I have always heard very good things about Evernote and have been meaning to give it a try for ages.  A few days ago I found out I was lucky enough to be accepted into their private beta program for their new online + desktop etc. version (thanks to a TechCrunch post with a limited number of invites!).

I’ve used OneNote in the past and liked it a lot, but have been trying to move away from any real reliance on MS Office applications – so Evernote fits in fantastically well with my increasing desire to work mainly with online and / or cross-platform capable apps. It runs on Windows XP and Vista, Mac OSX Leopard, and online in IE, Firefox, and Safari.  I even found very quickly that its web-clipper tool (to clip chunks of or entire web pages into notes) works fine on Flock as well.  There’s a full, installable client for Windows Mobile, and a /m mobile version for use with any mobile device with a browser.

I had high hopes for Evernote, and so far I’m not at all disappointed and am super impressed with it …

Here’s some of what I’ve been enjoying about it:

Seems like I can work with it almost everywhere – I have the desktop app running always on my laptop, while also keeping the browser version open while I decide which I like best day-to-day.  The indexing between the two is nearly instant when manually invoked.  The online version also looks great on both the iPhone and my Dell Axim (where I haven’t bothered installing its WinMo client).

You cannot yet edit an existing note on a mobile device (as far as I can see), but you can read all your existing notes, and create new ones easily.  It also has the handy ‘email yourself a note’ feature which I really think is one I will use more and more.  As with several other apps, you are given a unique mail-to address for your account, add that to your contacts on your mobile device, and  then just shoot yourself a note whenever you like with your email subject translating to the note title, email body being the note body, and so on.  This is a very common feature by now with quite a few social networking and similar sorts of apps – but it strikes me it is quite a lot more powerful when teamed with Evernote, because of its powerful indexing and recognition abilities.  I can see myself using this for sending photo notes more often from the iPhone.

Feels faster and lighter than OneNote.  Maybe just my imagination, but I only just uninstalled OneNote a week ago, and Evernote honestly feels as if it has all the power, but just a little less gloss and face-paint, than OneNote.

I’m only just starting to learn how to best use Evernote, and I’m sure I’ve not really discovered half its real power yet.  I’m looking forward to getting to know it much better …

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