Evernote wants to be a database for every bit of knowledge in your life. It takes all of the digital data you collect throughout your day, both the important and the inconsequential, and stores them in a centrally-located library that's accessible in an instant whenever you need it.
The software, which runs on multiple platforms and exists as a web service, collects whatever you throw at it -- photos, web clippings, hand-written notes -- and indexes everything for you. The result is that your life instantly becomes annotated and searchable. You can tag items and add comments to remind yourself why you saved something. Evernote can even search text and handwriting within photos, thanks to some awesome text recognition capabilities.
We reviewed Evernote at the beginning of last year. But since then, Evernote has moved beyond the Windows platform to include a recently launched Mac version, as well as web-based access and a variety of options for mobile devices.
In a telephone interview, Evernote CEO Phil Libin tells Wired.com that the goal is to move Evernote "away from a single platform. to an ubiquitous service you can access everywhere."
Indeed there are a nearly limitless number of ways you can get information into Evernote, but perhaps the most useful is an e-mail address that Evernote provides each user. When you sign up, Evernote will generate a unique e-mail address for you, and anything you send to it will be added to your default notebook.
I've been testing Evernote for the last week or so, snapping photos of various things around the house, newspaper and magazine articles I read at the dentist's office, business cards from contacts and more. I then e-mailed all those photos to Evernote, adding them to my notebook.
Thanks to the image recognition software, everything I entered is now fully searchable and accessible online or off - a bit like del.icio.us, but for cataloging the real world as well as the web. The image above shows the results of my search for "travel" in the web interface. The Mac client is shown below.
Amazingly, Evernote can parse text within images, even if its handwritten, if the photo was taken with a camera phone or under poor lighting conditions. And I know what you're thinking - no image recognition software is that good. You're right, Evernote isn't perfect, but it's by far the best I've used. It can even pick out handwritten words on a photo of an out of focus scrap of paper.
The Evernote Mac client in action, searching for the word "who."
Of course with Evernote available as a web service, the natural question is - where are the APIs?
Libin says that Evernote plans to publish some of its internal APIs in the near future, which means developers will be able to build mashups and third-party tools, as well as extract Evernote data for their own applications.
An open API would potentially make Evernote a very powerful blogging tool, especially on platforms like Tumblr where the focus is on the quick, short "clipping" sort of posts that Evernote encourages. Just post to Evernote and then pull it into your blog. That way everything is searchable, as well as published.
Which isn't to say that Evernote is a replacement for say, del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia. In fact, Evernote nicely compliments those services. Whereas both of those bookmark storage sites are about sharing and interacting with other members, Evernote is more of a personal database for searching your stuff.
I was disappointed to learn that there's no way to have Evernote grab the contents of an RSS feed. Too bad, since it would make a nice search engine for my bookmarks or my Flickr images.
While Libin says that the (much requested) RSS import feature is in the works, he also points out an alternative method of sending content to Evernote that will work right now: e-mail it.
If you want to get your Ma.gnolia bookmarks into Evernote, just grab the RSS URL and feed it into an RSS-to-e-mail service (like RSSFwd) and the tell RSSFwd to send the e-mail to your Evernote address. It's a bit convoluted and far from ideal, but it should hold you over until Evernote releases an RSS import tool.
At the moment, this latest version of Evernote is still a private beta. However, the company has offered up 1000 invites for Wired.com readers so if you'd like to give it a try, head over to this page and add your e-mail address.
Libin says Evernote plans to greatly expand its beta in the next month. So if you don't get an invite today, check back in a few weeks.
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