Peter's Blog

I was watching the very interesting 'Click' tech program on BBC News (you can also see it on their website) and it had a feature on 'cloud' storage i.e. storing everything over the internet.

Something they mentioned was something I have tried before, Evernote. There is a new version of Evernote that looks like exactly the kind of notetaking tool that I have wanted for years (it was this notetaking desire that led me to start this blog five years ago).

Here are some features:

• Install client application on windows, mac or windows moble (java/phone is in the works). The main reason I want to use a client application rather than a pure web application is because I want to be able to paste screen clips straight in and web applications cannot do that, I have to dick about uploading files.
• The contents of the client application are synchronised over the internet so the same notes are available on other pc's and also directly from the server using a web browser. There is also a mobile version of the website so I can get my notes from my phone.
• It will do text recognition in images. In theory you can take a photo of something on your phone, email it to evernote, it will index the words it finds in the image and then you can find it later in searches. I tested it by doing a screen clip of something written in a cursive font and it worked! For test 2 I took a photo of the screen with my phone and emailed it. It was on the web within a minute and after synchronising it was on the client. I played with the indexing and it could find most of the words.
  
  

  Evernote Test

  Here it found the word 'great' and highlighted it. Is that cool or what?
• The client has a built in screen capture utility.
• You can export notes to html so I have a mechanism for extracting my data, I am not locked in.
• It has tagging but it also has a very good search tool and 'saved searches'.
• It will work in linux under wine (although drag/drop is broken and I have't tried the built in screen capture tool).
• I can make some notebooks public and I can put a widget on this blog to display them:
  You can go through here and play with the text recognition. However, I feel the presentation leaves something to be desired. I could use this for the stuff that doesn't warrant a blog entry but I can't see anyone wanting to read it (even less so than the blog).

I had to register for the Evernote beta but it only took 2 days for my invite to arrive.

You get 40M of storage a month on a free acount and they don't specify a maximum limit so this could mean 480M/year free storage. For $5 a month you get 500M.

I think this is it, if this version of Evernote does not get me fastidiously notetaking, lifehacking, brain dumping etc then nothing will.