40Tech

Could Google be launching a competitor to Evernote and Springpad? Google scrapped its Notebooks app quite some time ago, but according to a story on the Verge yesterday, it looks like the company might be ready to get back into the note taking app business. Would you give it a try?

I’m sure that Google will insert many hooks into its other services, that will make the app very tempting. Still, there are a couple of reasons that I probably won’t be leaving Evernote anytime soon.

A recent article on Lifehacker has me wondering if I’m using Evernote all wrong. I only have two main notebooks in Evernote: Work, and Personal. There are a few other random ones that are automatically created by apps, such as the notebook that Scanner Pro, an iOS app, creates. I also have an “Inbox” notebook where notes reside until they are moved into one of the other notebooks. But by and large, all of my notes go into my two main notebooks. Am I in the minority with how I use Evernote notebooks?

At this risk of sounding like a snob, I can say that user reviews of certain iOS apps seem to miss the mark at times, because of uninformed users. This often seems to occur with subscription-based apps, such as LastPass, where users don’t realize that a subscription is required to get the full features of the app. Other times, this happens when users don’t seem to understand the limitations of iOS, and the workarounds that these limitations require of developers. One example of this is EverWebClipper, an app that makes clipping web pages into Evernote much easier on iOS devices, but somehow has received many low reviews.

Put this in the category of “interesting, although I’m not sure I’d use it.” If your whole life is in Evernote, and you also keep a journal, then you may want to check out Ever Journal Free For Evernote. The app lets you input journal entries, which are then sent into Evernote in a “My Journal” notebook.

Last week I wrote about the World’s Most Awesome Paperless Filing System, which lets you drop a document into your scanner and have it automatically renamed and then filed away into the proper folder on your Mac. That system used Hazel, a Mac app, to rename and file documents that appeared in a folder, based on the contents of those documents. As I mentioned in that post, I had chosen that system over previous systems, one of which involved Evernote. If you want to use the automation of Hazel to speed up your paperless system, but still use Evernote, then you’re in luck.

So let’s talk. There’s been a lot of conversation around the web — and on this site — about possible alternatives for Evernote. Springpad was the goto app for many, though the most recent update has pulled them further away from that comparison, and drawn the ire of many users in the process. If you look at Springpad, though, as well as several other apps that offer services that are considered comparable to Evernote (Shelfster, Thinkery, OneNote and Catch, for example), you can define a general criteria for a note taking application that I think — no matter how odd it may sound — could also be met by Google’s latest cloud offering and the new face of Google Docs: Google Drive.

Stick with me. I’d love to have a conversation with you all about this.

It used to be that the biggest comparison Springpad had to contend with was “is it better than Evernote?“ Not anymore. With the newly realized vision of Springpad 3.0, the powerful and flexible digital notebook service now finds itself facing off against the hottest web service du jour: Pinterest.

The folks at Springpad have taken something their software has always been able to do — namely, the ability to collect, organize, and share stuff you find online — prettified it and opened up the social pipelines in a big way. It’s easier to explore for new and interesting content. It’s easier to connect with people who have similar interests. But it’s also easier do something that neither Evernote nor Pinterest can provide without help: make the things that you save actionable.

Today, I discovered the Evernote Clearly extension. Today, my life changed. If you’re a fan of saving articles for later — or just of reading them in an uncluttered, easy on the eyes format — your life might change too. Clearly brings all of the minimalist beauty of iReader and Readability, does it better, and then sweetens the pot with the ability to send a nicely formatted copy of the article to Evernote with a single click.

It’s awesome. You must try it!

If you’re an Evernote fan, then Inc.com has a must-read article for you that takes a behind-the-curtain look at the company. Did you know that the company’s CEO was hours away from pulling the plug on Evernote and laying off everyone in the entire companya few years ago, but for a well-timed email from a fan offering a much-needed infusion of cash? The rest is history, as they say, with Evernote not only receiving millions in funding since then, but actually turning a profit and growing by a million users every month.

We’ve already talked about how you can encrypt files in Evernote. Two of the three methods in that post involved using other programs (one of which is also available on OS X). If you’re on a Mac, though, and want to encrypt PDF files and load them into Evernote, you don’t need any third-party programs at all. OS X can handle encrypting a PDF and getting it into Evernote, all on its own. There’s one slight catch, though.