Cult of Evernote
Apr. 27th, 2012 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleI am really turned on to Evernote. John is very excited too. I'm not sure why it took us so long to discover this.
I lead a complicated life and there is a lot of data to manage. Doing it with Outlook is like trying to perform your own root canal. Gah. Evernote is like frolicking in a kelp bed. Everything is just super easy and fun.
John is finding it immediately indispensable for organizing PDFs. In particular he is getting a lot of image-based PDFs from old science journals and having them suddenly be searchable is a big deal. He's become, in retirement, a fourth paradigm researcher and this is right up his alley.
I think the reason it hasn't caught on more is that it offers very little guidance for the new user. The tag-based approach for managing data is very powerful but demands a certain amount of independent thought. It's not for people who want "instructions" or are shy about experimenting.
Anyway, here's something I produced immediately - a jobs available list for work around our house we want to hire people for. Now, I can take my cell phone, bring up that notebook, tap on a note to edit it, tap the "snapshot" button, take the picture, and have the picture appended to the note. The updated note syncs with the web page and my desktop Evernote app automatically.
[If you cannot view the list for some reason, I would be interested to know.]
There are only a few software applications per decade that I really gush over, and this is one of them. Just download it and start throwing things at it. And play with it. The wonderful thing about this app is that it requires hardly any commitment, the "system" is just "Throw Shit In And Worry About It Later."
The key thing the desktop app does (and the mobile version does not) is to let you search on content, then use the search results to modify the tags on dozens or hundreds of items at once. When you do that in succession - search, tag, search on something else conditioned on that tag - you can classify data on a mass scale. When I "got it" it was kind of a rush.
It also has a set of third-party apps of variable utility that work with your data in other ways. Haven't checked those out much yet. The local storage on the Windows client is a SqlLite database, so in principle you can query it with any of a wide variety of third-party tools.
Anyway, just go, go, go and get this software. The free version is perfectly useful all by itself. Anyone who does any kind of research, runs a business, or obsessively classifies porn needs to give it a look.
I lead a complicated life and there is a lot of data to manage. Doing it with Outlook is like trying to perform your own root canal. Gah. Evernote is like frolicking in a kelp bed. Everything is just super easy and fun.
John is finding it immediately indispensable for organizing PDFs. In particular he is getting a lot of image-based PDFs from old science journals and having them suddenly be searchable is a big deal. He's become, in retirement, a fourth paradigm researcher and this is right up his alley.
I think the reason it hasn't caught on more is that it offers very little guidance for the new user. The tag-based approach for managing data is very powerful but demands a certain amount of independent thought. It's not for people who want "instructions" or are shy about experimenting.
Anyway, here's something I produced immediately - a jobs available list for work around our house we want to hire people for. Now, I can take my cell phone, bring up that notebook, tap on a note to edit it, tap the "snapshot" button, take the picture, and have the picture appended to the note. The updated note syncs with the web page and my desktop Evernote app automatically.
[If you cannot view the list for some reason, I would be interested to know.]
There are only a few software applications per decade that I really gush over, and this is one of them. Just download it and start throwing things at it. And play with it. The wonderful thing about this app is that it requires hardly any commitment, the "system" is just "Throw Shit In And Worry About It Later."
The key thing the desktop app does (and the mobile version does not) is to let you search on content, then use the search results to modify the tags on dozens or hundreds of items at once. When you do that in succession - search, tag, search on something else conditioned on that tag - you can classify data on a mass scale. When I "got it" it was kind of a rush.
It also has a set of third-party apps of variable utility that work with your data in other ways. Haven't checked those out much yet. The local storage on the Windows client is a SqlLite database, so in principle you can query it with any of a wide variety of third-party tools.
Anyway, just go, go, go and get this software. The free version is perfectly useful all by itself. Anyone who does any kind of research, runs a business, or obsessively classifies porn needs to give it a look.
