Finally, for all the data flotsam and jetsam we accumulate, there’s an application to make your online life searchable. Evernote gives you a central database to keep accounts, passwords, bookmarks, notes, recipes or whatever you want. It stores them securely and keeps it all easily accessible in numerous ways. Evernote is an application you install on whatever platform you’re on (Mac, PC, iPhone, or access it via the web) and, using a free account, synchronize it all together.
Of the three Cloud applications I’ve discussed here, this is the one I use all day, every day. Although there is a free version (ad sponsored), the inexpensive pay account ($45/year) is a must if you intend to use this to its fullest extent. Evernote wants to consider itself your searchable filing cabinet, and its tools do exactly that. Tag notes with tags that you make up on the fly and then sort the whole system via those tags, or search for any text you might have in a note.
Many online applications have the ability to store notes and search them, there are two things that set Evernote apart: Integration into a browser and the ability to take pictures of anything and OCR it automatically. The picture part, although it’s very cool, I don’t use much. You use your iSight or iPhone camera to photograph nearly anything and save it to Evernote. When the item gets to Evernote’s servers they perform some impressive OCR voodoo to make those photos searchable. If there’s text, a general search of all your normal text documents will also find the photos with the text somewhere in them. For example, a picture of a map that had the words “New York” on it would show if you chose to search for the term “New York.”
The second exceptional feature of Evernote puts a small Elephant-shaped button right into your browser bar. Come across a page you want to have available to you later? Click this button and the entire page—pictures, text, whatever (not flash or other embedded things) as well as most of the formatting will pop right into a new Evernote note, along with the Title of the page and the link to the original. Unlike simply bookmarking a page in a browser, doing it this way makes that page completely searchable. Bookmarks are one thing, but this is far beyond.
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Maybe I need to go to the Evernote site and check it out, but after what I’ve heard so far, here & elsewhere, I still don’t get it. I can pile any and all crap I want somewhere out of sight but searchable. So what? I can save pretty much anything I want already to my PC or laptop, and put it a folder or tag it or bookmark it. If I want the text searchable I can convert it to an OCR’d PDF. And anyway all my file names are searchable already. Maybe Evernote makes all these steps easier and quicker – probably it does. But it seems to me that all that does is make it easier to add more piles of crap to my life when I need less crap, not more – even if it is all searchable. I don’t want to get all Andy Rooney here, but to repeat, I don’t get it.
Let’s say you take a picture that includes a stop sign, Evernote will find that picture if you are searching for the word stop.
What this means practically if you can use your iPhone to take a picture of your boarding pass and it will find every word on the pass, flight number, gate airline, date, destination.
I find it incredibly helpful for saving exhibits from depositions.
As to Evernote, a lawyer on another lawyer mac blog reported that he was pulling off all his client confidential information from Evernote because of privacy/security issues? That concerns me. Is there anyway to ascertain that client confidentiality can be secure? Thanks so much.
Just looking around at what’s being written on cloud computing and feel that if you want to access and use any and all of your information from whichever computer you choose, icloud.com seems to offer a good solution. It looks like you can even use it from your iphone.
Evernote retain the right, buried deep in the Terms and Conditions that people rarely read, to view your data, and what’s more, they OWN your data AND sell it on to whoever wants it (Google for one).
This is why I gave up putting anything even slightly confidential into Evernote. It’s great software, but the fact that they own and sell your data is becoming increasingly unacceptable to many.
Nev,
Care to share with us where such a thing is actually stated in the T&C?
Thanks
Doesn’t look good for those who care about their data… Would love to hear what lawyers think.
In the Terms of service (http://www.evernote.com/about/tos/), 12 Jan 2011: “By submitting to Evernote any ideas, suggestions, documents and/or proposals through the “Contact Us” interface or otherwise (collectively, “Contributions”), you acknowledge and agree that: (a) your Contributions do not contain confidential or proprietary information; (b) Evernote is not under any obligation of confidentiality, express or implied, with respect to the Contributions; (c) Evernote shall be entitled to use or disclose (or choose not to use or disclose) such Contributions for any purpose, in any way, in any media worldwide; (d) Evernote may have something similar to the Contributions already under consideration or in development; (e) your Contributions automatically become the property of Evernote without any obligation of Evernote to you; and (f) you are not entitled to any accounting, compensation or reimbursement of any kind from Evernote under any circumstances.”
They have a Privacy Policy (http://www.evernote.com/about/privacy/) effective from Nov 2010, but who ever wrote it does not appear to have followed EU developments since Apr 2004.
“By submitting to Evernote any ideas, suggestions, documents and/or proposals through the “Contact Us” interface or otherwise”
I think this refers to creative suggestions submitted to Evernote, that is if you make a good suggestion to Evernote that make them a lot of money … you don’t get any of it.