The eOK .network

Last week Kevin pointed us to Evernote. There was a mad frenzy for the private beta invite, but he made sure there was enough to go around.

If you feel you’re not taking remembering things as effectively as you should, you need Evernote. In essence it is currently the best note taking application since txt files simply because it helps you clip/write notes in text and images and indexes it according to tags and the content of the note… including the text found in the images!

That’s the killer app right here. Take a photo of a business card and search for it as text. Capture your airline ticket on iSight and never forget your seat number. To add to the fun, Evernote runs on Mac, Windows, Windows Mobile, The Web, with J2ME and iPhone clients coming soon and all the OCR and indexing is done centrally on Evernote servers so you have your notes synced on any platform, all the time.

I’ve been using the app for a couple of days now and I’m impressed. Photo notes from iSight work like a charm and it syncs nicely between my Mac at home and Windows PC at work and I can even access my notes through my mobile web browser on the go. Lovely.

But as with anything that has more than five lines of code, there are issues. My first complain is the lack of drag and drop. The bookmarket and menubar item works well, but why not just let users drag and drop from the web browser? Also, for some silly reason, the program always wants to sync with the server even when a connection isn’t available. I’m not annoyed by its syncing habits, but I am by the error prompts that happen every few minutes. Why can’t it just move to offline status?

To fully appreciate the product, you’ve got to watch their video:

However much I love the technology, I agree with Coleman who was remarking that it took some getting used to. I guess we’re just not used to taking notes in such an unstructured manner. But this is certainly something I’d love to change my habits to.