to call the girl, and after a few days, you remember what happened, and you remember her name. Open Evernote, type her name in the search, and Evernote will find the picture of your hand with the name and number of the girl you wanted to hook up with. Isn’t that awesome?

Evernote mobile

The program is even better when you’re on the go. You’re in the city, and you see a movie poster. Not only is it a nice design, but you also want to see the movie. However, it won’t come out until 3 weeks from now. So, just take a picture with the Evernote mobile app for iPhone, and sync it the same way as you would do with the desktop version. When you want to go see the movie a few weeks later, you remember the date of the premiere, search for the date in Evernote, and it will show you the picture of the poster, with the name of the movie.

iPhone app

I’ve been using the iPhone app for a while, and to be honest, it could be better. When you take a snapshot, it seems like the app can’t handle the size of the image taken.  It takes a long time to save the file, freezing the phone. When you review the image, it shows the original size, which means you always have to zoom out to be able to read anything.

The sorting of the notes doesn’t really make much sense either. I’d expect the newest note to be on top, but it’s not.
Also, the app isn’t the most stable one out there. Apart from the freezing when saving a file, it crashes randomly (on the 3.0 OS).
All this doesn’t mean that it’s not usable. Like I said, I’ve been using it for a while. You just have to keep in mind that it’s not as quick as it could be.

Twitter

You can also use Twitter to add notes to your account. Simply follow @myen after you’ve signed up for Evernote, and you’ll receive a DM with the activation-link. Once that is done, you can either send a DM to @myen with a note (for if you want the note to be private), or if you don’t mind sharing it with everyone, you can send a message to @myen. A couple of minutes later your desktop client will be synced and the note is on your desktop. This is handy when you’re on the road and don’t have an iPhone or something fancy for a phone. Send the DM to the Twitter short-number (21212 for Canada) via SMS.

Interface

Evernote has a very intuitive Apple-like UI. You can select list, mixed, and thumbnail views, just like Finder. You have the toolbar on the left where you can find categories, multiple notebooks, tags, and attributes.

Pricing

Another cool thing about Evernote is that you can use it for free. There are a few restrictions on the free version, but for me the most important one would be the 40MB upload limit per month (this resets after 30 days), which is perfect if you want to store notes every once in a while. But if you have shit for brains and need Evernote to upload an image every 2 minutes (a lot more than 40MB), you’ll have to pay for an account, which will set you back $5 USD per month.

Conclusion

Evernote is my travel companion and will remember stuff when my wife isn’t around. Remembering things is simple, the text-recognition works great and the desktop program is easy to work with.

The iPhone app has a lot of potential, but I hope that in the next releases the app will be more stable, and handle images a little better (I hate waiting).

All in all, this is well worth a download.

About The Author

Mark Poppen

Mark is a web designer, originally from The Netherlands and immigrated into Canada. He started using MS DOS, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 2000, 98SE, XP Pro and even Vista x64. You'd think he's a Windows fan, but no. Ever since he got a MacBook for Christmas from his wife, Santa, he will not look back at Windows for fun. Mark is running a small web design firm in central Saskatchewan, Canada. Likes the design part of the business, but also Italian food, potato chips and is addicted to Pepsi.. Oh, and adrenaline. Follow him on Twitter: (@deluzione)