Hey guys,
I work at EverNote Corp, and have been fascinated by all the great comments on this thread. It's wonderful to be able to read about the things that serious users like and dislike about note-taking programs, including specifics about individual programs that you've looked at personally.
That said, I was a little disappointed to see that EverNote didn't get more coverage and enthusiasm. I'm guessing it's because EverNote was described as having "a unique, quirky navigation style" and -- more to the point -- it only allows you to see your notes in chronological order.
While it's true (today, at least) that notes are ordered chronologically, I thought I should point out the main strengths of EverNote with the invitation that you might want to give it another look.
CAPTURE: EverNote makes it really easy to capture content from anywhere. In the top Tool Bar of web browsers like IE and Firefox, you get a Web Clipper button that with one click sends the current webpage or selected content to a new EverNote note behind the scenes. (In just a few weeks we are adding a Clipper button for Outlook as well.) What's more, you can turn on options to call up EverNote from anywhere with Ctrl+Alt+N, or to send the currently pasted content in the Clipboard to EverNote from anywhere with Ctrl+Alt+V. You can also easily drag-n-drop content or file names directly from the File Explorer to EverNote.
ORGANIZE: In addition to organizing your notes chronologically in one long scrollable tape (so you don't have to open notes one-at-a-time to see what you want), EverNote offers Auto Categories that can automatically categorize notes for you in various ways: by Date (created before or after a specified date), by Content Type (Web clip, Outlook clip, Word clip, etc.), by Content Format (plain text, HTML text, template, digital ink, rich text), by Included Elements (graphic images, photos, encryption, file links, voice notes, video, To Do state, previous versions), by Category State (uncategorized, deleted, history notes, To Do Open, To Do Closed), or -- most importantly -- by whether or not a note contains specific keywords.
Of course, you can also create as many Manual Categories as you like, and assign as many of them (like tags) to a single note as you like, just by dragging the category name(s) to the note. Furthermore, Categories act as both tags and tree structure, since you can have as many levels of subcategories as you like. You can also have duplicate category names in several locations as well as shortcut categories that contain the same notes as the original, and intersection of categories to find all notes that have been assigned one category AND another.
FIND: EverNote makes it really easy to find your notes later, in any combination of the 5 following ways:
* By Auto Category
* By Manual Category
* By Look (scrolling the tape with our special Accelerator Scrollbar)
* By Date (a single click anywhere in the Time Band)
* ...and most importantly, by Keyword SmartSearch, which filters your tape to display found notes literally as fast as you can type.
In other words, EverNote is really a quite simple but powerful program that – once you appreciate the basic idea behind it – is really an easier and more efficient product for keeping your notes.
I know this probably sounds like marketing-speak, but it's really not my intention. I just hope that you'll give EverNote another (or first!) look and post to the forum what you think. Also, you might want to see what Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal says about EverNote at
http://ptech.wsj.com.../ptech-20050811.html.