15 August 2010
Evernote
Started using Evernote a few weeks ago. Its utility increases exponentially with use, so I've made a good-faith effort to seed it with info. Once it gets to critical mass I can see it will be phenomenally useful. Even a couple weeks in, it's already proving to be handy. Example use case: anything that might be tax-relevant info I now just send to evernote with a #tax tag. Or anything I find related to, say, cycling, that I'm interested in, I have Evernote remember, whether it be a website, a product I'm interested in, route info, PDFs of install & maintenance guides for components I have, etc. This could partially be covered by saving bookmarks, and keeping them in sync. Not entirely though. And I've got clients on my desktop, iPad, and iPhone. (The iPad client is the best for browsing, actually, much nicer than the desktop client. Desktop client is the best for adding new content. Also there are plug-ins for firefox and safari on the desktop to add pages to evernote with a single-click, but the iPad safari has no plug-in capability yet, which is a shame.) Will re-evaluate in a year, but so far it looks like it will be good.
what kind of privacy does it offer? or is everything you save being data mined, somewhere, by someone, about you?
ReplyDeleteNo, they claim data security. As far as I can tell, they make money by charging me for their service, rather than selling my data to people I don't know. Charging directly for service... interesting business model for the internet :-)
ReplyDeleteare you using the free service, or did you buy in? I'm not quite seeing how it'd work for me; their tutorial vids aren't great. (One of them claims it recognizes handwriting -- what, without a sample?)
ReplyDeleteI bought in for a year. I didn't watch any tutorial vids, but my use case so far is fairly simple. E.g. I get something from HMRC, I can scan it and have evernote remember it, tag it "tax", and then, if I need to find it, can keyword search or look by tag. IT does OCR on pdfs AND on photos, supposedly, so if I searched for "PAYE Coding notice", I should find the correct HMRC doc, for example.
ReplyDeleteWe'll see. I'll give it a fair shake, and if it's not as useful as I thought, I'll save everything off to a local store and not renew. So far, though, looks like it might be really handy.