This tutorial was created on August 21st 2010 and last edited on September 5th 2010 using Evernote 1.10.1.
This tutorial applies to both Evernote for Mac OS X and iOS.
The way I organize my iPhone apps is by keeping the 16 apps I use the most on the first page and classifying all the remaining apps in folders on the second page. Let’s just say that Evernote is one of my 16 main apps.
Why do I need Evernote?
Evernote is the ultimate note synching application. The applications for all devices are free, but what really makes Evernote shine is how it excels at synching. For synching, Evernote offers two synching options. A free account and a $5 a month premium account. Even though I’m an Evernote addict, I honestly don’t see the point of upgrading to the premium account. Although the free account’s 40MB a month of upload allowance seems tiny, it lasts forever and I never seem to be able to use it all before the month ends. The ads in the free account are also very unobtrusive.
The Main Interface (Mac OS X)
The main interface in Evernote for Mac OS X lets you display and edit notes in 3 different views: list view, mixed view and thumbnail view. Mixed and thumbnail view are undoubtedly useful when using Evernote for photos and PDFs, but since I nearly only use it for text, list view is the only mode that makes sense.
The Main Interface (iPhone/iPod Touch iOS)
The first tab of the Evernote app has quick shortcuts to create all the various notes: text, photos from the camera roll, new photos or voice recordings. Although I love Evernote, I must admit that the second tab in the iPhone/iPod Touch app is truly lacking. The default way it displays the saved notes is disappointing. All the notes are displayed chronologically and at first glance, there is no way to sort them by notebook. I found a way to keep the iPhone a useful tool and be able to focus on specific notebooks. The “i” icon in the upper right corner lets you choose your favourite “Note Grouping” and one of these options is grouping by “Notebook”. This is immediately a huge improvement in how the notes are organized, but it does bring forward new problems. Accumulating notes in Evernote is now problematic, because I have to scroll through all the notes in the first notebook to access the second notebook. I have resolved this problem in two ways, first by keeping my Evernote notebooks as clean as possible, but also even more importantly by using the short horizontal lines on the right side of the app that are actually shortcuts to all the different notebooks.
Notebooks
Sorting notebooks with the most used ones first and the less used/personal notebooks last is very important because of how the iPhone/iPod Touch app displays notes. Evernote unfortunately doesn’t let us rearrange the order of notebooks, so what I have done is to simply rename my notebooks, adding “01″ to “07″ before the name of my 7 notebooks.
Tags
Tags are an interesting idea, but their implementation is somewhat lacking. It is a good way to further differentiate and organize notes, but searching by tag is clunky and requires multiple clicks, which in my experience is rarely useful or relevant.
The Trash
Somewhat like iPhoto, Evernote doesn’t actually delete notes when you hit “Delete”. They are simply moved to the Evernote trash. It is amazing when you accidentally delete a note, but also something to keep in mind when you delete personal data.
To-Dos
Evernote pushes itself as a good option for to-do lists using their “ToDo Checkbox” that can be added to any note. To actually create to-do lists, however, Evernote will have to make the ToDo Checkbox work as a bulleted list so that I can easily get another checkbox simply by hitting “Return”.
So what’s missing?
The following is a list of what I think the Evernote team needs to work on to make Evernote the most useful application on my Mac and iPhone:
- Rich text on the iPhone/iPod Touch and even worse, the iPad.
- Better implementation of notebooks and tags on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
- Archiving; Gmail is the perfect example of how useful archiving can be. I don’t want notes that are not current clogging my notebooks, but I might still want to keep a copy in archives.
- The “To-Do” checkbox as a bulleted list. Why can’t I just hit Return to get another checkbox?
- Editable tables; tables are super useful, but it is not possible to adjust the number of rows and columns once they are created.
So am I saying Evernote is crap?
Absolutely not, it is one of my favourite Mac and iPhone application. Being this important to me also brings big expectations, and the development of Evernote seems to have been stagnant in the past year. Bottom line is, if you don’t have Evernote, get it NOW! It is free and it is the best note taking solution available.
