I’m not one of those people that uses a ton of little utility programs. My stable of applications is pretty small and most of the applications are used frequently. Evernote is one of those apps that has slowly been becoming a bigger part of my life over the past few months. I was originally a Google Notebooks user, but made the switch to Evernote when Google made the announcement to shut down their Notebooks service.
I have since come to depend on Evernote for all number of things, only a few of which I will describe here:
Recipe Box
I use Evernote to keep track of all interesting recipes I come across online. Recipes get added to Evernote using the Web Clipper or by scanning in the recipe from a print magazine. I also enjoy cooking by Ratio and use Evernote to track my results from using different ratios for foods like bread doughs, chocolate chip cookies and sausages.
Digital Library for E-Books and Journal Articles
Evernote is my online bookshelf for all my E-books and academic PDFs. I no longer have to worry about where I saved a copy or if it is on the computer I am currently using. With Evernote, I can always find the document, from any computer. Larger PDF files put a strain on my monthly bandwidth limit, but I have yet to actually hit the limit. It this eventually becomes an issue, I can always consider a premium membership. I’ve also had luck scanning in short booklets as PDFs and adding them to Evernote. This works great for things like instruction manuals and warranty cards that come with new products.
Notebook for work
Notes from meetings at work, computer IP addresses and the like all go into a special Evernote notebook. This is a “local notebook” meaning it is not synchronized with the Evernote servers, so everything I enter here stays private. I can only access it from my work laptop, where that notebook resides, which is how I want it. Unfortunately there is no concept of private tags, so I’m not able to tag items in this notebook without having the tags synchronized with the server. When I need to keep track of a diagram or figure, I can snap a quick picture of the paper or whiteboard with my cell phone and put it in this notebook. One other thing that would be very handy here is the ability to draw figures directly into notes with the Mac Evernote client.
Various shopping and organizational lists
Evernote holds all my grocery lists, wishlists and assorted other lists in my life. My big To-do list is stored elsewhere because Evernote doesn’t have all the feature of other list-specific services.
Vacation Planning
I’m planning for several vacations in the next 6 months, ranging from a weekend in the New Hampshire White Mountains to three weeks in South Africa for the 2010 World Cup. Evernote lets me keep track of itineraries, travel activities and other important information for my trips. Whenever I find a website with useful information, it gets clipped into the Vacation notebook. Ideas for activities get texted in when I wake up in the middle of the night with a good idea. Confirmation emails and receipts also end up in the notebook so I can easily find them later.
Records for Homebrewing
I am just beginning to brew beer at home and plan to use Evernote for my record keeping. I don’t have a system in place yet, but plan to use a separate note for each beer. The note will contain details on the brewing process and comments on the resulting beer.
While I find plenty of uses for Evernote already, it could use some improvements in its support for non-mainstream clients. I’m specifically mentioning the Evernote web interface, which does not handle PDFs gracefully and their lack of a Linux client. I’ve recently begun using Evernote on the Android platform and am mostly happy for it, with the exception of missing a Notebook oriented view.
. It is amazing how fast you can bring a Rails application into existence. One of the new features is scaffolding, which uses automatic code generation to create the stub methods for all your Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete methods. For my purposes, this was almost as much as I needed. I only had to create a style-sheet for myself and create a few custom views. It was a far cry from tedious creation of identical code and endless SQL statements that I associate with my web-programming days.