Archive for April, 2008

We are huge (HUGE) fans of the Apple iPhone. While the current Evernote mobile web interface works well on iPhones, it’s just not the same as having an application that’s tailored to the device.

Today, we’re unveiling the new Evernote iPhone web interface at:

http://www.evernote.com/iphone

We’re still testing and improving it, but we didn’t want to wait to give you access

In creating the Evernote iPhone web interface, we were able to rethink our mobile user experience. Whereas our standard mobile web application allows users to find notes by performing text searches, the iPhone version adds the ability quickly filter notes by navigating through lists of tags, notebooks, and note attributes to construct complex searches without typing. We think users are really going to like the ability to search and filter on their phone just as they can on the web or desktop applications.

One challenge we faced when designing the iPhone web interface was how to deal with large, complex notes. We decided that although the iPhone UI makes it easy to zoom and pan a web page, for Evernote the best experience should be more like reading email. Also, as in the standard mobile web version, we scale all the images on our servers, so you don’t have to download your 12MP images to your phone’s small screen. In addition to being able to email and delete notes, you can also zoom into a note, which will open it up in a separate browser tab with the full size images.

We know you’re going to ask, so here are the answers to some questions:

• Yes, we will begin auto-detecting iPhones soon. For now, iPhone users will need to go to the URL above
• You can use the two-finger gesture to pan around large images

The new Evernote closed beta is about two months old and we’ve just passed an important milestone: our first one million notes!  During this time, we’ve made lots of improvements to the service and we’ll be announcing a few more big things in the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned.

To celebrate (and to do some stress testing on our registration servers), we’re giving away instant beta accounts to everyone who clicks on this secret url (http://www.evernote.com/Registration.action?code=1MN0tes) from 6 am to 9 pm, California time, today.  If you miss the time window but want an account, just sign up using the normal beta application and we’ll send you an invitation soon.

Big thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to test Evernote and send us feedback!  We couldn’t do it without you.

Say you’re using Evernote to plan a trip. You’ve been clipping webpages of hotels and restaurants, typing itineraries, snapping photos of your travel documents (just in case). Now, you want to give all of your travel buddies access to this information. Evernote lets you do that.

By default, everything you create in Evernote is private, but you can easily publish any notebook to the web. Here are instructions for how to do this using the web and Mac clients. This is coming very soon to Windows. For now, Windows users can publish their notebooks using Evernote Web.

1. Select the notebook you want to publish
2.
- Web: Click on the Actions dropdown and select Settings
- Mac: Cmd + click on the notebook and select Notebook Settings
3. Click Publish
Optional step: Add a description
4. Copy the URL (don’t click the URL yet, the notebook isn’t saved)
5. Click OK or Save
6. Mac only: Click Sync

That’s it. That URL is now publicly available, so send it to anyone, even subscribe to the RSS feed. Stay tuned for more publishing and sharing options in the very near future.

Here’s a notebook I made during a recent trip to the Napa Valley.

Do you have an interesting public notebook? Post a link in the comments.

Visual step-by-step: Evernote Web

Visual step-by-step: Evernote for Mac

Security and privacy are extremely important topics for Evernote users, and for good reason. Evernote would like to provide a single service to manage your memories for many years. To achieve this, we must provide a very high level of system and data security while offering users a variety of choices to manage their own privacy requirements. Here is a high-level overview of some of the ways in which your data is protected by Evernote.

When you add a note to the service, it is secured like your email would be at a high-end email provider. This means that your notes are stored in a private, locked cage at a guarded data center that can only be accessed by a small number of Evernote operations personnel. Administrative maintenance on these servers can only be performed through secure, encrypted communications by the same set of people. All network access to these servers is similarly protected by a set of firewalls and hardened servers. Your login information is only transmitted to the servers in encrypted form over SSL, and your passwords are not directly stored on any of our systems.

We also offer enhanced privacy options that would not be available from services like email:

If you have sensitive text that you would like to remember (passwords, PINs, credit card numbers), you can encrypt that text in our Windows client (Mac coming soon) using a passphrase that is never transmitted to Evernote. This encrypted text can only be decrypted and read on one of your computers after you’ve re-entered the encryption passphrase. The sensitive text is not readable on our servers or on your computer by anyone who does not know the passphrase.

If you have some notes that you only want to access from a single computer, you can place these into a “Local Notebook” on our Windows or Mac client. Notes in a Local Notebook are never transmitted to our service, so they aren’t accessible from the web, or from your other computers. This may allow a greater level of privacy for some notes, at the expense of the accessibility and reliability you would get from a private note on the service.

Evernote recognizes that user choice is an important component of privacy and security. We believe that no single option is going to meet the needs of all users, so we aim to offer a set of tools that let people balance their needs for accessibility, privacy and control.

Lots of Mac users out there love Skitch. It’s a great application for image editing, screen grabbing, and annotations. In this short video, we show how easy it is to use Skitch with Evernote. Plus, you get to see the Evernote recognition technology in action.

If you’re in the mood for some takeout in San Francisco, here’s the public notebook of take out menus that we showed in the video.

Sign up for an invitation to the Evernote Beta.

History

In the early stages of the Evernote Service development the Web Clipper was just an easy way for developers to get content into the development notebooks quickly. It also helped us test our HTML sanitizer which makes sure no nefarious javascript makes it into users notebooks. First there was a command-line version, then a little clipper that just sent the URL’s to Evernote but didn’t work on secure sites. As we approached the final weeks before the beta launch we decided that the Javascript Web clipper was going to be part of the core service offering. We debated a little, each of the native clients support clipping and screen shots so it wasn’t clear that we really needed another way to clip content, but there was a strong lobby for not wanting to leave the web when you’re capturing web content.

Ultimately we decided that we needed a really good browser based clipper because a key part of the service launch was letting users capture from anywhere.

The version we released did a lot of what we wanted: one click capture, easy install, instant feedback, image and HTML document capture, capture selections of text and images or the whole page. We also support clipping from password protected sites like web-based email clients (which turns out to be kind of tricky).

Launch
Probably 15 minutes after we launched we realized the Web clipper was going to get a lot more use than we planned. In many ways it was just what we’d hoped for, users merged their personal photos and notes with information they gathered from around the web; Evernote helped them bring it all together. The Javascript clipper isn’t entirely bug free, each browser is different and mileage still varies. Also, there are a lot of really bad HTML pages out there and cleaning them up into our own internal variant on XHTML can be tough. For the first month or so I’d get a list of errors logged when the clipper could not save the clipped content from remote web pages. This list of different sites has provided a great source for testing and bug fixing.

Clipper Revisited
With this release the Web clipper has finally become really useful (at least for me and I hope for you).

Tagging and filing the clips as you clip them makes it so much easier to find pages later. I’ll clip sample code from articles, blog posts from Google Reader, recipes and put them straight into the correct notebook.

Some older features also seem more useful. Whenever you clip content, Evernote sets an attribute so you can view all your web clips and then filter by tags, notebooks or other criteria. If you are feeling a bit more adventurous, you may want to try filtering based on source URL. In the search box type: sourceURL:http://www.nytimes and you’ll be able to see all the notes you’ve clipped from the New York Times.

If you put clipped pages into public notebooks or email a note from a clipped page, your friends will also be able to access the source URL.

More to do

I’ve still got more features to add to the web clipper. At the top of the list is “search as you type” tags. Clipping from sites with frames is still a little flaky espacially on Safari. Lastly, I’ve been toying with the idea of recommending tags based on the clipped document’s similarity with other documents you have.