Evernote for Windows is our most popular version, used by hundreds of thousands of people everyday. Today, we’re excited to announce a major evolution in our Windows client: Evernote 4. Here’s why we think this is the best version of Evernote yet.
Starting from scratch
Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.5 (Windows .net and WPF) was incapable of resolving. As a result, we ended up chasing down platform bugs rather than adding the great features our users wanted.
So we decided to start over from scratch, with fast, native C++ that we knew we could rely on. As you’ll see, the results are amazing. This new version will set a foundation for rapid improvement.
Blazingly fast
Evernote 4 is designed to give you a great experience on any computer that you use, whether you’re on a netbook, a five year old Windows XP machine or a super fast top-of-the-line Windows 7 computer.
On our test hardware, Evernote 4 starts five times faster, and uses half the memory of Evernote 3.5.
Simply beautiful
We redesigned every aspect of the user interface to be faster, simpler and more attractive. The new layout gets out of your way, so you can focus more of your attention on your notes and less on buttons and scrollbars. It also works better on various types of displays, aspect ratios and control devices. So, whether you use a mouse, keyboard or touchscreen to interact with your computer, you’ll have a great experience with Evernote 4.
Here are a few of our favorite user interface improvements:
- Space saving layout: The toolbar and menu bar are merged to take up less screen space. You can always switch to the old school layout in the Option menu.
- More responsive interface: Switching between notes, displaying searches, bringing Evernote into the foreground, and virtually all other interactions are much faster.
- Easier new note creation: We’ve added a New Note split button, which lets you pick the type of note you wish to create (text, ink or webcam). It will remember your selection for next time.
- Relocated Search Bar: Note search and the search description now reside directly over the note list—a more intuitive location. You can click the small arrow to open and close the search description. Closing the description gives you more room to view your notes list, opening it makes it easy to modify your search.
- Clearer note info: The note information panel is more crisp and clear with the title, notebook and source links right up top. Just like the search panel, you can open the note information panel to access the details. Navigating through the note info panel and tagging notes using your keyboard is fast and efficient.
- More ways to interact: Evernote 4 supports multitouch gestures and many keyboard shortcuts.
And much much more…
Much of Evernote 4 is focused on creating a great user experience and a powerful platform for huge new features in the coming months. Of course, we couldn’t launch something this big without adding a few gems:
Improved clipping
Clips are the most popular note-type in Evernote. So, for Evernote 4, we decided to give clipping a big upgrade. When clipping from Internet Explorer, Outlook and Firefox, you will now see a New Clip popup that lets you add tags and assign notebooks without leaving your current application. You can skip the dialog by holding down the Shift key.
Microsoft Outlook users will love the support for clipping messages, attachments and even multiple emails. Clipping from Internet Explorer and Firefox now preserves more styles, works more reliability and also takes advantage of the New Clip window.
Better editing
We spent the last 9 months improving note editing, and this baby has some great new additions. We’ve got:
- Improved support for tables (including adding columns and rows).
- Better support for bulleted and numbered lists.
- Better copy-paste support to and from Internet Explorer, Office and other applications.
- The note editor toolbar gives access to more colors and just looks sharp.
Smarter titles
Evernote is now smarter about how it handles note titles. The app will make a guess based on the type of information you have in your note. For example, it may use the first line of a note or the title of a web clip. You can always go in and edit the titles to be whatever you like.
Flexible printing
When you’re printing one or more notes you can click “Options” and check off which parts of the note information you want to include in the printout.
Windows 7: Jump Lists
In addition to adopting a Windows 7 look and feel, we’ve incorporated new Windows 7 features including Jump Lists that allow you to pin Evernote into your task bar and quickly access Evernote, sync, find or add notes even when Evernote isn’t running.
Windows 7: Auto-location
Evernote 4 also makes the most of the new geo-location capabilities of Windows 7. You will now be able to easily set the location of your notes. Tap on “Click to set location…” in the note info panel and your computer will figure out where it is and set the location of the note.
Hiding what you don’t need
To make the most efficient use of your screen, certain elements are hidden until you need them:
- Note info: Click the chevron near your note title to display note info.
- Search description: Click the chevron near the search bar to view and edit your search description.
- Zoom level: To adjust the size of thumbnails in Thumbnail view, bring your mouse near the bottom of the Note List. This displays the zoom control.
- Sync status: Whenever Evernote 4 synchronizes changes, a sync dialog appears along the lower right edge of the window.
Getting Evernote 4
Evernote 4 is available now for download!
Please note, installing Evernote 4 will replace your existing Evernote 3.5 installation.
We will publish an auto-update in the coming weeks for current Evernote 3.5 users who choose not to manually download Evernote 4.
Firefox users: Check for updates to get the latest Evernote 4-compatible version of the Evernote Firefox Extension.
