“For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned”
I am a reasonably tech-savvy person. I also do have
interests in the latest happenings around the World as far as the gadgets and
technologies are concerned. This interest of mine, led me to discover one of
the applications, which literally remembers everything and acts as our second
brain. It is called ‘Evernote’. What fascinated me more about this
application was it’s support to most of the platforms, it’s simplicity and the
icing on the cake….. It’s absolutely free (there is a premium membership
option, more about it later).
Evernote
helps us to organize the information collected in various forms and from
numerous sources. It can be in the form of pictures, notes, ink notes,
voice notes, web clippings, mails, PDF, excel sheets, word documents etc.
It stores your notes on ‘cloud’ so you can access it from any computer
or smartphone or even your blackberry. The people at Evernote
has developed applications which can be installed on various platforms.
You can download applications for your laptop, mac, blackberry, iPhone,
smartphone, desktop etc. The cloud storage also helps in keeping your
data in sync on all your devices. I have Evernote app on my iPhone, my
laptop at work and my Mac Book Air at home. Till date I have around 600 notes which are synced and which are now accessible from anywhere in the world
even from the laptop or a desktop where no Evernote app is installed as I can
always go on their website and access my notes.
Evernote employs OCR to allow
the user to search for images according to the text contained in those images.
Being able to search for text in images is a great way to save time. If the
user needs to capture important information quickly, taking a snapshot for
future reference is a handy option. Often, the OCR will even be able to read
handwritten text in photos as long as it is fairly legible Finding the text,
later, is easy because of the benefits of OCR.
They have a
browser extension for most of the commonly used browsers so at a click of
button any web page is directly stored into our Evernote account. Just
think would you ever need a piece of paper now when you are collating
information from web?
The most beneficial element of
Evernote is it’s organizational system. The software contains several different
ways to categorize information, such as Tags, Note Titles and Notebooks.
Evernote allows the user to keep track of several projects at once with the
“Notebooks” feature. The user creates and titles a notebook, then can further
organize the information within that notebook with “tags".
Evernote has two memberships option. One is absolutely
free and another is a ‘premium’ one. Premium member pays US $ 5 per month
or US $ 45 a year but it comes with privileges such as a single note of up to
50 MB (free members:25 MB), monthly upload allowance of 1 GB
(free members:500 MB), capacity to search for text in PDFs, faster sync
speed.
For those that find themselves
drowning in piles of sticky notes, Evernote is a much improved alternative to
the former. The organizational system and OCR make it worth a look for those
that are looking for help in organizing ideas at work, home or just bits of
data from every-day life.
Evernote website: www.evernote.com
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