With incomparable text recognition to help you extend your brain’s memory, Evernote becomes a go-to app
Getting onto my list of indispensable means getting over a very high bar. There are only a handful of applications that meet the standard — and those have to meet a specific criteria: “Is it more difficult to get through a day without it than with it?”
It took a while to make the list, but Evernote recently achieved that status. I now load the app on every phone; it’s on my PC and Mac; and it’s a go-to application when I want to have something handy at any time.
At its core, Evernote is a note-taking application on the cloud. You type your notes into Evernote and it saves it for use later — giving you the ability to easily find the correct note with a few keystrokes. Its strength and competitive advantage come from a few things it does better than alternatives:
- It allows you to import scanned images, such as handwritten notes; then it automatically uses character recognition to index your notes for future use.
- Its character recognition is beyond compare. It really does recognize most of your words, whether typed or hand written — and it gets it mostly right.
- You can even use your cell phone camera to capture images or external notes — and if it sees text, it will use its character recognition on those too.
- It lets you grab items from the web in a few clicks; and it filters the information on the page so your saved Evernote is uncluttered and easy to read — without losing key images, headings & sections
- It syncs in the cloud, so you have your same notes available on all your devices
So, after experimenting for more than a year, I now rely on it every day. Even got my wife to load it on her phone so we can share important notes and lists.
There are other products with many similar capabilities that are very good — such as OneNote from Microsoft But in the long run, you can’t use them all without causing long run problems. Evernote is a great choice to be your one go-to product to extend your memory beyond its normal bounds. And it’s inexpensive — as little as Free; more likely $5/month.
Find more of my posts and articles around the web, including in TEQ.