Today is a big day for Evernote. Today is the day that Evernote becomes more useful, more powerful and more exciting for every user. Every partner. Everyone.
For the past two years, Evernote has been focused on one goal: helping the world remember everything. All of the decisions we’ve made have been in support of that vision. Along the way, we realized that to make it happen we’d need a little help from our friends, so we released the Evernote API. While we were busy expanding and improving Evernote, developers across the world were building applications that added features and functionality to our young platform, expanding into areas we never imagined. That was then.
Today, there are more than 2000 developers building hardware and software application that hook into the Evernote memory platform. Products that, thanks to Evernote, become accessible from everywhere, sync between devices and have powerful search capabilities. For developers, Evernote has become a way to gain useful functionality. For users, every integration adds layers of usefulness to their Evernote experiences.
Which brings us to the big announcement: Welcome to the Evernote Trunk.
The Evernote Trunk: Discovery and Exposure
The Trunk is a showcase of great apps and products that makes your Evernote experience more awesome.
To access it, click on the new “Trunk” icon in today’s update to Evernote for Windows and Evernote for Mac (Evernote Web later today, iPad next week). Clicking it opens a window full of amazing intergrations. Today, there are nearly 100 items listed across five categories: Mobile, Desktop & Web, Hardware, Gear, and Notebooks (this one is really cool, more on that later).
Of the nearly 100 launch items, around a third are completely new products and integrations. Importantly, new or old, every single integration is in the spotlight. Wondering which scanner works with Evernote? You should check the Trunk. Want to know which Twitter clients sends tweets into Evernote? Look in the Trunk. Which devices come pre-installed with Evernote? You know where to go. Now, every product developer gets exposed to millions of Evernote users, and millions of Evernote user see how to get more out of Evernote. Pretty great!
Fantastic new integrations
We’re excited not only by the potential of the Trunk, but also by the amazing new integrations that we’re launching today. Some represent highly-requested functionality, such as voice transcription, PDF annotation, mind mapping, sharing, contact management, and more. Here are some highlights:
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Voice transcription: Voice2Note, pliq.me, Quicktate
Today we’re launching with three great voice transcription services. Let’s focus on the Voice2Note integration by Dial2Do. Once you link your Evernote and Voice2Note accounts, Voice2Note will automatically go through your Evernote account, find any new voice notes, transcribe them, then insert the transcribed text into the note. They also have a phone number that you can call, and your voice recording will be transcribed and added to your Evernote account. Voice2Note has a free and paid version. -
PDF annotation: PDFpen (Mac), Nitro PDF Reader (Windows)
Evernote now has PDF annotation. PDFpen by SmileOnMyMac and Nitro PDF Reader allow you to annotate your PDF and then send them into Evernote for safekeeping. This is particularly great for signing and saving digital contracts. -
Mind mapping: Zeptopad Planner Note
Create mind maps on your iPad using this incredibly intuitive application, then save it all into Evernote - So much more: Read It Later, Lil’grams, ScanBizCards, Receipts, and many more.
Unexpected connections
What makes the Evernote memory platform so interesting is the way that it connects seemingly unrelated products and applications. Now, a notable Twitter message sent to Evernote from Seesmic can be pulled into SAP StreamWork to help with a group project. Or, a child’s scribble sent to Evernote from EverPaint can be instantly shared with family and friends on Lil’grams. Or, a photo of a wine label snapped by an Eye-Fi Card-equipped camera can help generate a meaningful reminder in reQall. All of these connections would have been unlikely, but now with Evernote they’re seamless. Explore the Trunk to find ways to use applications together in ways you never thought possible.
Exclusive Notebook partners
And now for something completely different…With the Trunk, Evernote becomes a powerful content distribution platform. In the run-up to the launch we worked closely with some of our favorite blogs and publications to launch the new Notebooks category. In this section, you will find exclusive content created for Evernote by Make Magazine, Cool Hunting, California Home and Design, and BlackBook. We also have a great collection of puzzles and games from Puzzazz.com and dozens of Evernote Tips.
Importing Notebooks in your account
The Trunk allows users to select the branded Notebooks that they like, and have the notebooks imported directly into their Evernote accounts. Like adding a new book to your shelf, once you choose a notebook from one of our partners, it will instantly appear in your account. But that’s only the beginning. If for example, you choose the Make:Projects Home and Garden notebook, Evernote will add a notebook full of great do-it-yourself projects into your account. In Evernote that notebook is more than a piece of static content, it’s a starting point for all of the other DIY projects you come across. The same is true for the Cool Hunting Travel Notebook. The editors of Cool Hunting have collected lots of useful travel tips into the notebook, and that same notebook is also where you can place your own travel ideas and related research. What makes these branded Notebooks so intriguing is that all of the content represents the jumping off point for your creativity and exploration.
Much more to come
You will be hearing a lot more about the Evernote Trunk in the next weeks and months. First, we’ll be adding it to more Evernote platforms. Later this year, we’ll be adding in-Trunk purchasing and other revenue opportunities for products and Notebooks. But most importantly, we will be constantly adding new integrations and new notebooks to the Trunk. Make sure to check back often. In fact, it should become the first place you look when you’re thinking about getting something new. With so many great products, why invest your time and money in something that doesn’t hook into Evernote?
Join the Trunk
If you’re interested in having your product or Notebook listed in the Trunk, then send us a request here.
159 Comments
A,ex Seropian
I’m excited to have things hook into my Evernote memory platform, that can’t even reliably save my iPhone notes, and crashes half of the rest of the time.
Good job, guys.
ghosttie
Well that was disappointing
Mugo
+1
sherbourne
+2
nev
+1
Mike
+1
Alex
Hope it will not be too complex to use. And will last
Murat Kayi
yep, I am underwhelmed…
Nicholai
Sweet! An ‘app store’ like extension for Evernote. This has a lot of potential, manage it well guys. Keep it easy to navigate & find great and useful integrations (star system?).
I read in a post or heard in a podcast previously that shared notebooks for the desktop & mobile clients was in the oven for this summer. I hope that’s still cooking — I think THAT would be extremely useful and will help Evernote grow much quicker, thanks to the social/collaborative aspect.
Thomas
I hope dropbox is in the trunk….:)
B. Moore
This is awesome!
Thank You for always pushing the envelope!
JLC
If I understand this correctly I am a little disappointed. I already had the capability to annotate pdf’s on my mac in the preview app and drag them into EN. What I was looking forward to was the ability to do it w/i EV so I could use my iPad for that purpose during class and meetings. Is that functionality coming next week with the iPad release?
Thank you for a great product. Not sure about the platform/partner approach as opposed to adding functionality in the base product though. Maybe other posters will help me see the light.
Rob Parnell
The Trunk Idea, Good enough. If I had an iPad – it would be great.
_
However, I do not, and not planning to get an iPad – till the version 3 – comes out.
_
Trying to be nice. So, what about the Dropbox? Maybe, in a few hours, it will be explained.
_
Okay?
Vinnie Harris
Well done, Evernote! The new products and integrations look engaging, and I will be trying many of them very soon. I like the thoughtfulness and creativity with these new additions to your already super cool and extremely useful Evernote product.
Steve Rose
Congratulations Evernote. Love the Trunk name too
Gregg
I agree with JLC. Pretty weak. Nothing really new in EN functionality. Just an advertising platform
Justin
An Evernote app store and a wannabe RSS reader? How about hand written notes on the iPad? Ya know…something people actually want. I understand you guys need to make money, but the focus on integrations seems to have completely stalled work on the actual Evernote product.
Minerva
Can we finally get the ability to share notebooks in the actual evernote client and not on the super ugly web interface?? Seems like you are doing that with the notebooks that we can pull down via trunk, but premium users can’t do that themselves with each other. Seems lame to me
Also can we get some sort of note to note linking, referencing? You know, like what wikis had years ago?
Those would be nice.
Courier
This is a brilliant innovation and one that will save me searching the net for integration partners
Happy Days!
Paul Papadimitriou
Congratulations for this nice addition. Best way to keep up with the infinite possibilities Evernote offers.
Dave Parks
Love using Evernote! Love the idea of Notebook sharing. Great for long distance collaberations.
las
Hopefully some of these mobile apps will be developed for android phone users.
Paul R
really disappointing..
Steve
Well, that was disappointing. I also would like to see more work done on expanding the baseline functionality (voice recognition, todo list management, etc) of the premium Evernote product rather than farming it out to third-party developers each with their own additional costs.
jammer(six)
Still no server-side encryption of attachments? Yawn.
edward d
Subfolders anyone?
Chris
How do you guys do it? Every single time you come out with some new innovation, it completely blows me away! I am so pumped about the branded-notebook import feature, it’s really cool and has a lot of potential if more partners jump on-board with their notebooks.
Mike Bean
Honestly, I’m not sure I “get” it. I mean, from the business point of view, it’s obvious why they would want to do something like this, I just don’t quite understand why I (as a customer) am supposed to care.
Rob Crawford
Hmmm… seems more like a “feature” for the company than for users. At least, so far.
I made my Windows copy check for upgrades — it said there weren’t any. I checked the download site, and hey! it had a more recent version available. I installed that, and it has the “trunk” button.
Which does nothing. Oh wait — the activity log shows it throws an exception. Apparently the proxy authentication that works perfectly with the “sync” button does not work at all with the “trunk” button. Huh?
The web version has nothing new, yet, and I won’t be able to check out the Mac version until I get home.
I love Evernote, but so far this is worse than underwhelming.
Rob Crawford
OK, so the Mac version works as advertised, but after pawing through the offerings in the “Trunk”, it’s still underwhelming.
Any chance of getting a consistent set of features across all platforms? Ink notes on the iPad? How about getting a Windows client that works?
Patty
I’m with a lot of you that just don’t “get” it either. I’m thinking this could be something really good when I understand it, but I’m not sure yet. I asked for nested folders and a calender feature and this sounds way more complicated than that. We will just have to see. I’ve always loved what EverNote could do, so I’m sure it will be ok eventually.
Gregg
Dont get me wrong. In 25 years of Mac love, EN is my number one app. But this was disappointing. Instead of notebook, call it dumptruck. Can I uninstall this “upgrade?”
Dave
Very cool and exciting stuff, but my question still comes down to: can I use it to achieve sub-notes? Do the apps sync?
Ranvir Gujral
Hi, I’m from Lil’Grams and we couldn’t be more excited about our new integration with Evernote and the Evernote Trunk. I’m an avid Evernote user, and this is a great way to integrate other useful services.
Sorry for the interjection, but I just wanted to let everyone know that we’re offering a year of Lil’Grams for free to all Evernote customers with the promotion code EVERNOTE. You can learn more about our integration here, if you’re interested: http://blog.lilgrams.com/2010/07/14/announcing-evernote-integration/
Daniel
While I am now, and have been for some time, very excited about Evernote integration capabilities in other apps, this “new” thing is not really new at all. It’s a pop-up window that opens a web page that lists out integrated apps. It’s basically a redesign and update to your “works with us” page. As far as I can tell, these integrations all use the same API that has existed for a long time now.
Hooray for great integrations like Voice2Note and others. Boo for a lot of hype over an announcement that included no core feature additions or enhancements.
I really need the ability to edit rich text on mobile devices without needing to destroy or merely append to the note. I want a real rich text editor across clients that can be a light Word replacement (one thing that Zoho notebook has over Evernote). Better tables, better layout of images in text, perhaps the ability to create multi-page notes (like a Powerpoint slide show). More intelligent and customizable handling of e-mailed notes and attachments. For Pete’s sake a better PDF client that can search within PDFs and highlight word matches. And by the way, Evernote has awesome character recognition in images (perhaps the one killer feature that elevates it above the competition). I think that similarly, voice transcription of audio / video notes should be a built-in feature of the platform (for Premium users) and not absolutely require 3rd party software.
When can we expect to see some feature updates, rather than a web page redesign with a link in the Windows client that opens said web page?
Lynn
I’m disappointed too. I wanted Folders to put my notebooks in. You’d think that would be so easy considering I have it everywhere else on my iMac? It won’t be long before I won’t be able to add another notebook to EN, so I’m running out of time.
Kit
Maybe I’m missing something, but the Trunk itself doesn’t seem to be Evernote-friendly. Is there a way to clip info from the Trunk to my Evernote, or to view the Trunk from a regular web browser so I can clip info from it to my Evernote? (Among other things, I use Evernote to keep track of software I’d like to try.)
JP
I agree with a lot of the comments. I was hoping for more improvements to the actual app (shared folders inside of the EN client, sub-notes, etc.) The integration with the 3rd party partners is cool but I think most of us were hoping for a major upgrade to the software itself (especially considering the buzz prior to the press conference this morning). I’m still a huge EN fan and it will continue to be one of my most highly utilized apps. Thanks for making a great product! Hopefully you can roll out some of those other changes soon.
Leilei
I was hoping for templates like I get with OneNote. Did I miss something here?
Andrew Sinkov
We plan on adding various templates to the Trunk soon.
Hmmm (again)
Not sure I like the way this is going. Like a lot of people, I was hoping for an enhancement on the basic product. I have not yet subscribed to EN, but was considering it. I am a little confused by this annoucement though? Presumably, if a 3rd party app introduces an ‘upgrage/enhancement’, (AT A COST), then EN will no longer persue the same for their own product on the basis that this would take out the 3rd party (which would seem like poor business practice to me). So it started with a brilliant product, with a fantastic premium price, but….. looking ahead, this product could cost me a lot more money. Hmmmm, really not sure about this!
Liz
Would rather have had a Linux version of Evernote…
Julie
Well, it’s a nice idea, but the Mobile section is horribly frustrating. If I have an Android handset, a list of iPhone/iPad apps (or rather a list of apps wth no clue as to platform required to run them) is no use to me at all, and vice-versa. (I haven’t checked them all, because I couldn’t be bothered clicking on each one in turn, but I don’t suppose there’s anything at all listed for Symbian handsets.) It’s really important to tag / sort / filter mobile apps by platform **in the list** so that I can ignore any that I can’t have anyway … and the current Trunk doesn’t.
The same is true, of course, for Desktop apps. Mac apps are no use to Windows users and vice-versa (unless they’re running emulators or dual-booting), so it’s really frustrating to find a promising-looking app, only to find it doesn’t run on the platform that you have.
Evernote does tagging and filtering, so please tag and allow us to filter the Trunk info so that we can exclude stuff we can’t use anyway.
Julie
Greg
Quick suggestion: It would be nice if there were a way to limit the list to the various formats. The first three cool apps I clicked on were iPhone only, and I use Android. Could you make a filter that gives select Android and Windows and leave out the things I can’t use?
Andrew Sinkov
Thanks for the suggestion. We’re looking into expanding our categorization/filtering functions in the future.
Ugur
How about:
* Subnotebooks
* Internote linking (look how AskSam or Wikis are doing it)
Two features I’d love to see
Ugur
Oh yeah, and shared notebooks, that also would be great
Trufagus
The ‘trunk’ icon on my toolbar is essentially an advertisement for additional products. Putting it on a menu would be one thing, but there is no reason that I need it on the toolbar.
The reason I have a problem with this is that I am paying quite a bit of money to avoid having advertisements in Evernote. If I wasn’t paying it would be acceptable.
Please allow paying customers to remove this new ad.
Brian
I fear this will be putting us, the customers, in the box… you know… the one posted in the blog under the red blanket. Sure, we’ll eventually be getting more and more functionality, but to get that we’ll probably have to pay for many of those features because they will be offered by other companies using EN’s API. So what costs me five dollars a month could turn into a bigger monthly bill if I want features that should be included in EN in the first place.
What’s worse – EN probably won’t add these features to their own product. Doing so would cut another possible revenue stream.
Disappointing news indeed.
Kit
Answering my own question: A web version of the Trunk is available from the web version of Evernote. I can now go crazy with the clipping.
(It would be a nice addition, though, to have an “Add to Evernote” button somewhere on the Trunk item pages in the local client software.)
Chris Lauretano
very cool,but I was really hoping for a Linux version of evernote. Running an old version via wine is nasty,and plus being an old version, no new features like Trunk. Love evernote on webOS and Mac, but the fact that I can’t use it on my computers at work kills me.
Mark Woodward
All dressed up and nowhere to go? Perhaps it was the build up hype, but like many others…I don’t get this as a big announcement for we users??
I’d rather have something that played my audio notes without having to download etc? An embedded audio note player…wow what a concept that would be
Dave H
Very disappointing, a quick link to a few sub-standard apps. I have been down this road with Basecamp and their third-party apps. Please realise users want new features within the main application not subscribing to several add-ons to get the required functionality.
Sterling Zumbrunn
Completely agree – case in point: Egretlist and FastEver iPhone apps. The very existence of these apps points to the lack of very, very basic functionality within Evernote’s own iPhone app. Why should I need to buy an app just to take notes quickly? Shouldn’t the Evernote iPhone app itself be optimized to handle this?
Mike
I agree with the general sentiment: this is a marketing tool right now with very limited new functionality. In some ways, you’ve just linked a whole lot of stuff that’s been around for quite some time into my actual account. Put another way, you’ve kind of gotten around the “no advertising” thing by allowing “partners” to advertise in the trunk.
After answering questions a few months ago, you implied new functionality was coming – due dates, shared folders, improved stability, etc. When will THOSE Big Announcements be made?
NeuroJoe
How about PDF annotation within Evernote itself without having to open an external reader? I use PDF annotator for pc on my tablet (a REAL tablet with computer functionality
but would like to be able to annotate within Evernote itself.
NeuroJoe
AND be able to add ink notations to a non-ink note. That would be huge for tablet users.
Alan
I agree with edward d: we need subfolders and a tree view. The integrations may be useful – something there for pretty well everybody – but my online memory needs more organization with subfolders.
Rev3rb
I’m kinda in the middle. Cool update but it didn’t deserve the hype it got. I’m sure the full realization of the trunk might come at a later date which I’m ok with. I think Evernote can and should do more. Mind you I love what I’m able to do now, it just seems it could be a more robust product.
James
I agree. You should focus on actually making the evernote client better, rather than puffing your partnerships with other companies. Having said that, I do like some of the results (Doxie, Egretlist etc). Stop trying to push it to us, and just let people work on your API in peace.
Chris
My first thought when the news of the big announcement was posted was at it couldn’t possibly live up the hype. Especially with no details or hints, everyone could just hope for whatever unique features most important to them. And sadly, the “trunk”, while nice, hardly changes the way we work with Evernote. It’s nice i suppose, but not huge. I am definitely disappointed (even though i kept my expectation low) I hope there will be some software updates coming to soften the blow….
Caryn
I’m so very underwhelmed.
How about some features that actually provide some functionality for users? I’d even settle for an iPhone app which crashes less often.