Tag Archives: evernote

Still on Evernote

general,

A few months back, after I started at Scientific Learning, I wrote about note taking software.  I tried using Evernote and am happy to say I’m still using it.  I ended up upgrading to the premium plan and am still pretty happy with its functionality.

My big wish list now would be:

  1. Templates templates templates!  I’d love to be able to build templates for things like one-on-one meeting notes, team meeting notes, daily notes, and technical research notes.  It’d keep me from forgetting things for different types of note taking sessions.
  2. Better formatting.  I noted this when I first evaluated it and it’s still true.
  3. Better export into the clipboard when I copy content.  Right now I generally just export to PDF and then e-mail that if I want to keep my formatting in-tact.  Pasting into an e-mail (on Mac) just looks bad, especially if I have lists in my document.

Note Taking Software

general,

When I switched to my job here at Scientific Learning I knew I needed to do a better job taking notes. The big question, though, was how should I take those notes and then even more important, how do I organize them and look them up later?

So far I’ve been pretty impressed with Evernote. They have a nice Mac and iPhone client as well as a web interface that works. Your data is synchronized through their web site and supports tagging as well as basic formatting. They have other support for uploading/indexing documents such as Word and PDF documents but I haven’t found a great use for that yet. There is also image uploading with support for geo-tagging from the iPhone. They have a premium plan that I’ll probably pay for once I’ve passed my 30 day test of software.  Basically, if I’m still using it after 30 days at a consistent level it’s probably something I’ll continue to use.

The only downside is I wish there was better formatting options since I’m a little bit of a stickler about that but the data is way more important than that. OneNote on the Windows Office suite was really cool about that and they’re going to get more “cloud” support in the 2010 version but the lack of Mac support there really killed it for me.  I don’t want to start up a VMWare instance everytime I want to take notes.  Also, not having an iPhone and web interface really limits its flexibility.