Organization in Web2.0: EverNote
Last week I talked about "I Want Sandy", so this week I'm gonna talk about another Web2.0 tool that I've been using alot: EverNote. EverNote is, as the name suggests, a note taking service. They offer a Website where you can view and edit your notes, as well as a Standalone application for Windows and Mac, and several Mobile platforms. The Standalone app will let you index information without the web service, if you're uncomfortable sharing your information on the internet.
Information is easy to get into EverNote too! For starters you can simple fire up the app or go to the website and create a new note, and start typing. The more interesting stuff happens with other means, tho. There's an EverNote extension for FireFox where you can simply highlight text and click a button to send it to EverNote, images and all. Also, you get a custom email address that you can send notes to to have them automatically entered as notes. Plus, with the mobile application (I use the iPhone version) you can take pictures or write notes and have them automatically entered into the site.
All of that is fairly routine tho. The real power of evernote lies in the searching. If you take a picture of something and send it to evernote, it will automatically search the image for Text and allow you to search on the text. This really adds to the value of the service. I've taken to using my iPhone to take pictures of all the notes and information sent home with the Kids from School, to make for easy searching. Simply search for "august" in the "Kids" notebook I've created, and I see everything happening in August. An example is below:
It's also trivial to extend this to cataloging Whiteboards at the office (where the handwriting will automatically be recognized), shipping labels, interesting books. The list goes on and on. The One popular example they talk about is using it to catalog business cards. I unfortunately have not had much luck with that, as the iPhone camera does fairly poorly at close-range.
The quality of the OCR is a bit spotty. It requires a good high-contrast image, which can be difficult with the iPhone given it's poor low-light quality and slow sensors. Also it searches for text in all orientations (right, up, down, etc) so it sometimes guesses wrong. One example is shown below, where I searched for "august" and it misrecognized a column of numbers.
So it's not perfect, but it's a far cry from nothing at all. Also, EverNote can index documents like PDF's. It doesn't support any kind of Preview, but you can send PDF's (I do it via Email) to EverNote and searches will then search the PDF contents! This is great for conference & technical papers which are always PDF's, and online magazines too!
EverNote offers a free service if you want to try it out. They restrict you to 40Meg upload every month, which is quite alot of text and cameraphone pictures. The premium service is a mere $45 a year, and offers 500Meg upload every month. I've fully integrated EverNote into my organization & cataloging tools, and highly recommend it to anyone doing the same. Where Sandy is great for scheduling, contacts, and short 1-liner notes, EverNote picks up the slack for anything bigger.
Technorati Tags: evernote, organization, web2.0
