The evolution of EverNote: a lot can happen in 5 years

EverNote has become the staple note taking service for millions of people around the world and has, unlike many services, continually evolved to keep up with the huge changes we have seen in the smartphone world. Originally it was set up as a desktop application that would store everything you needed in one place with plans laid down to enable syncing to a smartphone. Some of the syncing plans did not come off as expected, but I was lucky enough to get a version running on Palm OS and it was fantastic at the time. Sadly it didn’t see the light of day in wider circles, but the company has managed to grow from strength to strength ever since.

I originally reviewed EverNote Plus in October 2005 and here is what I thought about the first EverNote product-

I have been using EverNote for a fair few months now and over that time it has become my virtual home for tasks, financial details, snippets of web information and more recently it is collating everything I need for an upcoming house move. For years now I have been looking at applications which can house all of your information in one environment and always felt dissapointed by the results. OneNote is too bare bones for me and expensive and some of the other products available are VERY expensive. We are talking $100′s for one application or an annual subscription fee. For me EverNote is the most visually pleasing of all the variants and this is something I need badly. In my discussions with various site visitors I realised that I am far from the only person who requires a visual environment with which to absorb information quickly.

If you are ever unfortunate enough to have to make a presentation to me and it’s all words I will be the one in the room staring out of the window, chewing my fingernails or just sighing loudly to express my boredom. Include some none graphics and icons and I am the swotty kid at school who stared and copied everything the teacher wrote on the blackboard 100% of the time:) I think this is the reason I have never been happy with a lot of the organisational tools like OneNote and on the PDA there are no applications which can organise you in an environment that is visually a joy to look at. Although a PDA version of EverNote is not available at this time this is the main reason I got interested in the PC version- the promise of something that will increase the usefulness of my PDA ten fold.

Let’s look at some of the functions within EverNote. I have probably not scratched the surface of what it can do so will concentrate on what it does for me. Feel free to try it for yourself and get drawn into your own EverNote world:)

On the left hand side is the now standard hierarchical groups which you will recognise from PDA applications such as Bonsai. These are fully customisable and work well for navigating to the notes and tasks you need to see in a hurry. Adding new child groups is as simple as right clicking one and typing in the title. You can choose to hide certain child categories within a group (again, right click) and you can add icons and choose the font for each title. This helps you focus on what’s important in your life or the sections which you use the most.

I asked for a better explanation of the groups from EverNote and within 2 hours had the following reply- guess that’s what you call good service.

“We consider categories broadly divided into three classes by their design and purpose:

Auto-categories (the ones on the screen shot) are automatically assigned using pre-built algorithms. They pre-classify any incoming info essentially for the purpose of “assisted search”. Imagine you have 5K notes and look for one where you don’t remember any single word but remember it had an image and was clipped from the Web. Then you can click on the Web Clips, open the “Category Intersection Panel” (see Options>Category>Show Category Intersection panel) and select “Web clips with images” as shown on the screen-shot, thus substantially reducing the search space.

Manual categories – the ones you build and tag notes with according to your personal projects and lifestyle. You can assign any number of them to any note manually and they can have any hierarchy. Here is an example above.

BTW, when the tape is filtered by a manual category and you create a new note, it can acquire this category tag right away (this is an option, which is “on” by default).

“Smart categories” (we call them for simplicity “Keyword categories”; they are manual by birth (i.e. you’ve built them rather than they came pre-built with EverNote). But you have assigned to them certain keywords or other “filters” in order to automatically tag your past and future data. Category names can be displayed on the note bars in italic. The example above shows the same PDA247 category which I assigned manually to three notes, and two of them have acquired the category automatically as they include the keyword “Shaun” included in the category filter. Found keywords are highlighted…”

When you are creating a new note in a category the range available is impressive. From simple text notes to full to do lists with dates, most of what you need is already catered for. The ability to create new templates is possible using XML- that means nothing to me (!) but we should see many templates coming from users as the product’s market grows. All of the templates built in look good as is the EverNote way- they fit in with the overall design and are extremely easy to use first time.

If you install the Web Clipper you get something very special. A button appears in IE (other browsers are now supported as well) which when clicked adds the whole page as a note in EverNote. Graphics, links and all other parts of the site are reproduced perfectly. If you require only a certain part of the page just copy/paste the bit you want. Below is an example from rohdesign. I love Mike Rohde’s sketches and had to include them in my database.

I simply click the EverNote icon in IE and there it was in all it’s detail- 25 of Mike’s sketches in one note. When you click the button it feels as though nothing has happened but trust me, when you go to your EverNote database it will be there. This works well for every web page- if you see something you really want to read but don’t have time for (like links from PDA247 news articles:)) just use the button and you can read it at your leisure.

In theory this could be a good way to grab daily news and updates from your favourite web sites. If someone could build a macro to visit each page, click the EverNote button each time you would have the latest news loaded in EverNote ready for you to read later in the day. When EverNote is suitable for PDA usage that would appeal to many people- no longer having to read text based mobile sites and RSS feeds- why not read the whole page in all it’s glory?

The Ink Features are superb and especially useful if you own a tablet PC (or a PDA when it becomes available- do I keep mentioning that point?:)) It’s not just a case of creating handwritten notes because it will recognise handwritten words and display them at the bottom of the screen, it can recognise shapes and display them perfectly and includes the expected pen thickness, colour palette and even a choice of pen or pencil to suit your desired look. You can also move selected parts of the text using various in built tools and this is in fact very useful for arranging your notes.

The Ink Feature alone is worth the money for the Plus version because it includes the above mentioned word and shape recognition, advanced not recognition and ink-note search. When you consider that the standard version is free it’s just plain daft. How can something this good be free???

I mentioned the web clipper feature above and that is my personal favourite part of EverNote BUT you can copy /paste data from ‘any’ application that supports the Windows Clipboard. This means Word, Excel, Notepad, PowerPoint and my guess is almost any other application you care to mention. This really does mean you can hold all of your data in one place.

The Endless Tape takes a bit of getting used to but once figured out makes it the central part of EverNote for the user. New notes are automatically added to the end of the tape and date/time stamped accordingly. Sounds simple but this provides an accurate chronology of your notes and this is a must when you have lots of notes stored.

In the image above you will see the Time Band (on the right) which lists all dates from the very first note to the latest. Just click on it to jump to the date required, clicking the top or bottom takes you to the first and last note respectively. The Accelerator Scroller (also shown above) provides a means quickly scroll through all of your notes. Move your mouse or pointer away from the centre and the further you move it the quicker it scrolls- nice:)

Searching for text is easy as well- just use the search box at the top. I found this to be extremely quick and the easiest way for me to get to the note I require. Text in we clips and other imported media is found so for a journalist or researcher we are looking at a decent project management tool and an easy way to store and find research material.

The above are just some of the feature found in EverNote and I will conclude the rest at a later date but the real beauty of this application is that you can use it for whatever you want and in any way you like. For example- expense reports, letter templates, article writing (this review was written over a few days in EverNote), photos and personal items (see image below) and any other data that’s useful to you. Using one application saves a lot of time and reduces the need to hunt through various programs just to get something that takes seconds in EverNote due to it’s multitude of search and navigation tools.

I have written many reviews and articles for PDA247 and freelance for technical magazines but never have I enjoyed writing one as much as for EverNote. As I said at the start it has taken me years to find an application to store everything I want in one place and at last here it is. The potential of EverNote knows no bounds and it is a testament to the programmers that it is stable, incredibly quick to use and probably the only application I have seen that I can think of no extra features for.

Now, consider what EverNote can do (just about everything), consider how much time it will save you, consider what you can do to make the program your own and then consider how much you would pay for something like this.

YOU PAY NOTHING! There is no charge for the standard version of EverNote. If you need the advanced Ink features you still only pay $34.95 for the Plus version. Am I missing something here? Without doubt this is the best value piece of software I have ever seen, indeed it is the best piece of PC software I have used in my life- EverNote is remarkable in so many ways that I ill stop now before you think the EverNote team came round to my house and stood behind me with loaded guns while I typed this:)

If the above has inspired you to find out more about it just go to www.evernote.com and download it- I promise you it will be a worthwhile few minutes of your time. Once you have tried it please have your say in our EverNote Poll which I will pass onto the developers once we have a few more votes to show them how much we want a PDA version of this program. You have no idea how much I want to see this running on my PDA!

Since writing this review we managed to get an interview with Stepan Pachikov who is the creator of EverNote. Interview originally published on 5th October 2005-

1/ Who had the original idea to create EverNote and what inspired that idea?

[SP] It was me: I was looking for an application which would help me overcome a few shortcomings of the Outlook: folder metaphor, which doesn’t allow you to easily place a note (e-mail) to many different folders; I also badly needed a more flexible To-Do manager (it has not been implemented in EverNote yet). EverNote’s “endless tape” had been inspired by the Apple Newton.

2/ How long did the development for the desktop version take and how long have the PDA versions been in development?

[SP] We spent six months with one engineer to prototype EverNote, and then almost two years with a few more to develop the desktop version. In parallel, digital ink support and handwriting recognition technology has been developed. HTML engine had been licensed from Terra Informatica. Smartphone and PDA versions (Windows Mobile and Palm) are in the works for almost a year.

3/ Does EverNote have a schedule for development completion or can you see it continually being enhanced?

[SP] EverNote is an endless project and we see a lot of interesting tasks on our roadmap (search through camera snapshots of images with handwritten and printed texts; search through voice notes; attaching location as a category; new metaphor for “assisted search” based on auto-categorization, and much more, mostly based on AI and fuzzy logic).

4/ Has it been as successful as you hoped?

[SP] Not really. I had a plan to release smartphone and PDAs versions (including Symbian) six months ago…

5/ What’s the best book you have read and the best song you have heard?

[SP] It is so difficult to pick one! OK:

1) Michael Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” (unfortunately, all translations are very far from being perfect, try O’Connor)
“Oft denk ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen ” by Gustav Mahler with Kathleen Ferrier and Bruno Walter

6/ Tell a bit about yourself and your involvement in the company.

[SP] I am a founder of the company and the current CEO, I am 53 years old, I hold Ph.D. in computer science from the Moscow University, have three children, I don’t like Putin and all his current friends (starting with Bush and ending with Berlusconi); I love my friends and all (literally all!) kind of arts (Thomas Mann, Gurdjieff, Hartmann, Schönberg, Mozart, Keith Jarrett, Leonard Cohen, Shen Wei, Angelin Preljocaj, Pushkin, Bob Dylan, Shakespeare, Beatles, Pink Floyd, Tarkovsky (both father and son), Pasternak, Kandinsky, and many many more)

7/ What’s the best piece of feedback you have received to date concerning EverNote?

[SP] I was told that “EverNote is more than one note.”

8/ Lots of people are desperate to see the PDA version. Can we see a screenshot to show them what it looks like?

[SP] Generally speaking, EverNote on PDAs looks almost the same as the desktop version with the closed category panel. My wife and I use our smartphone version (on iMate SP3) for more than 6 months and like it very much. We had to delay the public appearance because of the massive work on different sync options.

9/ How do you feel knowing that some people are getting massive benefits from your program (I suspect I am saving an hour a day with it)?

[SP] This really makes me happy!

10/ Anything you would like to add?

[SP] EverNote is about the memory. Memory is not only about search – a good “photographic” memory is also about capturing! I believe that in the near future, a cell phone will become a kind of extension to human memory: capturing and recoding everything we would like to remember. EverNote is a tip of that Iceberg.

M: This hour, my friend, shall stir your senses…
The things … are something more than magic’s empty show.

The comment from Stephan that stands out most to me was when I asked him if EverNote had been as successful as he had hoped, to which he replied- “Not really. I had a plan to release smartphone and PDAs versions (including Symbian) six months ago…”

4 million users later, this comment shows just what can change in a short space of time.

5 years later I am now using EverNote to sync with Awesome Notes on my iPhone and still use it every day to capture things I need to remember, tasks and almost everything else I need. I could see the potential all those years ago, but I never thought it would become as successful as it is today. I do wonder if Stephan feels the same.