Archive for June, 2008

What’s the toughest thing to remember? For me, it’s websites. Everyday, I visit tons of sites: blogs, shopping, news, recipes, and travel. It’s too much. I’ve actually stopped bookmarking because it’s so hard to find anything in the sea of links, and when I do go back, the page is often gone or changed. Since Evernote is a single place for all of your memories, (websites you visit are memories too, you know) we thought we could do better.

Introducing, the new Evernote Web Clipper, which gives you the ease and simplicity of bookmarking, but more importantly, also gives you context by saving the text, images, and links, including the source URL, right into your Evernote account. Once the page, or part of a page, is saved into your account, you can tag, organize, search, browse, edit, and remember it forever.

I use the web clipper when I’m researching vacations, looking for a good recipe, or when I run across neat technical articles. With a single click, I have the content saved. So, even if the page goes away, my memory of it doesn’t.

Most importantly, because the web clipper is part of Evernote, you can have more than just copies of web pages. You can remember all sort of stuff such as, pictures, personal notes, doodles on napkins, and anything else, all accessible online, offline, and from your phone.

Here’s a short video where Andrew shows us how to install and use the web clipper:

Here’s another idea. Find a recipe online and clip it into Evernote. Then, when you’re at the store, bring the note up on your phone using Evernote Mobile Web: instant shopping list.

A little technical detail: You don’t need to reinstall the bookmarklet (the little browser button that says “Clip to Evernote”) if you already have it. It automatically upgrades to the latest version. Otherwise, go on and install it. Just drag or add the green clipper button below to your link bar.

Now, get out there and start clipping!

If you’ve been using Evernote for more than, oh, 2 days, then you probably noticed some pretty dramatic changes to the Evernote Web interface. Not only does it look great (*collective pat on the back*), but the new interface is also more user friendly, a whole lot zippier, and it saves a ton of vertical space, which makes it more usable at different screen sizes and resolutions. We also cleaned up the UI by removing redundant actions that can now be accomplished with drag and drop and multi-selection, such as tagging, moving, and deleting notes and notebooks.

Sign in or create an account to see for yourself.

Firefox 3 Support

In other big news, Evernote Web now fully supports Firefox 3! No more pesky popup messages.

Enjoy.

Big news today: Evernote is now in Open Beta and we’ve rolled out many changes, including premium accounts.

Four months ago, we introduced the invitation-only private beta of the new Evernote service.  Our goal was to get about 10,000 people to use the system so we could fine-tune our servers and try out new features.  We were blown away by the response and watched with equal parts of glee and horror as the closed beta users count passed 10,000, then 25,000, then 50,000…  By the end of the four months, over 125,000 people had participated in the closed-beta!  Luckily, our hardware, software and team held up with only minor incidents of spontaneous combustion.

Since launching the closed beta, we’ve released new feature updates virtually every week and today we took the biggest step of all: Evernote is now open to the world!  You no longer need an invitation to create an account.  Anyone can sign up right from www.evernote.com and start using your shiny new external brain in 60 seconds.

We now have two types of accounts: Free and Premium.

Free users will keep all of the features of the closed beta, including automatic synchronization between Windows, Mac, Web and mobile phone clients and advanced image search.  There is no limit to the total number of notes that you can store.  Free accounts can upload up to 40 megabytes of new notes into the service every month.

For $5 per month (or only $45/year, because we’re bad at math), you can upgrade to a premium account.  Premium users have their upload quota raised to 500 megabytes of new notes per month and get a number of other goodies, including enhanced security through SSL for all data transmission (free users only get SSL for login), priority access to the recognition queues (for much faster image recognition, even during peak busy times) and premium customer support.

You can try out a premium account at any time without worry: if you ever decide to go back to a free account, you’ll still have all of your notes (you’ll just go back to 40 megs per month for new notes).

We’ve also got a limited number of stylish Evernote launch t-shirts (pictured above) that we’ll give away to one-year subscribers until we run out of stock.  I’ve been wearing one around the Las Vegas strip lately and getting more compliments than I deserve.  People just like swirling pink elephants.

For more info on free and premium accounts, check out http://www.evernote.com/about/premium/.

Two more big changes are going to get their own blog posts soon, but you can try them out right away: we’ve got a brand new web clipper and a completely redesigned web interface.  I think you’ll like them.

We’re excited (and a bit scared) about abandoning the relative shelter of the private beta for the open waters ahead, but if we’re really going to expand everyone’s memory, we’ve got to let everyone in.  As always, let us know how we can improve.  We’ll be keeping up the rapid pace of new development throughout the open beta.

Thanks to the 125,000.

Wish us luck!

With our latest releases, we’re introducing monthly upload allowances to Evernote.

What’s a monthly upload allowance?
The monthly upload allowance is a measure of how much new data you add to your account on the Evernote web service in a given month. For all of our existing users, the month starts today, June 13. Oh, and don’t worry, all the notes you’ve created and all the features you’ve grown to love aren’t going anywhere.

How much do I get?
All free accounts are set to 40 megabytes per month. At the start of each month, your allowance is reset and you get a fresh forty. This means that if you max out your account every month, you’ll have 480MB of notes at the end of the year.

You’d be surprised how much 40MB gets you in Evernote terms. Here’s a rough estimate:

• Typed notes: 20,000
• Ink notes: 10,000
• Mobile snapshots: 400
• Web clips: 270
• Audio notes: 40

How is the monthly upload allowance calculated?
Every time something new is added to your account on the Evernote web service, it counts towards your monthly upload allowance. So, if you have 10MB remaining for a given month and you add a note containing a 1MB image, that will leave you with 9MB for the month. One important thing to keep in mind, you cannot add to your monthly allowance by deleting a note. So, deleting that 1MB note will not bring you back up to 10MB. Notes kept in local notebooks are not sent to the web service and therefore do not count towards your monthly upload allowance.

What if I want more?
Hang in there. We’re putting the finishing touches on our premium subscription, which will offer a significantly higher monthly upload allowance and a bunch of other goodies.

How do I know how much I have remaining?
We’ve built meters into Evernote for Windows, Evernote for Mac, Evernote Web, and Evernote for Windows Mobile to show exactly how far along you are.

There are also a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, so make sure to update Evernote on all the platforms that you use.

I use Evernote to collect all of the interesting things I see, wherever I am. For me, a big part of collecting is sharing, so I tend to make a lot of public Evernote notebooks (see: publishing notes). We recently added a new option that makes sharing a lot more flexible: The Evernote Widget.

Here is a widget of funny things I’ve found on the internet:

Think of the Evernote Widget as a portable version of a public notebook. You can create a widget from any public notebook and embed it directly into your blog, Facebook, and MySpace pages. Here is what you can do with it:

• Share notes from any public notebook
• Display thumbnails, titles, and links to the notes
• Search right from the widget, even for text within images

Get your own

Follow these steps to get your widget:

1. Go to a public notebook (yours or someone else’s)
2. Click the ‘Get Widget’ link beneath the search bar
3. Click ‘Add to Facebook’ or click the code to copy it
4. Paste the code into your blog or anywhere that takes HTML

Share your memories as they happen

Here’s how to set up the Evernote Widget to instantly share everything from mobile snapshots to web clips to audio notes as soon as you create them:

1. Make your default notebook public
2. Create a widget of that notebook
3. Embed the widget on your blog, Facebook, or MySpace page.

Now, whenever you create and sync new notes, your friends will instantly see them.

More sharing options are on the way. Stay tuned.

A couple of weeks ago, we introduced multi-selection checkboxes to Evernote Web. Now, we’re taking that once step further with the addition of drag-n-drop.

Here’s what you can drag

• Drag notes between notebooks
• Drag notes onto tags or tags onto notes
• Drag notes, tags, and notebooks into the trash
• Create nested tags

Give it a shot.