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The Evernote Blog

Happy Tablet Day

Our Notes | By Phil Libin
 

Evernote loves tablets. We’ve got a long and storied history with tablets of all kinds. Got an old tablet lying around somewhere? Chances are we either developed technology for it, had applications that ran on it, or both. Usually both.

Remember the awesome Apple Newton? Evernote’s current R&D engineers developed the handwriting recognition technology that made it so notable (and ahead of its time). Remember those Doonesbury strips making fun of the Newton? You know who cried when those came out? We did. Well, not me personally, I was in college and the Newton was at the top of my unattainable gadget drool-list, but the guys sitting next to me right now clutching their Newton prototypes while watching the Apple liveblogs did. I’ve got those Donnesbury strips in my Evernote account now.

We’ve also been on just about every other form of tablet known to man. The original version of Evernote was written to run on Tablet PCs and the digital ink technology in the current version of Evernote for Windows is still the best in the industry. I even use an old Hitachi slate as a drink tray at home. Tablets are our roots, man. Our roots.

So naturally, we’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about our plans for supporting Apple’s hitherto-mythical tablet device, but we’ve avoided answering them just in case it turned out not to be a tablet but, um, a shoe or something. Still, we always hoped it’d be a tablet. You always remember your first love…

Anyway, now that the iPad has officially gone from “imminent!!” to “just announced!!” we can officially spill the beans on our official plans for Evernote on it. Here’s we go:

Evernote is going to support the Apple iPad. Oh Yeah. We’re gonna support the hell out of it. We’re glad to see that the current Evernote iPhone app will run on the iPad without modification, but we’ll be modifying it anyway to optimize the experience on the larger device. Oh how we’ll be modifying it! Expect rapid improvements to our iPhone app which will benefit all of our iPhone, iPod Touch and, now, iPad users in the near future.

Ok, so we’re excited by the iPad itself, and by the HP Slate, and the Sony VAIO L series, and the Nvidia Tegra, and by the added light that these and other devices will shine on touch computing in general. I’m looking at some happy engineers right now.

  • Joel Hickenbottom

    Anything that will allow the iPad to be more like what I see in the rumored Courier from Microsoft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USbkrk8-pjw&fmt=18) in terms of adding text with my finger or a stylus, drawing both sketches, check boxes, bullet points, etc, would be amazing. I’m surprised that the iPhone/iTouches, let alone the iPad, don’t allow for the for handwriting recognition. But should all the weight fall on Evernote to make me purchase an iPad from Apple? More so, it would be totally worth it for an upgrade to Evernote Premium for such technology across the three devices as well as the Macs using a tablet pen. We’ll see—Excited to see what you guys work up.

  • Mr. Reeee

    The iPad will be a game changer and it’s great to see you guys jumping on board. Stylus input (with a Pogo Sketch) will be great.

    With iWork, Evernote, Bento and OmniFocus most of my basic work needs are taken care of. Now all we need is a decent CAD or vector-based drawing application, like Vectorworks.

    I agree with Steven Dukarm about your Mac OS X support. With Apple’s constant rise in marketshare, you guys need to step up and FULLY support Mac OS X.

  • K Zuse

    I’d like to concur with a few people:

    Jongoloid: digital ink notes with optional conversion to text, stylus use – yes please !!

    Brett Patching: being able to edit/draw on existing notes with finger (or better/optionally stylus!) input (look at OneNote…)

    Jim Hanlon: agreed, it definitely must have offline capability, otherwise: no good

    question to William D: why please only the atheists?

    But: “Remember the awesome Apple Newton?”…surely you are joking?! I do and I still am angry at Apple stealing what little money I had (I was in college then too) from me with a patently non-functional product. “Evernote’s current R&D engineers developed the handwriting recognition technology that made it so notable (and ahead of its time).” Not joking, then? You might want to keep silent about that connection…

  • Jake

    Does that mean you have stuff for the Nokia N-series Internet Tablets? I’d love Evernote on my N800…

  • K Zuse

    I see now that I was really just asking for what dozens of others had already asked too. Oh well…at least I added one more vote…
    But now for something completely different: could you develop something like Canvas for OneNote, for the iPad and for EverNote (at least on the Mac) in general?! Because that would be *awesome*!!!

  • Justin

    For your handwriting engineers: what does handwriting look like from underneath with a capacitive screen? Without the actual ‘stylus’ in your hand, you can still ‘write’…

  • http://applevirus.wordpress.com Eric Baird

    With any luck, 2010 should turn out to be Happy Tablet //Year//. :)

    I won’t be getting an iPad (lovely screen, lousy peripherals support), but I’ll most likely get an ASUS EeePad if you can put Ubuntu on it. I already have Ubuntu on my netbook. Evernote for Linux?

  • geoff ryan

    I too would love full support for snow leopard.I would like offline access to notes synced on my iPod touch.I love the ability to clip only what I want and not the full page as with delicious.I must say,tho,that saving a note is a lot quicker and smoother with delicious.Is that because Macs are not yet fully supported?Its a pity cos I really like the other aspects of evernote,but it is definitely clunky compared to delicious when used on my iMac.

  • http://homepage.mac.com/jverboon/BRAC.htm John.

    Excellent Idea for EverNote to integrate with the New iPad.
    But make audio recording please longer than 20 minutes. Many thanks for your fine application!!!!!.

  • Chris Pope

    The iPad should be/could be a paper-killer. I am a commercial real estate agent, and have significant trouble keeping endless client notes organized. EverNote would be the cosmic link to computerized note-taking — a substantial contribution to a paperless society. Please make a stylus part of the design/package. Many thanks. With a robust EverNote product, I become an iPad purchaser.

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