In my previous post in the Living in the Clouds series, I wrote about Google Notebook, a note taking application from Google. I use Google Notebook exclusively for my research on the web. I use it to note down important results, quotes, etc. from various websites. But I use a much powerful application for all my other note-taking needs. The app is called Evernote and it is extremely useful in organizing information you capture in your daily activities.
Evernote cannot be considered as a SaaS application in the sense of using just the browser to manage information. It comes under the category of data on the clouds than the app on the clouds. Your data can be accessed using desktop applications, web browser and mobile devices. Evernote is much more powerful than Google Notebook in the sense that you can add image and audio notes along with the usual text based notes. You can just jot down a text note or you can take a photograph and post it as an image note or you can record an audio and post it as an audio note. You can do all these using the desktop and the mobile clients. You can check out their complete feature set here.
From this week onwards, I will add a video clip to the posts in this series. Here is a short overview of Evernote.
As it is customary in this series, we will discuss some of the important pros and cons of this service.
Pros:
- Ability to take pictures from the mobile phone and add it to the Evernote as an image note.
- Ability to search for text in the scanned images/photographs. Suppose if you scan or snap a business card and add it to evernote, the contents will show up in your search results.
- Web Clippers makes this app completely multi-platform.
- Ability to add PDF files in the desktop application and upload it to the web.
- Amazing Iphone App.
- Availability of API and integration with other services like Jott and Pelotonics (which itself is a pretty neat SaaS app and I might cover it some day in this space).
Cons:
- Lack of Linux Application. I could run Evernote’s Windows Application on an Ubuntu box using Crossover Office but I would like to see a native Linux application.
- Lack of an easy option to export the data into an open format. This is a big put off for me.
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