1/11/12
8:15 am

MacMost Now 656: Using Evernote

Evernote is a third-party program that allows you to create notes on your Mac or iOS device. These notes will sync across your devices. You can create audio and photo notes as well. There are many ways to use Evernote and anyone with multiple computers or devices should check it out.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On todays episode let's take a look at Evernote.
So Evernote is one of those programs, that after you use it for a while you begin to wonder why it's not built in to Mac OS X.
And I get questions all the time about the "Notes" feature	in iOS and also in Mail and iCal in the Mac, and it's a little clunky	and a lot of times I end up telling people "Well, you should probably just look into using Evernote." So let's go and take a look at Evernote.
So you download Evernote from evernote.com.
It is free to use for it's basic features and if you just are a casual note user the free version is fine, but you can upgrade later on if you find you're more of a Pro user.
Now you get a window like this which basically stores notes in notebooks and then you see the note and then you can type whatever you want.
For instance here's some notes that I made for making today's episode.
And you get a little Ad there at the bottom because it's the free version and it's got to pay for itself.
So that's the basics to create a new note you could just click on "New Note" and give it a title, and just type.
So, what's the big deal? Well, the main big deal is about syncing.
See there's also a free Evernote app for iOS. So say, if you have an iPhone or and iPad you get that app and then you have Evernote running on your Mac, and when you create that note it'll sync instantly across the internet with all your different devices. Even if you have another computer, another Mac that has Evernote.
You don't have to manually sync. You don't have to connect anything. It just happens over the air.
So you can create that note and then run out the door, look at your iPhone and you'll see the information that you typed in Evernote on your iPhone.
So at the top here you'll see that can take a note with your iSight camera and with your microphone. You can do this on your Mac but it's even more useful to do it on, say, your iPhone.
You can take a picture of something, say a product that you see in a store, and you go and look it up online later.
You can just take a picture of something in Evernote, just to have it as reference.
As a matter of fact, a lot of people do this thing where they maybe scribble some notes on a napkin in a restaurant or on a piece of paper, and then take a picture of it in Evernote and save it to their iPhone in Evernote but then it's also available on their Mac.
Same thing with any video you may want to record, and also with audio notes, so you can just record something, say, while you're driving instead of having to pull over and type.
One of the cool things you can do on your Mac in Evernote is you can encrypt a piece of text.
Not the entire note, not your entire notebook full of notes, but just a piece of text.
So, for instance, in this note here I can do something like this, and decide "Oh, I want to encrypt that." I can select it, Control+Click on it, and see that I can "Encrypt the selected Text" give it a password and "OK" and you can see now that that piece of text, just that piece of text, is encrypted and in order to see it I have to type in my password. Very handy.
Another cool thing you can do is you can take screenshots and have them go in directly into Evernote so you go to Evernote > Preferences and there you go to Shortcuts, and here you can set a shortcut for clipping a rectangle on the screen. So in this case it's set to Control+Command+C.
So let's try that, let's go back here just on the screen and let's do Control+Command+C, you can see I can take a screenshot like that and then it automatically will create a note.
So you can see it's there and there's the screenshot, and you can see it's posted right there.
I didn't even have to running Evernote at the front for that to happen and of course now that syncs to my other devices so I have that image there as well.
You also may have noticed that you can actually "Paste to Evernote" as well, so that you can, say, copy some text from any application you are running and you use in this case the default Control+Command+V and on Mac it creates a new note in Evernote with that text in it.
You can do the same kind of thing in a web browser. You can get a Safari extension for Evernote that will allow you to clip things in the web browser and save them to Evernote as well.
And notes don't have to be just text or media, you can also attach files.
So you can actually, say, attach another image or a photo to a particular note and then that'll sync across all your devices.
So there's a lot of different things you can do with Evernote as a matter of fact, it's a very versatile program.
I find that people that use Evernote sometimes use it for wildly different things. Some people use it for, storing files, some people use it just for little notes, some people use it completely for audio or even photos.
A lot of different things you can do with it and since the basic is free it doesn't hurt to download it, set up an account and give it a try.
Hope you found this useful, 'til next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 11 Responses to “MacMost Now 656: Using Evernote”

Eric

13 years ago

With iCloud, Notes on iOS sync with Notes on the Mac (Notes via Mail.app). Notes on iOS got much better with iOS 5. Write a Note on my iPad and it shows up on my iPhone, iPod touch, and my Mac.

Daniel Gartin

13 years ago

Cool,also i used to have an iPod touch 2nd gen,which could not sync notes over the air,because i use Gmail so i just copied all of my notes from the Notes app into the Evernote app,when i got my iPad 2, i was able to restore all of my notes,great program

Rich O

13 years ago

I have been using Evernote for some time now and I feel that it is just one of those things that once you start using, you just don't know how you got along with out it before. I use the free account for now, so I don't go crazy with pics and audio, and I watch my monthly quota so I don't go over. The cool thing is that every 30 days it renews, so if you are just a note taker with the occasional pic every now and then, you will be surprised at how far 60MB will take you.

The encrypted text was a cool feature to showcase. But I was surprised that you didn't mention one of the more powerful features of the Evernote server: Type recognition. You almost touched on it when you mentioned that some users use it to take pics of notes scrawled on a napkin, but you didn't mention that Evernote searches your photos, if it finds any type on it, that type is now searchable. That feature alone (along with cloud sync) blew me away when I tried it out. Also, Skitch was acquired by Evernote and has sync-to-Evernote functionality incorporated into the Skitch app.

Everything can be organized into notebooks, nested--or stacked--notebooks, and tags. Along with type recognition, Evernote is one very useful app. They should append their tagline to: "Remember everything and find it faster!" Or, something like that.

David

13 years ago

Hi Gary, you forgot to mention the killer feature of Evernote which is the ability to search for text in images.

Shane Phillips

13 years ago

I love evernote too. I am closing in on 2000 notes. Listen to their blogcast too it is great. One of the things I use it for is to take a pic of my work schedule with my iPhone 4s and that way I always have my schedule. If there are any changes during the week to my schedule I write,a little note

Todd

13 years ago

Yes Evernote is fantastic very robust. I use it for recipes and any notes that I want images. But I will also give a shout out to the note app that comes with IOs and Macs. If you are a minimalist and want to keep very little software or don't need a lot of features it is great for keeping a basic journal or other scraps of info it is a great "stop gap" for items you might copy elsewhere. I will say again though that Evernote does that and more. Software makes our lives richer and easier.

Jotaceo13

13 years ago

Why to use Evernote when I have on my phone Reminder that sync with iCal?

Gary Rosenzweig

13 years ago

Watch the video. Evernote is very different than Reminders. Reminders are like little alarms. Evernote stores all sorts of different data. They do different things. I suppose you could use Evernote to just make a list of Reminders, but it does so much more.

Forkboy1965

13 years ago

Of late I have been taking fuller use of Evernote as I found Notes in iOS to get squirrelly with iOS 5. Notes just disappeared from my phone and moved to a new location in my email.

Still haven't been able to get them back into Notes. From now on I'm sticking with Evernote

mctavish

13 years ago

I have had the free version of Evernote on my devices for sometime, but I haven't used it much, so I may be missing something, but there does seem to be some problems.

It seems to sync very irregularly. For instance, I have put a note on my iPhone, and it isn't there when I check Evernote on my computer.

Also, on my iPad2 (which doesn't have 3G), if I try to open I note at I time when I don't have Internet access, I get a message that I have to have a pay subscription to have a note stored on the device.

iOS 5's Notes has improved a lot recently. Though it has nowhere near the features of Evernote, it reliably meets most of my modest needs.

mctavish

13 years ago

A repeat post. Sorry, I should have proofread more carefully.

I have had the free version of Evernote on my devices for sometime, but I haven’t used it much, so I may be missing something, but there does seem to be some problems.
It seems to sync very irregularly. For instance, I have put a note on my iPhone, and it isn’t there when I check Evernote on my computer.
Also, on my iPad2 (which doesn’t have 3G), if I try to open a note at a time when I don’t have Internet access, I get a message that I have to have a pay subscription to have a note stored on the device.
iOS 5′s Notes has improved a lot recently. Though it has nowhere near the features of Evernote, it reliably meets most of my modest needs.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 656: Using Evernote

Comments: 11 Responses to “MacMost Now 656: Using Evernote”

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