I just got a whole new round of invitations to Evernote, so anyone who is interested let me know. Post here or PM.

For the curious, Evernote http://www.evernote.com is a pretty kickass Information Management system.  Their description is:

Remember everything. Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.

My personal thoughts are that its pretty great, though admittedly just became useful to me, with the addition of drag n drop PDF and other file formats. Before that I was a bit hesitant to use yet another system, that didn’t have extensive ways to get data in and out. Sure javascript clipping is nice. But I already have tons of data, most of it stored as PDF files.

Evernote has both a desktop and a web interface. You can store things just on your desktop, make things public or keep them private. Anything sync’d to the web is accessible anywhere. O’ yeah and it can pretty much recognize almost any type of text, from scanned items, PDFs, even some audio files (not tested extensively). So search is pretty awesome. Obviously tagging is available as well as grouping items into “notebooks”.

I just started an EE notebook today. Goal is to capture sample code and solutions from the forums and a more searchable manner. I often find solutions of interest, but not currently needed. But then going back for it, means trying to recall a phrase or term or remember the author. Then if I find it, I may have to comb through 2 to 4 pages of post, for the one that has the specific code I want.

With Evernote. You select the code, or response. Use the javascript file. It creates a new note, with title of post, just the code or selected text, link back to original post, and any tags you’ve added. Nice.

Anyway, I have numerous invites so, let me know if your interested. I also posted on twitter, so they may go quickly.

Alnisa

Hi Alnisa,

Count me as interested. Thanks very much!

Best wishes,

Mark

Hello,

I would be very interested as well.

Thanks,

-Lee

I’d like to try this too, if you still have an invite left.  Thanks =)

Thanks to Alnisa you should now have an invite from me Lisa

Best wishes,

Mark

Thank you, Mark. =)  This is pretty darn cool.

Yep. I just need to update to Leopard now so I can try out the application as well.

I seem to remember a program on the Mac some time back that did pretty much everything this does but it was just on the computer and not the internet too. The word recognition for images is simply superb in this though. I had a really small piece of text on an image and it still picked up on it!!

Pretty darned neat!!

Best wishes,

Mark

Since Mark took care of Lisa, that leaves me CI Lee. CI,  just sent you a PM.  Alnisa

Now that the desktop client handles PDFs I’m so loving Evernote. It’s even making my life with Twine (semantic web) easier because their methods for getting data into Twine suck (besides Javascript). But Evernote can send emails of found sets, via search, tags, or even entire notebooks to Twine.  And the search is awesome. Even integration into Spotlight.

I haven’t used it for a month but I thought the interface was horrible.  Perhaps I should try again.

Have you tried Zotero?  All that Evernote did for me was remind me to start using Zotero again.

I haven’t used Zotero. I oly use Firefox to check websites against. Otherwise, I’m pretty much a diehard Safari user. I’ve been contemplating Firefox over Camino as a second browser; and then of course Flock. But haven’t really made a decision as of yet.

But Evernote is far more than just a citation tool. It consumers full documents, abstracts, reports, books, websites, audio, video, photo files, etc.—all indexed and organized. My thoughts are the interface could be prettier, but works fairly well. You have collections, tags, and different views: snapshot/thumbnail, list, or full-page view of data.  For me, the biggest and most welcome change to make the system useful for me, was modifications to the desktop client. Document & Records Management for our organization and my stuff is something I’m always on the lookout for. We started converting most things to PDFs, once Apple integrated PDF capabilities into the OS. Not because we didn’t have Acrobat Professional before, but because it was an indicator that Adobe PDF would be a long-term document format, that we wouldn’t have to religiously maintain and review ever 2 years to keep accessible. (An issue: I just had to crack upon an old NAS storage hard drive, to gain access to records from 8 years ago, and we probably won’t even have software to view 1/4th to 1/3rd of them. We don’t eve own Quark anymore, so any Quark file that didn’t have a PDF copy is essentially dead to us. )

Data longevity is important, but so is data accessibility. So PDFs, text, and html are our formats of choice (and images). And Evernote handles them, indexes them, stores remote copies, desktop copies, creates a searchable database, integrates that database into spotlight, and more. So right now, I’m looking at it as a possible longterm solution. And having the desktop component to that was essential, because well websites occasionally fail.

I guess I can’t complain too much about the interface on a beta product.  That is not an excuse for me though, if they didn’t think it was ready then they wouldn’t let people use it, beta or no. 

This does seem better than what I originally remembered.  I believe there were a lot of quirks which made usability difficult. 

I don’t remember the note switcher being there (switch from text to drawn.)  It must have been there because the interface would not make sense without it.  But I remember that being one of my main gripes.  There was that drawing area which just took up space and I couldn’t get rid of it.  Maybe they had both methods of creating a note there but no switcher.

Anyways, looks like it is getting better but it seems really slow.

I find Evernote speed reasonable, but speaking of slow, painfully slow betas; let’s talk Twine. I’m really, really, trying to give it a good go, because I think a good semantic web application has a lot of potential. But it routinely takes 10-20 seconds to login to the application. And I’m always trying to come up with tricks to get past the current limitations.

That said, they really are one of the few web application in Beta, that is an actual Beta, as opposed to ‘we just want a fail safe status in case people don’t like us’.  The downside, is the system just isn’t ready for the average user. I hand out invitations with a slew of disclaimers and links to help pages, because wow, that bad. But still that said, there are somethings about it that are good, and could be great if they worked faster, and paid more attention to users need versus the semantic infrastructure.