What You Need:
-- Free account at www.evernote.com
-- Evernote application for the Mac (free, www.evernote.com)
-- Optional: Evernote application for the iPhone or iPod touch
-- Optional: Twitter account (see Step 9)
What do you do when you come across some info you want to remember? If it’s a webpage maybe you bookmark it; if it’s an email or a file, you might stick it in a folder called “Important!” Evernote is a super-useful service that comprises a Web-based application, a free Mac desktop app, and even an iPhone app, all kept effortlessly synced. And it’s ready to store all your digital info--receipts, serial numbers, snippets of code, articles, photos, PDFs, audio files, recipes, you name it--with handy tagging, indexing, and searching features so you can actually find it all later. We’ll walk you through setting up Evernote, then encourage you to tinker around and discover how it fits into your personal workflow.
Head to www.evernote.com and click the Register link at the top-right of the page. Then click the Downloads link at the very bottom of the page (or go to www.evernote.com/about/downloads) and grab the free Mac app, which requires Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard. Install that puppy in the usual fashion
This is all the personal info they ask for. Refreshing.
The app will put a little elephant-head icon in your menubar. Click it to check out your options: New Note launches a window where you can type a new text note or drag in an attachment from the Finder. If you have a free account, you’re limited to attaching JPG, PNG, or GIF images; MP3 or WAV audio files; or PDFs. But Premium account users ($5/month or $45/year) can attach any file type.
Those hotkey combos work globally, and you can change them in Evernote > Preferences > Shortcuts.
The menubar icon also lets you paste the clipboard contents into Evernote, send a screenshot to Evernote, and launch the main Evernote window with the cursor in the Search box. Better still, all these commands can be executed with global hotkeys.
Most of the info we want to save comes from that ever-gushing font of knowledge and nonsense known as the Internet. Evernote’s got that covered: Firefox has a dedicated Evernote extension, which adds a toolbar button with a contextual menu for clipping the whole webpage, or just a selection, to Evernote. The Evernote app can install a similar Safari plug-in (click it to send the current webpage to Evernote, or Shift-click it to save the page to Evernote as a PDF, which does a better job of preserving the formatting).
But if you want to avoid bloating your browser with extensions or plug-ins, there’s also a “bookmarklet” you can drag into your bookmarks toolbar for one-click clipping. Find it at www.evernote.com/about/downloads.
Mouse over the Evernote button in Safari for a reminder of what it does.
If the Evernote app is running, you can also drag supported file types right onto its Dock icon. If you’re using someone else’s computer when inspiration strikes, just log in at www.evernote.com to view your notebooks and add new notes through the Web interface.
And the app also has a button labeled iSight Note that lets you snap a shot with your Mac’s iSight—and it even flips the image horizontally before saving it to a notebook, so any text that’s visible in the image doesn’t appear backward.
Normally when you hold something with writing up to your iSight, the text is backward.
“Who cares if the text is forward or backward?” you may ask after reading step 4. Well, you do. The genius of Evernote is that it finds text in your notes—even text that shows up in a photo, scanned document, screenshot, or PDF, and even if the text is handwritten. When you click the Sync button in the Evernote app, the notes on your Mac are synced with Evernote’s servers, where the text recognition is performed. Once that info is synced back to your Mac (which happens automatically, or you can click Sync again after a couple of minutes), you’ll be able to search for words contained inside any of your notes.
Our search for "Mac" found the image we took in step 4. Smart!
Evernote lets you create multiple notebooks, but we prefer to dump everything into one notebook and then use tags to keep it all organized. You can tag notes as you write them, and as you type a tag, the app will suggest tags you’re already using that contain those letters. For tagging after the fact, just select one or more notes from the list and drag them onto the desired tag, listed in the sidebar—it’s the quickest way to tag multiple notes at once. And of course, each note can have as many tags as you need.
Drop multiple notes onto one of your tages to apply that tage to all of them.
...or iPod touch, naturally. The free Evernote app is a lifesaver for capturing inspiration on the go, letting you create new notes by typing, taking a snapshot with the camera (iPhone only, of course), using an image that’s already on your device, or even recording a quick voice note. You can read all your notes, mark some as favorites (which saves a copy to your device, so you can read them offline), and search your notes too.
Notes you make on the phone will sync back to Evernote on the Web and on your Mac.
Bonus: Tap the magnifying glass icon to the right of the Search box for the Advanced Search page, where you can search for notes based on where you made them (within 1, 5, or 25 miles of your current location)—great for finding the note you made about where you left your car, once you get back to the parking garage.
The Evernote app can export your notes as ENEX files, which lets you back them up locally, but only the Evernote app can read the ENEX files. The app can also print your notes (including the ol’ print-to-PDF trick) or email them via Apple Mail. Evernote’s Web application also lets you print and email, and even publish your notebook online—you’ll get a URL you can share with friends.
Share your notebooks to let anyone (who knows the URL) read them.
If you have a Twitter client open all day anyway, it can double as a fast way to send short notes (140 characters or less, duh!) to Evernote. First, you have to follow myEN (twitter.com/myEN). You’ll get a direct message with a URL for linking your Twitter and Evernote accounts—make sure to sign in to Evernote before you click the link. Then just add @myEN anywhere in your tweet to have a copy sent to Evernote. You can also direct-message myEN (start the tweet with D myEN) if you want your note to stay private.
To get started, go to twitter.com/myEN and click Follow.
Evernote’s Premium account ($5/month or $45/year) boosts your upload limit to 500MB/month (a free account is 40MB/month), syncs your files between multiple computers running Evernote--even across platforms--and supports more file types and SSL encryption. (The small ads in the bottom-left corner of the Evernote app and webpage disappear too.) We don’t want to discourage anyone from upgrading to the paid service (we’re sort of Evernote fanboys, OK?), but we have to admit that in our months of using the service, we’ve yet to have an “Oooh, I wish I was Premium!” moment. Your mileage may vary, of course.
