Evernote, in both its free and premium formats, has been a favourite productivity application among many Mac users since its debut. At its core, the application is an robust organizational dynamo, enabling users to keep their lists, notes, web clippings and so much more organized, synced and accessible across a wide variety of operating systems and hardware. With the release of Evernote's most recent Mac beta, it appears as though the software's development team will be maintaining their reputation for organizational excellence, while at the same time, implementing a pair of interesting new features to expand the application's already expansive functionality.

With the release of Evernote's latest Mac beta, users have been given access to two intriguing new features: Notebook Sharing and Notebook Stacks. After taking the morning to play with both new features, we have to admit that we're pretty excited with what we've seen. Notebook Sharing, as the name would suggest, allows an Evernote user to easily share the contents of a given Evernote notebook with the public, a group of users or an individual. The shared notebook is accessible via any internet browser, and can be password protected should the notebook's owner decide to do so. The second new feature unveiled in the beta--Notebook Stacks--is the application's latest method for visually organizing the contents of your Evernote account. The Notebook Stacks feature allows Evernote users to create their own categories to contain any number of individual notebooks under. For users who utilize Evernote to note and keep track of everything in their digital life, Notebook Stacks will no doubt be a Godsend. 

While the features seen in the beta are a great start, we think that with a few tweaks the final product could be even better. It's great that sharing our notebooks has been made so easy, but what about making it possible for users to interacted with the shared content. By adding the ability to edit notebooks from anywhere through a wide range of devices and interfaces, Evernote could give cloud-based suites like Google Docs a real run for their money. It'd also be great to be able to arrange a Notebook stack to open inside of a second Notebook Stack. What do you say Evernote, hmmm?

For the time being, the Evernote beta is available for use only with OS X, and can be enabled by turning to the software's Preferences pane's Software Update section and selecting "update to beta versions when available". A word of warning for those eager to try the new beta on for size: In the short amount of time that we've been using it, we've experienced a lot of crashes. If your Evernote library is precious to you, you might want to consider waiting the update's final release.

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