There’s millions of things each of us need to keep up with, but usually we actually only end up keeping up with the very most important things we’re supposed to remember. Sure, we usually remember the most important phone numbers, passwords, and ID numbers, but beyond that, it can be very difficult to remember everything.
Evernote bills itself as a digital extension for your brain. You can store all of your notes, images, and more in it, then quickly search and find anything you need. You’ll never have to forget anything, ever again. While Evernote is widely popular on smartphones, it has recently been updated with a beautiful web app that makes your important info accessible from anywhere. Keep reading to see the great features that have been added to one of the world’s most popular note apps.
Evernote: One of the Most Cross-Platform Apps
Evernote started out as a notebook app for Windows PCs, but the launch of the iPhone and increasing popularity of smartphones over the past few years has really made Evernote an indispensable app for users around the globe. You can snap a picture of anything, clip a portion of a website, or jot down a note, and then find it later from any of your devices. The underlying system is built on a web app that keeps everything in sync, but most people use it through the beautiful desktop and mobile apps that have made it popular.
The Evernote Apps offer a rich interface for your notes
The Evernote web app used to include far fewer features than its desktop and mobile counterparts, and didn’t include the nicest web app interface, either. That’s all changed now with the brand new Evernote web app. The Evernote team has given the web app a full new interface, dozens of new features, and more. Finally, you could use Evernote just from your browser, and miss out on little.
The brand new Evernote web app
Beautiful Notes, Online and Offline
The new Evernote web app brings the desktop interface to the web. You can view thumbnails of your notes, or sort them into a clean list. The list view gives you a number of ways to find the notes you’re looking for, as you can sort the columns by their title, date created, or date edited. Or, use the revamped search box, which gives you automatic prompts to help you find the words you’re looking for. Your notes aren’t very useful if you can’t find them, but you won’t have to worry about that with the new web app.
The notes list view in the Evernote web app
The Evernote web editor works almost just like the Windows and Mac note editor. You can format your text, choose from several traditional fonts, add outlines and to-dos, and more. This lets you edit anything in your existing notes, or create new notes online with the same options you could have used offline. You can even edit a note’s metadata, including tags, links, and location info. Best of all, the Evernote web app auto-saves your work, so you won’t have to worry about losing anything you’re entering.
Once you’re finished editing, you can save your notes privately into any of your notebooks. Or, you can make your notes public, and share them with your friends via email, Facebook, or with a unique link. This is a great way to quickly publish a simple page with rich text, links, tags, images, and up to 25Mb of file attachments.
Format notes richly right in your browser
The Evernote desktop and mobile apps have always let you add pictures, audio recordings, PDF documents, and more to notes, which makes it easy to keep all of your data organized. Whenever you search your notebooks, you can quickly find files that include those words, including text in images. The web app didn’t originally let you add files, but the recent updates have added an upload button. What’s more, you can even drag and drop files from your computer to your notes in Chrome and Safari!
Drag and drop files to upload them from Chrome and Safari
Even Better With Chrome
In addition to the web app and desktop apps, Evernote can integrate great with most popular browsers. You’ll have to install Evernote for Windows or Mac, respectively, to add it to Internet Explorer or Safari, but you can use Evernote in Chrome without installing any desktop version. The Chrome Evernote Web Clipper offers the best integration of any Evernote addon, and lets you clip content from websites and search your notes right from the extension. It’ll work on Chrome on any platform, including the upcoming Chromebooks, and can make it even easier to use Evernote to store all of the stuff you need to remember online.
Find notes and clip web content from the Chrome Web Clipper
Conclusion
I’ve used Evernote off and on for the past several years, and have used it extensively to archive interesting items I come across online. However, I usually prefer to type my notes from college and meetings in plain text, and have increasingly used the Simplenote web app to store my notes. Many rich note apps such as Evernote seem to run increasingly slow on the desktop as you add more data, while plain text is always quick and easy to view and search. The new Evernote web app, though, has brought the best of both worlds. It’s speedy, and yet still works great with any formatting (or the lack thereof) that you want to include.
If you’ve given Evernote a try, and couldn’t find the web app usable enough for your needs, it might be time to give it another shot. It’s an impressive way to keep up with everything you need to remember. With the new web app, it’s an equally nice app on any platform, too!