Cloud Services Revisited – Part 3 – Every note in the cloud

In our 3 part series on using the cloud for everyday things you need, we’ve covered backups and passwords, now we’ll cover the simple act of note taking.  The service I’m talking about is a tool/service called Evernote. Evernote is both a web service and a piece of software.  In brief it is a place to take notes that will automatically back them up and make them available through a website and a local client, but it’s much more than that.  It can change the way you keep track of everything from Meeting notes and magazine articles to your bills.

I don’t remember when I first started using Evernote, but it’s been at least 3 years.  I have some notes that list their created date as sometime in 2002 though, because I’ve consolidated all of the other note taking and “someday I want to remember this” methods I’ve used and brought them all into Evernote, back dating the older ones.  Evernote is a service that follows the maxim I like to call “In the Cloud we Trust, but Local we Love”.  Similar to the Dropbox service we covered earlier.  Both of these services make all of your material available on your local machine, but instantly (or pretty darn instantly) will synch your changes to the cloud as well as to any other machine where you have their software installed.  And they support an impressive number of platforms.  Windows and Mac obviously (sorry Linux guys), and a bunch of mobile platforms.  iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, PalmPre, Windows Mobile, that pretty much covers you.  There’s also the web browser version that will cover any other device connected to the network.  The notes can be tagged as well as organized into notebooks to help you better organize them.  Instantly synced, without ever loosing access on your local device so you’ve always got access to your notes, even when your away from the internet.

“So what,” you might be saying,  “It’s just taking notes”.  But when you’re notes are available to you everywhere, and always backed up, it changes how you take them, especially when you have one of the mobile apps.  Someone gives you their phone number or email and you don’t want to keep it in your jealously guarded address book, you can quickly create a new Evernote note for them and it’s saved away.  Want to keep track of your interactions with different contacts, create a running note for each person or create a new note each time you talk to them and tag them all the same.  You can track the dates on the notes and refresh your memory on what you’ve discussed and when.  In a meeting and don’t have your laptop?  Open your smart phone and take some shorthand notes during the meeting, when you get back to your desk you can flesh them out and create a To Do list complete with check boxes.

But wait, there’s more!  Say you’re in the car, and you want to record some notes for yourself.  I’m going to advise against trying to type out your notes while driving here.  Instead open your Evernote app and hit the voice note button.  Now you can record your notes in audio and once you save they’re automatically uploaded to the Evernote site and when you synch your desktop app, it’s downloaded there.  Now you can listen to the notes, type them up if you want, and write down any new ideas you have now.  Keep all these together with the original voice note for later reference.

Text, Audio, what else.  How about pictures?  Evernote will let you paste in images, audio, or PDF files (see the Premium section below for more options).  All the files are uploaded to the Evernote service and then available on any other client.  With images, you’re in for a real treat.  Once the image is synced up to the web service, it will be scanned and indexed so that any text in it will now be searchable.  I imagine myself a handyman, and I always find magazine articles telling me how to build or fix something.  Using this technique, I can quickly search through the text of all the articles I’ve scanned to find just what I need.  So I don’t have to thumb through piles of paper magazines to find that one article on how to fix a squeaky washing machine.  The same thing can be done with owner’s manuals!

Did I mention search?  Evernote allows you to search through all of your notes, or one notebook at a time.  It will bring up the list of notes that match your search, and also highlight the word(s) you’re searching for.  You can even filter your searches by tag or notebook and can then save your searches and reuse them later.

Most of the Evernote functionality is available for free, but they do have a subscription model they call Premium.  I’m currently using the free package, which most of the time meets my needs fine.  There are some nice features though that you get when you buy the paid package which costs $5 a month, or $45 a year.  I mentioned the ability to attach some file types above, but subscribers can attach any file type.  They are also given a huge uploads limit of 1GB per month, while the free subscribers are limited to 60MB a month.  That doesn’t really become a problem until you start uploading a lot of files.  If you’re just taking notes, that’s a lot of writing.  Premium subscribers also will have their PDFs indexed for search which would be nice.  They also get expedited image and PDF scanning as well as support.  Buying the premium package also helps support Evernote and allow free loaders like me to keep using the free service.  The last benefit is allowing multiple people to edit shared notebook notes, and I’ll talk about that next.

So now that you’re putting all of this stuff into Evernote, you are going to want to share it sometime.  You have two methods for doing this.  If you’re looking to share with a limited number of people, then a Shared Notebook is your best bet.  It allows you to invite other Evernote users to share one of your notebooks.  In the free version, they can only view it, but with the premium subscription the other users can edit all of the notes in the shared notebook.  If you want more of a one time share, you can create a publicly available link to any of your notes that can be viewed by anyone regardless of whether they have an Evernote account or not.  You can see an example of that here.

I was going to stop there, but there are two more features of Evernote that I just can’t pass over.  The first is that you are given a unique email address with your Evernote account.  It allows you to send an email to automatically create a new note.  One of the uses for this would be to give it to the companies that send you electronic bills.  Your bills would then be automatically imported into your Evernote and be searched instantly.  You can even configure the email to be stored in a particular notebook.  This could really reduce clutter, and your bills would be tagged with the date they were sent, all without lifting a finger.  Finally, Evernote has browser plugins that will let you copy and paste a portion of the website into your note and keep the formatting intact.  Perfect for when you’re note sure if the site will stay around for later.

I hope that I’ve piqued your interest in Evernote.  It’s a great service and can really become  a central part of your cloud based life.  Head over to Evernote.com to find out more.  Also be sure to check out Parts 1 and 2 where I covered CrashPlan and LastPass.