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The Evernote Blog

Evernote for Mac Update: Card View, Word Count, New Save Features, and More

Product updates | By Andrew Sinkov
mac_cards

Today, Evernote for Mac gets a pretty great update (v 3.1) full of new features, redesigned screens and stability improvements. We’ve added a completely new Card View, word and character counts for notes, easier attachment export, and much more. Let’s take a look:

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The New Card View

We replaced our thumbnail view with a completely new Card View. The design of this view will be familiar to Evernote for iPad users and those that have tried using Evernote for Mac in fullscreen mode.

There are several reasons to love Card View. First, you get much more information about the content of the note at a glance. If your note contains only text, then you’ll see the first couple of sentences in the card. If it’s just an image, then the card will present a well-formatted thumbnail.

The Card View action bar
At the top of the Card View, there are several useful options. At left, you can select a sorting method. In the middle, choose from one of two card sizes. On the right, choose to hide the note pane and expand Card View. You should definitely try that last one. Hide the note pane and also hide the left notebook panel using the Favorites Bar. The result: a full app window of note cards, which is a great new way to browse your notes.

Word and character count!

You asked for it, and here it is. Evernote for Mac now has word and character count totals for each note. To view the counts, tap on the “i” in the top right corner of a note. The numbers are displayed in the Size section. To view the counts quickly, try the CMD+Shift+I keyboard shortcut.

Redesigned account info screen

We spruced up the account info screen inside the app to make it easier to read important information, such as your remaining monthly allowance (60MB for Free users and 1GB for Premium). Also, Free users can now upgrade to Premium by clicking a new upgrade button in the account info screen.

Save all attachments

Dragging something out of a note onto your desktop is simple enough when you only want one file, but what if you want to export all the files and attachments in a note? Now, we have the answer. Click on a note, or select multiple notes, then right click and choose Save Attachments. You’ll be asked to choose a destination folder. That’s all. Every file, image, PDF, and audio clip are now in that folder. This is just one of the many ways that we make it easy for you get your content out of Evernote.

Better printing

You’ve asked us to add more context to notes that you print and, in this update, we did. In the print settings, click on Show Details. Next, click the checkbox labeled Print Headers. Now, your notes will print with all their header information, including title, dates, tags, and notebook.

Date and time stamp

We’ve added a couple of useful keyboard shortcuts that let you add a quick date and time into the body of a note as you type.

  • For date: Press CMD+Shift+D
  • For time: Press CMD+Shift+Option+D

These shortcuts are great if you’re taking accurate meeting minutes or trying to associate your lecture audio recording with the notes you’ve taken. If you’d like to change the date formatting, you can set it in the new Formatting tab in Evernote Settings.

And much more…

In addition to all of these great new capabilities, we also improved bullets and numbered lists, made result highlighting in PDFs more accurate, and fixed tons of other issues. You’ll find the app is more stable and reliable than ever. We hope you like our latest version of Evernote for Mac. Let us know what you think in the comments.

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  • Matt

    I like the idea of the card view, since I can use it as a mood-board. The problem is:
    1) There’s so much dark grey gutter space between the notes, that it’s visually distracting.
    2) The lines on the cards also distracts me from the content.
    3) The fixed sizes also mean my content is truncated.

  • Ed

    The save attachments feature is great. I’m so glad that this can be done with out having an Evernote stamp on the attachment.

  • Staggo Lee

    I’m easy to WOW, so I really like the improvements and new features.

  • Michael

    How about bringing the Mac and Windows clients up to the same feature set? How hard can it be to add a “Tags” column to the Mac client!?!

  • Charlie B

    It’s good to have date and time stamps, but why not do this consistently on the Windows and Mac versions? In Windows, ctrl-semicolon stamps both date and time. This has been in place for years. The Mac equivalent would be cmd-semicolon, far superior to this four-fingered monstrosity.

    I realize some things need to be different to accomodate the different platforms, but when possible please keep the interface consistent for the benefit of users who have multiple computers. Arbitrary keystroke combinations are hard enough to remember without needlessly having different strokes for different platforms.

    PS: Trying to do a time stamp I somehow turned on the Mac’s dock hiding feature, which uses similar keys. My fault, I’m sure, but you could help by keeping it simple.

  • Curt

    The Card View is an interesting alternative view, but for many use cases it’s a huge step backward from the old thumbnail view. I’m interested in THE CONTENT, not the pretty ruled white paper or the grey background. The old view allowed me to zoom in and out to see the content at the level of clarity that was relevant for the task at hand. Now that feature is gone – I find myself squinting to make out the little thumbnails. The key to browsing through content in a thumbnail view is to make the content itself visually distinctive – at arm’s length, I should be able to easily differentiate one piece of content from the next. But in the new experience, each “card” looks far more alike than it does different – thus making it much harder to find what I”m looking for. Please bring back the zoomable thumbnail view!

    – A Paying Evernote Premium Customer

    • Janet

      I wholeheartedly agree! I rarely title my screenshots and use the images to organize/find what I’m looking for rather than titles, text, or even tags. I HATE how most of my images have been cropped to fit inside these cards, their content distorted. I too am a premium user very disappointed.

  • Julie

    Hmm…I just ‘went Premium’ and am very unlikely to upgrade to the latest version if I’m going to be stuck with card view (also use on iPad). I find it to be clunky. It’s like going from college-lined paper to standard.

  • http://robrites.blogspot.com Rob Lewis

    Inexplicably, your people don’t seem to get the brilliance of my top feature request: star ratings (you know, 1 to 5 stars) for notes. iPhoto has it. iTunes has it. Lots of other apps have it. Evernote needs it.

    It should of course be sortable and searchable. And “0 stars” doesn’t mean “really poor”, it means “no star rating assigned yet”.

    Puh-leeeze?

  • Larry Clapp

    I’ve had date, time, and date+time stamping hotkeys for my Mac for quite some time, that work in all applications. Inserting these is a standard “service”, and can be configured to respond to the hotkey of your choice in the “keyboard” area of the Preferences app (I think; I’m not at my mac).

    I built similar functionality, with similar hotkeys, on my work Windows box, using AutoHotkey (autohotkey.com)

    That said, I look forward to the other enhancements. :)

    Here’s the AHK code, if anyone’s interested. You’ll have to figure out the Mac bindings on your own. :)

    ; timestamp
    #!t::
    ; It will look like “03:43:19 PM”
    FormatTime, $CurrentDateTime,, hh:mm:ss tt
    SendInput %$CurrentDateTime%
    return

    ; datestamp
    #!d::
    ; It will look like ’2010/10/07 – Wed’
    FormatTime, $CurrentDateTime,, yyyy/MM/dd – ddd
    SendInput %$CurrentDateTime%
    return

    ; date and timestamp
    #!j::
    ; It will look like 2010/10/07 03:43:11 PM
    FormatTime, $CurrentDateTime,, yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm:ss tt
    SendInput %$CurrentDateTime%
    return

  • Mate

    My view is different than on your screenshot – icons are in color (not grey) and I don’t have Favorites Bar. Is it, because I have Snow Leopard, not Lion?

    My sugestion for the next update: add quick view (like in Mac OS X – shortcut: space) avaliable in Card View.

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