Internet Tech Boston

This guest post is written by Milo Caruso, a full time .NET web developer at Convention Data Services in Bourne and freelance designer and developer. He has worked on a variety of attendee registration sites ranging from small (under 100 regstrants) to large (90k+ registrants) during his time at CDS. His freelance work has ranged from staightforward brochure style sites for small businesses to custom, membership based web application development. Milo and his work have been feature in the Boston Globe.

I am the type of guy who collects things. I don’t really have any specific collections, just a general collection with a few themes and sub themes. Some baseball cards, some stamps, some baseball paraphernalia…you get the idea. I guess you could say that I am a pack rat of sorts.

This predilection has carried over into the web and on my computer. I have little snippets, images, audio, etc. all over my computer. There have been some attempts at creating folder structures that make sense to attempt a semblance of order. What usually happens is that I use the system for a while, then the specific interest or project wanes and I, well, forget what I was thinking. The system makes sense but only if I can remember what I was thinking.

What I have lacked is a tool to help me store what I collect in a structured or unstructured fashion and be able to find it later. It has been a challenge to try a locate such a tool. The idea of Microsoft OneNote has appealed to me greatly and some of it’s bells and whistles such as integration with Outlook, make it a very appealing option. My main issue with this is that I have actually been trying to move away from using MS products. Not because they aren’t good, but the whole idea of branching out is also one that appeals to me greatly as well.

Enter Evernote. Evernote launched publicly in June, after preparing the market with a bit of “beta” hype. Initial reviews have been mixed. ReadWriteWeb doesn’t like Evernote because of the limitations around its central product feature – OCR. The Inquistr likes Evernote based on its myriad of usages. In the interest of full disclosure I’ll say that I  tried it a couple different times previously without much success. Some of the issues were with the program and some were with my thought process. I have always liked the application but always found it to be somewhat lacking. This time around however, I gotta say I like it a lot. It still has some warts but definitely more of a prince than a toad.

To start with there are the multiple manners in which you can access, enter and edit your evernote information. First and foremost is the desktop application which provides the richest experience of any of the “editions” if you will. Second there is the web edition which is a browser based affair that allows you to access and edit your information from any browser. Third there are the mobile editions which are presently available for the iPhone and Windows Mobile. I have neither so was unable to test those. I do however have a Palm T|X so was able to test out the mobile web edition which is basically the web edition simplified and reduced in functionality to allow mobile devices to use their mobile browser without having to have a specific plug in. Also, if you set Evernote to start when you log onto windows there is a little clipper “widget” that you can access by clicking on the system tray icon which allows you to either perform a screen capture or save selected items in whatever application you have in focus. There is also the option of dragging and dropping pdfs and some other file types into your notebook.

Entering information into Evernote is pretty straight forward. You can type notes, you can drag and drop images from a variety of different applications or your desktop, clip directly from the web using the web clipper browser plug in and even enter notes as a sketch using you mouse or better yet a tablet. This last one relates to one of the cooler features in the application, but we will get to that later.

Of course the entering portion brings me to one of my gripes which is text formatting. Actually changing the color, font, weight, etc. of you text is not as intuitive as one would like in the desktop edition. Rather than having the normal formatting toolbars that one would find in the average word processing program, you need to right click and select “font” from the context menu that in turn given you a menu to set the font, color, etc. The tool bar does appear if you double click an entry and open it in it’s own window but having it available up front would be nice. Ironically the web based version has the tool bar right from the start.

So, how does Evernote help in organizing ones thoughts? Well, in a few primary ways. One, it allows you set up “Notebooks” which you can title to makes sense, i.e. “All the info about X”. It also allows you to divide a notebook up into different sections. Two, it allows you to create tags that you can assign to specific entries.

Third, it does it for you. This last one is where the real power of Evernote comes through.

As with other information storage applications, Evernote creates a text index of all of you text entries, tags, etc. This is search-able in any of the editions. What really takes the cake though is the inclusion of text recognition and the fact that this text is indexed and search-able. What this means is you can, say, drag a picture of you with your two children, with you wearing and A-Rod road jersey and a short while after, you can search for “Rodriguez” and that image, with the text “Rodriguez” highlighted, will be in you search results. This ability alone is a wonderful thing and makes trying out Evernote a lot of fun. I was duly impressed that it worked in both the desktop edition and the web version. This also means that any notes that you may “write” using the aforementioned tablet, could be recognized and indexed. Kind of like electronic sticky notes. Now the text recognition is not prefect but it is pretty darn good.

Are there limitations? Yes and here is a quick list of some of my gripes:

• I have already mentioned the text formatting UI issue.
• One thing I noticed while trying to use the web clipping plugin was that it I got an error message saying that I could not use the plugin if the Evernote application was not already started. You can set it to automatically start when you log into windows but I had to find this feature. It would have been nice if I was given the option when I received the error.
• Need for reminders. If you are going to claim to be a to do list, you need reminders. The application allows you to put cute little check boxes next to items but has not mechanism to allow for a pop-up of other type of reminder. (This is actually the one spot where I think OneNote has an advantage with it Outlook integration).
• In the web version as soon as I save it goes back to the overall view and I have to click into the notebook and then click on edit again. A bit of a clunky user experience.
• The UI still seems a tad unpolished. This is a pretty arbitrary comment and I don’t have a real good explanation of what I mean but it just “isn’t there” yet.
• You can not drag and drop word documents or other common documents. Being able to do so with pdfs and mp3s really wets your appetite for this sort of feature and makes it disappointing to find it is not there.

All in all though, not a bad list and with the possible exception of the lack of a real reminder mechanism, none of the are show stoppers.

Conclusion

All in all I would say that Evernote could be a very useful tool for a lot of people. Unfortunately I think that a lot of those people do not know that this sort of tool would be useful. At the present time your average surf and search user would find a tool like this very useful if they could get around two things: One, their intimidation of learning another application and Two understand how much more efficient clipping small sections of the web and storing them in an indexed fashion would be over bookmarking. I have seen people that have book marks up the ad nausea and of course they can never remember which bookmark is for what site. Having this sort of indexing/tagging system could go a long way to achieve this.

The image indexing though is really the part that could hook people. Imagine being able to drag a photo with text into your notebook and not even have to write a description or tag it because it will index it for you automatically. Text recognition is not new but the way it is pulled together with the other features is really powerful.

But more importantly is the concept the EverNote is trying to sell. They are trying to sell the idea that people need this sort of offline/online trapper keeper. I am not one to argue with the usefulness, as I have previously stated I find this sort of thing extremely useful. And I think that many people could benefit in productivity gains if they really did not have to remember and organize their snippets of information. I wonder though if the other options out their, such as the aforementioned OneNote, Google Notebooks our the built in web clipboard of the Flock browser might keep enough people happy to hurt the development of Evernote. I truly hope not as I am one who would like to see this product develop and flourish into an even more robust application.

Like I said, I like to collect things.