System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 4, 2011 at 10:30 AM

Without saying it’s perfect by any means, I believe that Evernote comes closer to a universal capture system than anything else I’ve tried.

#1 There are innumerable ways to input material into Evernote: capture from web (from just about any browser), send via mail, copy, attach files, direct scan (easier with ScanSnaps I believe), snapshot via smartphone, voice record, handwritten notes via pen interface, note & record via LiveScribe, etc.

#2 Accessing that information is as easy as it gets: universal search across notebooks, full indexing—even of text in images and non OCR’d PDFs, Windows and Mac native clients (why not Linux, I still wonder), smartphone native clients, web interface, local synchronised copies of databases etc.

#3 Organising the information is not Evernote’s strongest point, providing only 2 levels of notebook organisation, but the (unlimited) hierarchical tagging should be enough for most uses. Evernote also allows better suited applications to use it as infrastructure. The easiest way for this is to copy an Evernote info item’s unique link to just about anywhere else.