Alun Salt
There’s an odd special offer on Evernote for a limited time. You can buy 15 months of the Premium service for $29. The usual price is $45 for 12 months. The offer is through the MacHeist bundle. This is a collection of Mac OsX software being sold together. The software is nearly all Mac licences only, but the Evernote licence can be activated without a Mac.
Why would you want to do this (even if you have Mac)?
Evernote is a note-storing application. You upload text, images or files, and Evernote keeps them available online. This means you can access your notes from the computer you uploaded them from or from any other internet-connected computer. This works all ways so that the Evernote app on your mobile phone will automatically upload notes to your home computer. This sounds fairly trivial, the power of Evernote is in its OCR.
Evernote can read images. This means photos of book covers are searchable. It reads PDFs too. For anyone doing research this makes the collection of PDFs on your hard drive manageable. If you have photocopies of old papers then scanned images combined into a PDF become searchable too. Uploads can be tagged, improving the search-power.
To a large extent Google Docs already has OCR, so why bother with Evernote?
One is storage size. Even with a free account, you have unlimited storage. What you pay for with Evernote is the upload quota. Google has a limit of 5GB, though you can pay to upgrade this too.
Another is the mobile integration. A decent camera on a smartphone can now photograph journal pages and combine them into one PDF. Share to Evernote is a common feature for many apps on smartphones, so you could capture and store papers in one go. There is a question about how happy you’d be to read papers captured by a phone though. There are 41 Megapixel cameraphones, but most phones are equipped with much lower-resolution sensors.
To a large extent the usefulness depends on you finding Evernote fitting into your own workflow. The free version is a handy way of finding that if that will happen or not. Macheist closes in a couple of days, so it will have to be a quick decision. Mac owners might be swayed by the fact the excellent Scrivener is included in the bundle too.
