Maximize Meeting Time With Evernote

iPhone Evernote Sitting in a meeting today, pen and pad in front of me, I was taking notes as usual.  As the meeting wrapped up a co-worker asked, ‘“can someone send out notes from this meeting?”  I volunteered, but before I could say the words another co-worker announced “done”.  I honestly thought he’d been texting or checking his emails, but apparently he had been taking meeting notes on his iPhone with Evernote.

I went back to my desk and immediately downloaded the app to my phone, and it seemed to work pretty well overall. There are versions for the desktop, mobiles phone and web browser. However, a notable difference exists in the app from platform to platform; the functionality is basically the same cross-platform, but the look-and-feel is different depending on the device used.

While taking notes with Evernote, you can use  your phone to automatically upload your snapshots to the app’s server. The most innovative feature is “OCR” (Optical Character Recognition), which allows you to search archived pics by searching for text appearing in the photos. This is great for folks like me that like to write on a whiteboard during meetings, since you can easily snap a picture of the whiteboard and file it away for later use.  This feature could also be handy when taking pictures of products or ads for later research.  You could even use it to take pictures of people with name tags at conferences. The idea is that it can really easy to ‘remember everything’ (as their slogan goes).

Projects on your phone, computer, or tablet are synchronized automatically to your Evernote web account. Since it synchronizes regularly, reinstalling the application or losing data because of a crash isn’t as big a tragedy as it could be.

For Android: Evernote is offering a preview at the 2.0 release of their Android capture client, and it looks promising. According to their release announcement virtually all aspects of the app have been improved. There’s a more intuitive search function, and capturing new notes is smoother.  Read the announcement for the full list of new features and improvements.