Evernote just feels like it has been around forever so it probably has! It is one of those staple apps with a massive following. It's not a pretty app but it is definitely practical. Evernote is a supernote and organiser tool that works on (1) the web, (2) on PC/Mac desktop apps and (3) on mobile apps so basically you can get Evernote everywhere. Notes are stored in notebooks in the Evernote Cloud.

Evernote can do lots: it lets you type notes and helps you store content from the web (called clippings - see the two cropped images above this paragraph). You can create audio notes, take and or upload photographs for storing; you can capture handwritten notes and store them too and Evernote even recognises handwriting so that you can search handwritten text. In the two shots below you can see (sorry for the rough red pen pointing out the key bits here :-) ) that I have photographed a whiteboard and a page of handwritten notes. The search feature has found the notes containing my search term and highlighted them in yellow on the notes in question.

You can also email anything (like an email you have been sent) straight to your Evernote for filing. Think about it as a digital scrapbook come notebook where you can store your content and find it easily. Evernote notes can be easily shared, but by default are private.

I don't think that I am a model user of Evernote but then again the great thing about this is that you can use it as you wish. I put odd bits and pieces that I want to remember in there such as link from tweets and notes from talk (shots below).

We have already seen that Evernote works with handwritten notes. Companies like Moleskine, and Whitelines have cottoned on to the fact that people love writing on paper but also like the convenience of digital notes and they have made special notesbooks that, when photographed, tidy, sharpen and straighten the image and, if you use their tags, will even file it for you automatically in your chosen Evernote notebook.

Shared notes and notebooks

You can publish your Evernote notes as webpages for sharing. I do this in school for my lists of recommended subject apps. I always have my lists with me (in My Evernote) so if I hear of another app, I simply update my Evernote Note, and my shared online Evernote list automatically updates! For an example of this take a look at my Geography app list from Evernote. I have also put links to some of my Evernote notes on the school intranet because it is such an easy way to share content.

Evernote Trunk

Another thing to know is that lots and lots of apps integrate and play well with Evernote. Evernote calls these their Trunk. Skitch is one good example of an Evernote Trunk app. It was so good that, in the end, Evernote actually bought the app and now it is part of the core offering - all your Skitches are automatically saved to Evernote for you. The same thing happened with the app Penultimate; it's now part of Evernote.

Evernote Premium

The free Evernote account has a monthy upload limit of 60MB of data and unlimited storage - each uploaded note can be a maximum size of 25mb which is ample for text and the odd image..

An Evernote subscription (called Evernote Premium, £4 per month) also allows you to upload more content (1GB) each calendar month too (although I never had a problem with the free upload allowance until I started uploading lots of photos everyday). The Premium account also has enhanced search and allows you to access your content when offline by choosing which of your notebooks you want to keep a copy of on your device (bearing in mind mobile devices have limited storage it is nice to be able to choose). The maximum size of each note is bigger with Premium at 100mb which to be honest doesn't make much difference if most of what you upload is text.

With Premium you can present your notes as clean-looking pages that are sized to fit nicely and mean if you have got ideas in an Evernote notebook you don't have to make them into presentations first. Here's one of my notes in normal view on the iPad and then in the presentation view.

As well as free Evernote and Evernote Premium there is also Evernote for business which lets teams collaborate and more besides (I won't talk about Business Evernote here as I don't use it).

Annotate PDFs

To be honest there are lots of apps that let you annotate PDF files but, if you are a subscriber you can also do this in Evernote, using Skitch. Why would you want to use Evernote to annotate your PDFs? Well, I guess for a lot of users, they keep all their content in Evernote so it is a logical extension to want to annotate these same notes in the same location.

Worth a try?

Evernote has evolved a lot since its early days and some people don't approve of the current Evernote because they say it is trying to be all things to all people (which is impossible). There have been a couple of blips over the years but overall I have found Evernote to be reliable, stable and available. I go back to it again and again.

If you are curious the free account is fine for most people so it is worth giving it a try! I got a year's worth of Evernote Premium free from my phone network so it is always worth keeping an eye out for coupons.

If you would like another person's perspective, t his pastor really likes Evernote on his iPad and so does this teacher.

Evernote on wikipedia