Loudmouthman

Have you ever picked up a gadget or tool and it stayed in a drawer for months on end then one day you take it out to have another play with and suddenly you realise precisely why it was going to be so important to you ?

Evernote is that tool. Despite opening my account several months back I never actually got into using it with any form of anger. Until I saw this interview by Robert Scoble with Evernote CEO Phil Libin.

A Really Useful way to take notes

[ note for some reason this wordpress install is stripping the  embeds when saved! ]

That one video changed my view on using Evernote and I sat back and realised how Evernote was going to fix my organisational habits.  Lets talk about a couple of  things which get in the way of organising and grabbing data and how Evernote has resolved this for me.

Convenience

Evernote not only exists as a Web application but has a number of separate client applications that can be installed for windows, mac, iPhone and windows mobile.

From my desktop I can clip and copy text and webpages , bookmarks, PDFs, Images, Scanned images.

Using the iPhone I have snapped images with the camera and had them uploaded into my Evernote account.

Using Spinvox memo I had dictated notes to myself and had them emailed my Evernote account.

Evernote has built a number of roads to ensure that you can ship your data into your Evernote account when you think about it. In return I can locate all the information stored in my Evernote account through a web page or the Evernote client application on the Iphone.

Taxonomy

Lets face it we make promises to ourselves that we are going to have a consistent way to archive and index all our information. We make complex commitments to indexing and title arrangements and usually about 9 months later we have forgotten all our good intentions and its just a pile in the folder again.

Evernote however does not require you to immediately tag, title and index your data. Its will do much of the work for you by indexing every recognisable word it finds. Later , if you wish , you can bulk tag your notes and your information and you can create notebooks into which you can drag your notes to create a semblance of order.

Searching for information is Google like in its simplicity and those searches can be saved for later.

Evernote has done for me what I envisioned computers doing, its doing the admin and the indexing work and I am just passing it the information. If you have an Evernote account and you have not  started to feed it then I can completely understand why you might be wondering what is it for, so here is  how I am using it .

• Software licenses : I mm scanning in the cards, as well as copying the emails into Evernote. As a second location for storing these collection of numbers its — genius — and of course I am now going through my email archives to put the rest elsewhere. Its already come to my rescue in locating the Joiku hotspot licenses.
• Business Cards: I hold the card up to the camera and Evernote grabs a shot of the card.  Likewise I can snap a picture of the card to be uploaded to Evernote. As a more work intensive process I lay out all the cards on a flatbed scanner and scan at 200DPI Greyscale as tiff. Then I slice the Image file up and orient the cards and save them with meaningful names. Then drop them into Evernote.
• Magazine/Newspaper article comments are photographed and dropped into Evernote.
• Twitter tweets  and content from some websites are snipped into Evernote.
• Spinvox memos from my mobile phone notes are dictated through Spinvox and they email me the results in this case they email them into the Evernote Email inbox.
• Bookmarks and Webpages snipped direct to Evernote.

There are  a couple of things I would like to see from Evernote though.

API I would love to see an API into my own data allowing me to grab the indexes, the data the information but to also build my own applications around the evernote data.

SHARING It would be awesome to be able to share a notebook with another Evernote user allowing a more collaborative collation and collection of notes. Currently sharing is limited to publically publishing your notes via a URL.

So thats my love for Evernote, how about you ?

Thanks for reading.

I finally bit the bullet , laid out the cash and committed the finances. I bought an Apple Mac.

Its been less than a week since it arrived and I felt it was time to blog a little about  the experiences.  Its not like I am new to the apple mac range, since  I tend to recommend my clients purchase a Mac if they are serious about presentation or giving the impression of design and quality.

There is something about owning a Apple Mac which informs others that you have a commitment to something. Its all about that Brand thing again.

Lets be honest here, there is not much I can do on a Mac that I cannot achieve on a PC running Windows and Ubuntu so why is it really that much different ?  Allow me to use a hackneyed example.

You can buy a Jaguar XJS or you can but a Ford Mondeo. In both carsd  you can achieve the same results in  terms of actions. You can get in , head to a destination, park up and arrive, Job done. So whats the point ? The point is you are going to enjoy the journey in the Jaguar. There is going to be  a feeling of design and care which has gone into the production of the jaguar that makes you, the owner ,feel like its there for you.  Your going to enjoy the journey and your going to look forward to using it time and time again.

Of course like the Jaguar the Mac comes with a whole new way of thinking and doing. There are  just so many different ways to get things done that I am still learning, or rather unlearning. I switched on the mac and it found and joined my network, my printers and my network drives. I attached my phone and grabbed the images into iPhoto and then edited movies in iMovie and uploaded them to my network attached storage and things just worked. Im not worrying about antivirus this or spyware that or printer driver CD the next thing. Im not looking at battery life in terms of minutes but in terms of hours ( 4 so far ) and Im not facing the occasional spinning , hanging , waiting for the next window to open because I have  opened more than 4 applications at once.

Also its based around a Unix type operating system so  I have my needs met for the remote management and shell access that I get on Ubuntu. The webcam and flash player work as well, no problems not something to be said for an experience in the other operating systems.

F5 does not refresh . DOH on 12seconds.tv

I am sold now, I am not going back I dont have time in my life to buy more Windows boxes or apt-get do-it-alloveragain more Ubuntu installs. Im just having too much fun getting things done.