Everyone's had it happen at least once. You leave the domicile in a rush and reach your destination with only minutes to spare, whip out your computer or flash drive, and promptly discover you don't have the document you need. No? Then maybe you've lost that one bookmark you really wanted to revisit in the wash of hundreds of favorites, misplaced a receipt for an online purchase, or accidentally chucked an important piece of paperwork or business card.
All of these problems have a single, simple, elegant solution: Evernote.
I discovered Evernote months ago while it was in beta, tried it briefly, and forgot about it. For some reason, I wasn't impressed. Tweaked by friends who are avid users of the current release, I jumped back into the service two months ago, and have since become completely addicted. Evernote is, as its name implies, a single repository for your documents. Here's how it works.
You start by opening a free account at Evernote.com. This account allows you to capture and sync a selected variety of file types, up to a total of 40MB per month (that's cumulative...you can upload another 40MB each month). Once these files are uploaded, you can tag them, divide them into categories (called notebooks), and attached a variety of metadata to them. The uploaded notes/documents/images/files are completely searchable -- Evernote even pulls text out of uploaded images and makes it searchable.
That's pretty useful all by itself -- a single, Web-based point of access for all your information. But it gets better. If you use multiple computers (even multiple platforms) and/or mobile devices like a Smartphone, there are Evernote versions available, and they're all smart enough to synchronize to your central data store. So you see the same notes on your work PC, your home Mac and your iPhone or Q.
Beyond that, there are Web clippers and browser extensions for Safari and Firefox that allow you to save URLs or entire Web pages directly to your Evernote store. You can also create notes within any Evernote tool (desktop, mobile or Web), or upload captured images or video directly to your store. If you use Windows and a SanDisk U3-enabled flash memory drive, you can even carry your copy of Evernote with you and run it directly from the flash drive.
As good as the free version of Evernote is, there are limitations. Forty megabytes a month can quickly become a constriction, and the free version only supports synchronization of image, audio, ink and PDF files. Support is limited, and you have to tolerate a certain small amount of advertising. The good news is that the paid version is cheap ($5/month or $45/year), and it bumps your storage to 500MB/month, with full synchronization of all file types, along with a few other niceties (removal of the ads included, of course).
If you're the sharing sort, any of your notebooks can be published to the Web with a checkbox, making them available to anyone who knows the address. My brother and I each publish our recipe notebooks, and subscribe to each other's RSS feeds, so we get immediate notification each time one of us finds some neat new kitchen trick. Sharing data in this way multiplies the power of Evernote considerably.
It's possible that all this sounds like a sales pitch. Consider it a testimonial from a convert, if you will. I have literally abandoned Safari bookmarking in favor of "evernoting" for Web pages I want to save. I store software purchase receipts there. For important work paperwork, I use our Konica bizhub's scan-to-email facility to PDF my documents and then drop them right into Evernote. I no longer keep business cards from vendors or company contacts. Instead, I snap an image on the iPhone and upload it to Evernote. The service's text extraction makes them searchable in no time flat.
I could continue about how elegant and well though out Evernote is, but a simpler testament to the service's value might be this. I am notoriously cheap. I prefer free any time its an option. With Evernote, however, I've found so much value in the service that I paid up, a year in advance.
It's that good.
