[geeks] anyone using Evernote?

[Chad McAuley]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Michael-John Turner <mj at mjturner.net>
wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 10:46:54AM -0500, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
>> One of these days I will get organized ... anyone using Evernote and
>> willing to share their experience with it?
>
> I've been using a free account for the past 3-4 weeks and find it pretty
> useful.
>
> Pros:
> - Native clients for most major platforms, with the notable exception of
>  Linux (for which there's a web client).
> - OCR
> - Ability to edit notes/upload photos from mobile phone (iPhone, Android,
>  Blackberry) - find that very useful.
>
> Cons:
> - Data lock-in (although there is the ability to export to XML, I'm still
>  not that comfortable)
> - No native Linux client, no ability to edit notes from the command-line
>
> Those are just my initial thoughts - I'm still working out if it's the best
> solution for me (using something like, eg, Dropbox or a WebDAV-enabled
> subversion repository may be better, I'm not sure).


I've been playing with a free account for a couple months, and here's
a few other things I've noticed:

1) Inconsistencies in shortcut key/editing/UI behavior between the
Windows and OS X native clients. I.e., in one you can hit a certain
key combination to create an unordered list, in the other it's either
some completely different key combination or no shortcut key exists
and you've gotta use the context menu. Or in one you can use
tab/shift+tab to change indentation levels, but in the other those
cycle through UI elements and you've gotta use the context menu to
change your indentation level. I haven't needed to use my account for
anything for a while, and last time I did I was using the 3.5 beta
client in Win, so maybe this has been fixed.

2) If you're used to using OneNote or any other notetaking program
that mimics the real-world notebook/folder/page/etc concept for it's
organization structure, (or would like to use that structure to
organize your notes) it might take you a while to get things
structured the way you want in Evernote. I've been using OneNote at
work for a few years and when I started testing Evernote for my
personal stuff I ran into this problem. In OneNote I could create a
notebook for a topic (recipes), create folders in that notebook for
different categories within that topic (desserts, vegetarian, fish,
etc), and then pages/subpages in a folder for individual items.
Evernote only allows you to have notebooks and then pages within a
notebook. Since Evernote does allow you to add tags to notes, I'm
using those like I use folders in OneNote. But it's still something I
have to remind myself to do since I'm so used to how I do things in
OneNote.


Other than those two little things (and I'll have to check tonight to
see if the first is still an issue), I really like Evernote.