I like getting comfortable when I read. I grab a cup of tea, sink into my favorite chair, put my feet up, and then crack open the book. Getting cozy and tuning out distractions helps me focus. Unfortunately, online reading doesn’t let you do that. Before you even finish the first paragraph, you’re clicking on links. Five minutes later, you’re buying a new tent and wondering how you ever got there.
There’s a better way. Introducing our new browser extension, Evernote Clearly. Available now for Google Chrome (other browsers are coming soon).
Get Evernote Clearly from the Chrome Store »
With one click, Clearly hides all distractions from blogs and articles, allowing you to read in peace.
How it works
Click on Clearly whenever you visit a blog post or article. Clearly slides in, showing an alternate view of the page without navigation, ads, or links to other content. When you’re done reading, click on the return arrow and Clearly slides out of the way, so you can continue browsing the site.
Multi-page articles
If you launch Clearly on a multi-page article, it will automatically turn it into a single page. No more clicking from one page to the next.
Save it for later
You don’t always have time to read everything in the moment. That’s why we built a web clipper right into Clearly. Click on the Evernote icon in the side bar, and the page will be saved into your Evernote account. You can even set tags to go along with all of your Clearly clips.
The auto-tag feature is a great way to easily create reading lists in Evernote that are accessible from any computer, phone or tablet you use.
Make it yours
Clearly offers three beautiful theme options:
- Newsprint: Like reading a newspaper
- Notable: Clean modern look
- Nightowl: Dark background, perfect for nighttime reading
Not a fan of the presets? You can make your own. Go into the extension preferences and create a custom theme. You can customize just about everything in Clearly from fonts to colors to alignments.
You can also customize keyboard shortcuts to launch Clearly and clip to Evernote.
All inside your browser
Clearly does all of its processing magic right inside the browser. It never sends any content to Evernote, or anywhere else, until you choose do to so.
A great web clipping companion
With Clearly, you now have two Evernote buttons for your browser bar. Our Web Clipper will help you capture anything you see online and Clearly will give you a clean reading experience. We hope you like it. We plan on bringing Clearly to more platforms and more languages soon. Let us know what you think.
175 Comments
Benjamin M. Strozykowski
I declare this a WIN.
I had been using ReadItLater, but it felt very unnatural to not have everything I read in Evernote. This makes things much easier for me.
Bes Zain
Awesome!
Hopefully one day, we can use Clearly (built into Evernote maybe?) to read all the bookmarks or links we may have saved into Evernote.
Andrei Thorp
Great idea!
Jamie
Like Readability, but 2 years behind! Or a year behind Safari Reader!
Gavin
I can’t stand Readability’s clumsy scrolling behaviour. Safari Reader only works in Safari. Well done Evernote on a great Chrome page reader.
GTK
I just tested three different articles, from three different web sites, using both readability and Clearly. Clearly works much better. Readability retains the fonts from the web version in evernote, but loses some links and the defaults don’t retain the title. Evernote converts the basic font into the client defaults, but retains all the links and the relative formatting. Very very smooth.
Ashu Joshi
I am an Evernote Premium Customer – when would I be able to save articles and read them in a “Clearly” mode or an “Instapaper” mode from my iPad?
Otávio
I’m looking forward this feature
Jeffrey Eisenberg
I’m a premium subscriber and I want that too.
Davide
Me too I want this feature on iPhone as Premium Subscriber!
Chris Gonzales
I already use Readability for this sort of thing, but I’ll definitely give Clearly a try and see which one outperforms the other.
Phil
There is a free bookmarklet that does a similar thing and can be used in almost any browser, including mobile Safari. It will send an instapaper-like version of the article to your evernote account.
http://www.klip.me/pushtophone/
Regnareb
Other browsers ? Oh so Opera will have his Evernote extension !
Paul
I hope so.
Can anyone confirms that?
Karsten
+1
Nacho
+1
Dennis
When is expected to be available on safari? I want it now
Good Job , I use read it later but I found this more useful since I can add it to Evernote.
Hadret
And I’m still waiting for “normal” Firefox extension update for 8
jbignert
@Hadret – wb Clipper with Firefox 8 support just got approved @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/evernote-web-clipper/?src=hp-dl-promo
Hadret
Great news. So, now I’m waiting only for Evernote Clearly for FF8 (:
Lisa D
Wow! I love it! Thanks so much for sharing
Kaos
This would be excellent in Firefox, can’t wait!
Mike
On this website http://www.linuxbsdos.com clearly will display the content of the home page not the page you are currently reading when activated
Ed
This is a great start. I like how clean it makes a lot of overly complex pages.
Where it runs into problems in my initial testing is with multi-page articles. If the extension could either fetch the rest of the article from subsequent pages, or provide access to the link for the next page while staying in Clearly, that would make it even more useful. From a clipping standpoint, the former option would be great, but either one would make it much more usable. As it is right now you have to go back to the original page (exiting Clearly), scroll down to the next page link, then hit the Clearly button, and then do it all over again if there is another page.
It is already very useful, and I look forward to seeing it continue to evolve. Thanks for continuing to make great products.
Andrew Sinkov
Clearly does support multipage article viewing. In many cases, when you visit a multipage article, Clearly with combine all the pages into one, and mark where the page breaks are. We’ll keep improving this functionality to make it work on more sites.
Robert Williams
How do you auto-tag articles that are sent to Evernote using Clearly?
Steve K.
Click on ‘Customize’ button in Chrome, then ‘tools’, then ‘extensions’, find Clearly in the list and click on ‘options.’
Andrew Sinkov
Right click on the Clearly icon and go to the Options screen. There you’ll see a “Tag with” section. All clips, will be marked with the tag you set.
J
Too many steps to do this every time you need a new tag. Makes more sense to tag once in the evernote app, yes?
nan
Waiting for Firefox, too–this would be great! I’m a big fan of Evernote, and tell lots of people about it.
Flokass
Is it based on Readability? It looks like that.
Patrick
I’m trying to use the extension on Chrome 17.0.938.0, and it does nothing – I can click the icon as many times as I want, and the page never changes. Is it not working on developer versions of Chrome?
Patrick
So, after playing around with my extensions, it seems that Clearly doesn’t play nicely with Better Pop Up Blocker. *sigh*
Jakob Bignert
Chrome 17 is beta. For best performance use Chrome stable builds.
Carl
The reading experience is great in Chrome when you activate Clearly. However, when you clip the article in Evernote, you get a very boring note.
Would it be possible to keep the beautiful Clearly style in Evernote? It would make the reading experience a lot better on the iPad.
Andrew Sinkov
We’re looking into options for that. Thanks for the suggestion.
Ischa Gast
+1
macfixer
+1
Davide
+ 1
Ashu Joshi
Used it – and having two buttons for Evernote does not help me. I have a “Read It Later” button – does a nice thing – sends it to my Instapaper account. I have the readability option available to read on the browser. This release should have been combined it with sending a readable version to my Evernote account/notebook so that I can read in on my phone or tablet.
Andrew Sinkov
It does that. When you click Clearly, you get the option to send the page to Evernote by clicking on the elephant icon. Then, you can access the article from any device you have.
Ashu Joshi
I should re-phrase. If the Elephant will clip and send…. that’s a big IF
fjpoblam
Looking forward to a Safari extension or iPad app, to obviate the need for sync between laptop and iPad… Tweet us when you have it.
Doron Algam
The way it looks I will probably stop using “turn off the lights” extension. Great job!!! Please make it fast for Safari and Firefox.
Mark Johannsen
Pixar called, they want their lamp back!
Kevin Blakeley
I think its a great start but there are two features I would like added:
1. When you clip the article, anyway to keep the theme/formatting with the article so its nicely formatted in Evernote?
2. While the auto tagging feature is neat I miss the ability to specify other tags when clipping to Evernote. Right now I still have to use the clipper to get that functionality and I would rather not.
Gina
Great if you’re reading, not so great if you want visitors to click on your ads!
Noah
Please make a multi-column reader. Everyone is doing these full width readers and no one seems to want to mimic the old newspaper style of multi-columns which some of us find far faster to read.
Jakob Bignert
That’s an interesting idea. Thanks.
Nicola
Thanks for another clever idea!
I would probably leave ReadItLater for this, were it not for one thing – RIL keeps track of where I am in the article. This is very useful, especially in long articles.
Are you planning to implement something like this for Clearly?
Jay
I really like the idea. My number one request, and I’m not sure if this is for Clearly or another plugin, is that I could share a page in Android and get the whole page saved without all the formatting into Evernote. Right now when I share a page, the URL gets saved but I must come back later to manually copy the web page article into Evernote.
C
Pixar…?
Alexander
That’s awesome. Thanks Evernote. But it would be nice if I could clip the article to a specified notebook eg. ‘Read Later’ cause right now it’s sending it into the main notebook only.
Christian
I’m also looking forward to that
David
Clearly looks worth checking, but one big problem — I can not use Chrome until when I print a web page, it has ability to print web page info URL, title, along with date. I keep looking?
Joe
What’s the lamp’s name? Pixar’s is named Luxo Jr.
Andrew Sinkov
Hmm, that’s a good question. Do you have a suggestion?
Ben Jendrick
You should call him “Clever”. (Clearly + Evernote)
Eddy
Nice feature! It’s simple, beautiful and works!!
I usually clip to Evernote in “draft” as a Readitlater service. I even give up Google Bookmarks/Delicious, and use Evernote as a bookmark archive now. (less account = more productive)
However, I sometimes find that the clipping extension mess up the clipping, especially inconsistent of fonts, table, etc. It often records the web page’s sidebar and also make the note UGLY. (When can Windows users have a wonderful experience without pain? *joke*)
So I manually select the content and clip to Evernote for Windows directly.
Hope you can investigate the problems.
BTW, I still rate Evernote as the BEST application in my computer
Thanks!
Alyona Cherednichenko
That’s AWESOME!
Thank u!!!!!!!!!!!
pspn
Forgot it! ReadItLater
, I can’t waiting for it available for Firefox.
It’s great feature.
pseudografas
Feature suggestion: When I right click on a link and click “Clearly”, then the content of that link should be loaded in clearly, not the content of the current page.
In any case I like this extension very much
John
Sorry but why duplicate other products? There’s plenty left to dol with other items.
Babs
VERY difficult to Locate and Download.
LOTS of WHAT it CAN do but not easy TO actually GET to.
Had to download Chrome browser, then Find the Chrome extension and CLEARLY was not in the chrome app store. If you’re going to make a big splash, make indicate CLEARLY where, how to download it. Example: download HERE… Click. And make sore it Works . First real criticism of Evernote, EVER. Din’t get so big and move so fast that little errors and difficulties make Evernote ordinary and run of the mill. It is EXTRORDINARY… Keep it that way!
Ralph
Can this be available as a bookmarklet? I try to keep installed Chrome extensions to a minimum for performance and resources reasons.
Brian
This would be great on the iPad, and Safari, perhaps even firefox! Not interested in Chrome…
Steve
The shortcut for posting to Evernote is CNTL+ALT Up-Arrow. This key combination makes my screen go black for a few seconds, like it is trying to rotate the screen to portrait mode. I’m using Windows 7. Is anyone else experiencing the same?
Jakob Bignert
Try customizing the shortcut. There can be conflict depending on what software you have installed on your system.
Baron
Now that Evernote is in the reading space, it would be nice if the iPhone app was able to feature-match Instapaper. Saving read position in a note, for starters.
Instead of bookmarking articles to be archive or sending them to Instapaper to read later, I now clip them in Clearly for both!
A bookmarklet for iOS would be great to this end as well.
Delio
Does this also work with the comments of articles. That’s my pet peeve with all of these readability type services. Sometimes the comments are more valuable than the article.
Ryan
This is excellent. Great work, Evernote guys. Really looking forward to having it on Safari too.
Stew
This seems to work well in Chrome 15.0.874 for most articles. But it failed miserably on this one:
http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/17/court-california-same-sex-marriage-fight-can-continue/?hpt=hp_bn2
I can’t even tell where it got the Clearly text from???
Jakob Bignert
URL added to our testbench.
Stew
Okay, I realized the Clearly text I saw as the first line was probably from the photo caption. But now it’s only showing the comments on the CNN article, which isn’t exactly useful (at least until you read the article).
Evgenia Grinblo (@Grinblo)
Please marry me.
Zal
Great functionality but missing one very important thing–the ability (to be configured in the extension’s Options panel) to specify the notebook where the clips will be sent. It looks like they are going into the default notebook, but I would much rather have them go to “web clips”. Please add this option!
Geert
WOW
Just try this on wikipedia !
Now you can READ it as a book.
It will blow your socks off.
evn fan.
Vixie
C’mon, get it to FIREFOX!!
DDD
Steve
This is very handy. I used to do a Readability and clip to Evernote, but I got Readability’s formatting in the clip which was annoying. Clearly requires fewer clicks.
Also it’s faster than Readability. It’s just a second or two, but if use it alot, the speed improvement is very noticeable.
People who keep comparing this to Readability or Instapaer I think aren’t getting the point. This is to make Evernote a better experience, not to steer Evernote into the text viewer space. But I don’t work at Evernote, so that’s just a guess. However, Clearly is nowhere near making me quit Instapaper. Instapaper and Evernote are in totally different spaces.