Evernote

For the past few months, I’ve been messing around with Evernote, an information tracking/note-taking service. Evernote is interesting for a couple of reasons:

• The service’s “claim to fame” is some proprietary image recognition technology that allows you to search for words found inside images. So you could store pictures in Evernote and then search for text found inside those pictures, for example. You have to synchronize your notes to their server (more below), where it is then processed for searching.
• Evernote uses a hybrid web-based/local client arrangement, and makes clients available for a reasonably wide variety of platforms. I’m using the Mac OS X version, but there are also versions for Windows, Windows Mobile, and (soon) an iPhone version.
• Evernote synchronizes your notes across all platforms, so you could create a note on your Mac laptop and then search it from your Windows Mobile smartphone. Each client synchronizes with the Evernote server(s) so that your notes are available from any client. You can also log in and view your notes from a Web browser as well.

Evernote just recently opened up their beta to the general public (it’s been a private beta until now). If this sounds like something that might be useful to you, go sign up and put it to work.

Personally, I’m still struggling with the best way to use Evernote. Thus far, my usage has been very light. I’ve particularly wrestled with getting information into Evernote. If any readers are also Evernote users, I’d love to hear how you’ve been using Evernote and which tool—the Evernote Clipper, the Web Clipper, printing as PDF into Evernote—seems to work best for you.