The Evernote post

I’m sitting here wracking my brain and I can’t come up with anything to write about.  The reason?  Probably because it’s getting towards the end of the semester so school work is picking up.  I’ve also been more busy with work-related projects as of late.  All of that worried me until I remembered an awesome application that I received a beta invite for a week or two back called Evernote.

Evernote, to put it simply, is a web clipper.  You know how Apple had an update to the dashboard where you could copy any piece of a site and set it as a dashboard widget, that way you could monitor just that portion of the site (it’s probably the portion that you go to the site for) instead of having to load up the full page in a browser?  Well that’s sort of what Evernote does, except you can catalog all of the various things you find on the web into a notebook for review later.  For example, let’s say I’m looking for a new piece of geek swag to add to my repertoire.  I can go to think geek, drag my cursor over the bit of page I want to save (this includes images, links, text, the whole 9), use my Firefox Evernote extension and the note is instantly added to my Evernote notebook.  I can set up folders for various projects or studies, and review my notebook from a thousand different platforms.  Okay, not really a thousand, but with the individual PC and Mac clients Evernote has, not to mention the web interface, chances are you’ll never have a hard time accessing your notes.

Once you have a notebook full of web clippings you can search through it quite rapidly using the search feature.  The best part about the search?  Not only does it search the text you pull off of a site, but it can also search an image for text contained within.  For example, let’s say I grab a blog post that has a picture in it of a front window sign from a club.  The sign says "Ladies free all night, gents $4.99 with flyer."  If I remembered that text from the image but I can’t remember exactly where the image was located in my notebook, I could simply search for ladies (click to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see the part of the sign that says "ladies" is now highlighted yellow.  Alternatively, I could search for gents (click to enlarge):
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now the part of the sign that says "gents" is highlighted yellow.  Pretty awesome, right?  Imagine using Evernote as an actual note-taking application, you could scan in your notes from paper and use Evernote to search through them quickly.  Sure, there are already programs out there that do similar things, Microsoft’s OneNote for instance, but that’s mostly for straight hand-writing recognition.  The fact that you can pull basically any image off of the internet that has text in it into Evernote and it automatically recognizes the text is pretty cool.

So that’s Evernote.  Unfortunately they’re still in a closed beta which means I have no invites to give out (if I get any I’ll make another post asking if anyone wants one) but you can pre-register to get into the beta if you want to try it out.  Another nice thing about the application is that it’s free (as of now), but I wouldn’t be surprised if they charged for it down the road.  Evernote is definitely a handy tool to have on your machine.  If you’d like to learn a little more they have some good video tutorials on the site too, this one will give you a run-down of all of the features.  Again, despite the tutorial video showing Evernote on a Mac it’s also available for Windows XP and Vista.  They have a cellphone app too, and the online application I mentioned before.  Now, back to work!  =P

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Death Cab for Cutie – Soul Meets Body
Project Gotham Racing 4, Puzzle Quest