Evernote Review

Part of my endevour to go 100% paperless in my home office includes ridding myself of notepads and spiral notebooks.  I order to do this, I need to come up with a new way of quickly jotting down information for later retrieval.  There are lots of "virtual notebook" applications: Notateit, Notebook 1.0, MS OneNote and they're great, specifically OneNote.  I've gotten very used to moving around in this over the last several years.  But the software I've decided to really beat the crap out of on a day-to-day basis is Evernote.

Why Evernote, especially over OneNote, which I'm already intimately familiar with?  One word... integration.  Evernote isn't just a standalone application residing on my computer like OneNote.  Nor is it an "Internet accessible only" application like Yahoo Notes or Google Docs.  No, I can run EverNote on any system I have at any time with or without an Internet connection.

EverNote is also available on almost every single platform out there right now: PC, Mac, iPhone/iPod, Android, Palm, Blackberry, whatever.  It also has a really large selection of add-ons that allow me to do just about anything I can think of with regards to note taking.  I send audio files, pictures, emails, scans, PDF's, and tons of other formats, allowing me to really use EverNote as my personal brain dump area.

It's also completely searchable.  I can create more detailed indexes, or I can just have EverNote look for specific words inside my various notebooks.

The application and basic services are FREE!  You can download it right now and not pay a single dime for it.  Of course they also have a premium version for "power users" and it's only $45 a year.  $45, really?  That's pretty darn cheap when you consider what this system gives you.  So if you've never seen or heard of EverNote, go check them out at http://www.evernote.com/, you'll be glad you did!