Evernote: The Best Notepad I've Ever Used

During my time off these past few months, I've had the privilege of being swamped with creativity. So much, in fact, that it's kind of prevented me from actually creating anything! However, the situation could have been a lot worse if I hadn't been using Evernote.

 

This is a fairly simply note taking tool. It lets you create a new note from a global hotkey, and quickly jot down whatever is on your mind. The note can then be tagged, and is saved as soon as you finish typing.

Once you've got a heap of notes, you can browse all your notes on a long roll sorted by date, filtering them by tags or keyword searches. This is pretty expected functionality, but in practice Evernote makes the process very smooth an intuitive.

Finally, Evernote has a few other special features that bump it over a glorified todo.txt:

• Full RTF and HTML support, so notes can be formatted with bullets, tables and images.
• Online syncing and writing: You can rune Evernote on multiple computers and have the same set of notes on each, as well as creating and accessing those notes online, and posting new notes by email.
• If you use the online syncing, it also performs text recognition in photos, which is used by the search index. Take a photo of that napkin game design, email it to your notebook, and search for it later.

Evernote is definitely not a replacement for the personal wiki that many of us have. It doesn't allow notes to be linked to each other, and can't impose any structure on notes other than tags and dates. But for something fast, easy, and transparent to make sure that your ideas get recorded somewhere, and are available whenever you need them, you could hardly do better.

Evernote Home Page