Cult of Evernote

[snousle]

I 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.

Comments

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

Interesting app.

I could view it and the attached photos.
There was one glitch - the bottom of the page was cut off, on both the left and right panels. Both had active sliders that worked but the sliders and the page content were cut off mid entry.
I could view the left panel until the entry titled "install border, tile, backboard ...". That cut off just after the title, as well as the cutting off most of the thumbnail. It was still clickable but again, when the photo downloaded in the right panel, the bottom was cut off. That is true for all the photos, no matter which entry I clicked on.

[twobraids.livejournal.com]

I've recently been on a kick of scanning old "filing cabinet" records. I now have PDFs of every scap of paper that was produced in the nursery operation since 1999. I've started doing it for all my personal records, too. I've scanned up to 2005 so far. Taking the idea even further, I've scanned nearly every book on my bookshelf, every product owners manual, and now I'm working through the sheet music collection. the goal to eliminate the filing cabinet ball and chain that I've accumulated over my life time.

Most of these copious PDF files are already OCR'd and I've been looking for an indexing and tagging system. I've not been successful. I looked at Evernote a few years ago, but balked at their TOC. I'll reconsider them. I'd really like to find a local, rather than "cloud" system, though.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

The paid Evernote version for Windows has the capability to produce completely local notebooks that don't get synced with the server. You do have to log in to create them but your data doesn't get sent to the cloud. But I don't know if you can get OCR on the images that way since the OCR is done on the server. If your OCR results are already included in the PDF the local notebook approach might work just fine.

Synced notebooks can also be selected for off-line use on mobile devices. I just tried this out and it works fine.

For me, cloud storage is a big benefit since I'm really bad about keeping current backups.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Hm, aggravating. The software does have some annoying glitches and omissions. You'd think after all the work they've done they'd get the scrolling right...