Ever since Apple announced plans for the new iPhone 3.0 a couple of months ago, we’ve been hard at work rebuilding Evernote to take advantage of the platform’s new features. Today is the big payoff: iPhone 3.0 officially launches and our new app is ready to go! Get it now from the App Store.
This is a major upgrade for us. There are two main reasons to be excited about Evernote for iPhone 3.0: the great stuff that we put in, and the even greater stuff that we’ll be able to add in the near future. So, what’s new?
Beefy synchronization
We’ve completely rewritten the data synchronization part of the application to take advantage of the new iPhone 3.0 capabilities, so that info about all your notes (but not their entire contents) is now synced locally on the device. This means that you can scroll through thousands of notes without interruption and without ever seeing the dreaded “load 25 more” message. It also means that filtering on tags, attributes, notebooks and locations can now be done without ever hitting the server, so it’s virtually instantaneous. Also, note content is now cached more aggressively, so pulling up a previously-viewed note is very quick. If you have a lot of notes, Evernote may need a couple of minutes to sync your note list the first time you launch the new app.
No pending
This new data handling functionality also means that there’s no longer any need for a “Pending” tab —pending notes are now displayed in the normal note list and you can edit them at any time, even before they’ve been synced!
Where in the world?
We love maps, and Evernote 3.0 for the iPhone’s got em! You can push the “pin” button at any time to see all of your notes displayed on a map. The numbers indicate how many notes you have in a particular area, and zooming in will break up the groups until you can see each individual note as a pin. Now, if you want to quickly remember the name of that great pickled mustard herring you had in Stockholm last summer (mmmm), just thumb the map over to Sweden and there it is.
Instant groups
The note views now lets you group your notes by date, title, notebook, city or country. You can also instantly jump to a different group by taping the index bar on the right of the note list (or on the bottom, if you’re in landscape mode), or scroll your finger over the index bar to fly through your notes at breakneck speed. Once you get good at using groups, maps and index-jumping, you can quickly get to any note without ever having to search.
Advanced Searching
Of course, you can still search through your notes and we’ve made that better as well. Advanced search options are now easier to use and many types of searches can be performed without ever having to touch the server, so they’re really fast. You can also instantly jump back to seeing all your notes at any time.
Way better audio
We’ve given the audio recorder in Evernote a lot of attention and now it’s much better than before. We doubled the recording time, halved the number of required button presses, and dressed it up in a spiffy new skin. If you haven’t tried making voice notes in Evernote before, give the new audio recorder a shot. It’s so slick now that we can’t stop playing with it…
Cinema-quality Landscape View
Try holding the phone sideways in the note list view. Now add a few thousand notes and try it again. It’s a drool-worthy visual timeline of your notable life.
Mercy for your fingers
We’ve eliminated several steps and small buttons when making snapshot and camera roll notes. Now you can snap a picture and send it to Evernote with just a couple of clicks. If you want to add a title, tags or text to your photo (or any other) note, just pull it up from the note list —even if it’s still pending.
Plays nice with others
Evernote for iPhone 3.0 now supports in-app integrations with iPhone apps from other developers. Several exciting Evernote-aware apps should be launching really really soon! Stay tuned and we’ll blog about all of them.
General improvements and bug fixes
This is our third major version of Evernote for the iPhone, so there’s a lot of improvements under the hood.
More on the horizon
Just as important as the new features that made it in to this release, is the fact that Evernote 3.0 for iPhone is the most powerful mobile platform we’ve ever built and it’s going to let us do things in the future which we couldn’t even dream if doing before. So what are we dreaming about now? Well, we don’t want to make specific promises (and some of them may be a long way away), so we’ll just hint at three things for now: sharing, local search, calendar integration, to-do management, audio search, compass use and memory training. Wait, that’s seven things. Dammit! Suffice it to say there will be lots of amazingly cool features coming soon.
Works on all iPhones and iPod Touches
Upgrade your existing iPhone or iPod Touch to the 3.0 firmware, and you’ll be all set to run the new Evernote. Of course, if you’re lucky enough to get the new iPhone 3G S, you’ll notice that, thanks to the fantastic new camera and faster speed, it’s pretty much the perfect Evernote device.
As always, Evernote 3.0 for the iPhone is available for free from the App Store. Remember that your Evernote app is happiest when it gets to sync across all of your computers and mobile devices, so if you haven’t already done so, make sure to download us for Mac and Windows as well!
It may still say version 2.0 in iTunes, while all the Apple servers update.
