Review: Evernote 5.0 for Mac improves an already-indispensable service
That interesting Web article. The emailed order for your new Mac. The snapped picture of the label as a reminder of that terrific pinot noir you just drank. A quick audio note you make with your phone. Those hundreds of downloaded PDFs of bank, brokerage, and utility company statements. You’ve got the information—heck, you’re practically drowning in it. Now you need somewhere to put it. You need an Everything Box. That’s a program that can store and sort those clippings and files, index them for easy search and retrieval, and allow you to add your preferred organizational structure as well, whether it be to group similar kinds of information into collections, or add metadata such as tags or categories.
Evernote is an Everything Box, as are other familiar Mac programs, such as Devon Technologies’ DevonThink (), Bare Bones’ Yojimbo (), and Chronos’s SOHO Notes, to name just a few. Where Evernote differs is that it’s free (with a paid Premium tier providing extra features), available for Mac and Windows and as a Web app, and it has native iOS and Android apps. Evernote automatically uploads everything you put into it to the company’s servers, making it available for syncing to all your devices. Evernote 5 is a major refresh of the program’s look and operations, and makes the service easier to use and more appealing than ever.
See Your Notes Your Way: Evernote 5’s clean new interface includes notes presented in this new Card view, which gives you a nice preview of each note, with the main content in the large pane on the right. This shot also shows, at left, the new Shortcuts and Recent Notes, which give you quick access to your pinned and latest notes, respectively (click to enlarge image).
How Evernote works
The basic unit of information in Evernote is the note. You can collect similar notes in a notebook, creating as many notebooks as you need, or throw everything in one main notebook. You can add tags to notes to help categorize them further, and when you search for a tag, it finds notes with that tag in all notebooks. If your new item is a picture with words in it, Evernote will run optical character recognition on its servers to make the picture’s text searchable (even if the text is handwriting); the text then gets synced down to your Evernote clients with the rest of the note.
Evernote gives you many ways of capturing new notes. You can type text notes directly in an Evernote client, or drag text, images, sounds, or videos into the program. You can also use the Evernote Web Clipper, an extension for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, to snag all or part of Web pages. You can even email notes to Evernote. On the desktop, a menu bar extra allows you to create a new note, an audio note, or a screenshot, paste whatever’s on the Clipboard, and search the program.
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http://www.macworld.com/article/2019709/review-evernote-5-0-for-mac-improves-an-already-indispensable-service.html
