Since then, we’ve updated and improved the app dramatically, but something kept nagging at us. Evernote Food was great at capturing the grand finale of the meal—all the dishes, the people, the ambiance—but what about the inspiration? What about the process of discovering a recipe or choosing the restaurant? So we went back to the drawing board and rethought Evernote Food from scratch. The result is one the most beautiful, fun and complete food applications ever.

Say hello to the new Evernote Food 2.0, now available on iPhone, iPod Touch and for the first time, iPad!

Get Evernote Food 2.0 on the App Store »

From Soup to Nuts: The Complete Food Experience

A meal often starts hours, days, even weeks before you take your first bite. It begins as an idea that turns into a plan and finally an experience, which is exactly how Evernote Food is designed to work. When you first launch the app, you’re greeted with four options: Explore Recipes, My Cookbook, Restaurants, and My Meals.

On iPhone or iPod touch a simple swipe or tap of the header brings any section into full view, while on iPad, tap on a section and it beautifully unfolds to show you all of its content.

Let’s walk through each of the sections.

Explore Recipes
Explore Recipes is your starting point. Here, you swipe through tens of thousands of recipes from dozens of the best food blogs and websites. Tap on any recipe that strikes your fancy to load the blog right inside the app. If it’s the dish you want, then tap on the scissors to clip the recipe into your Evernote account along with any tags or notes that you’d like to add.

If you’re not in the browsing mood, then search through all the recipes. You can search by dish, ingredients and even by blog name. On iPad, tap on the magnifying glass and type in your search. The results will include any matching blog post and any items from your own account. It’s never been easier to find exactly what you’re craving.

Great for Publishers
One of the big considerations when building the app was to make it both great for users and content providers alike. That’s why we use Punchfork to collect the recipes and whenever a user chooses one, we drive them to the actual site where they can browse and discover everything that the site has to offer.

My Cookbook: A Recipe Collector’s Best Friend

If you’ve been using Evernote to store your recipes, then My Cookbook will blow you away. Every recipe you clip using Evernote Food is displayed right alongside all of the food you’ve ever saved to Evernote using a desktop Web Clipper. Just swipe or search to find what you’re looking for.

Create Your Own Recipes
To make the My Recipes section work, Evernote analyzes the text of each note in your account to identify the ones that are recipes (no special tags or notebooks necessary), while filtering out your travel itineraries and work projects. A really cool side benefit of this process is that you can now author recipes and Evernote Food will recognize them and magically display them next to everything you’ve clipped.

Your Shopping Buddy
Everything you do in Evernote Food is always in sync across your devices thanks to Evernote, which means that you can plan out a big dinner using Evernote Food on your iPad, then grab your iPhone and head to the store. Launch the app on your iPhone and use all the recipes as your shopping lists. Everything you need is in one place.

Your Cooking Companion
Once you’re back from the store, launch Evernote Food, set it on your counter and cook along with the recipe. We love using the app on an iPad or iPad Mini for this. Be sure to take photos and captions in the app as the dish comes together.

Discover Great Restaurants

With Evernote Food 2.0, we promise to inspire a full spectrum of food experiences: from recipes all the way to restaurants. The Restaurants section helps you discover new restaurants, add them to your list and then track where you’ve been, all in one place.

Lists and Maps. Near and Far.
Discovering a new restaurant to try couldn’t be easier. Simply tap in the search box and enter a name or cuisine type. You can then choose a location anywhere in the world or stay local by tapping on Current Location. The list and map will instantly update to show everything in the chosen area that matches the search along with great cuisine icons to help identify the restaurant type. Then, tap on a restaurant to see relevant details including address, cuisine, photos, and, in some cases, even a menu.

On iPad, the map and list are displayed side by side. On iPhone and iPod touch you can switch between the two by tapping on the icon in top right corner of the screen.

Plan Your Food Adventure
The middle tab of the Restaurant section is called Saved and it’s your restaurant to-do list. Make lists for your town or wherever travel takes you.

Your History
The right-most tab in the Restaurant section is for My Meals. It displays a list of every restaurant where you’ve created a Meal. Here, your entire Meal history is presented as a list and map for your currently-selected location. If you ever want to see where you ate on your last trip to Paris, simply launch this view. Then, tap on a listing to see what dishes you had.

My Meals

The first three sections are all about inspiration, the final section is where those inspirations become memories that you’ll treasure forever. We’ve turned the core feature that Evernote Food launched with a year ago into My Meals, and there’s a lot more to love about the updated functionality. We redesigned the look and feel to be cleaner with crisper navigation and a more attractive photo grid. Tap the plus to start capturing a new food experience.

Saving a Meal
Every aspect of creating a new Meal in Evernote Food is more beautiful than ever. The interface is more intuitive, the text is clearer, the map is larger, and the photos look gorgeous. Give your Meal a name, choose your location and start snapping photos. If you’re having a big multi-course meal, we recommend keeping the app in camera mode and just snapping a quick photo with each new dish. If you have food photos sitting in your Camera Roll, you can easily add those, too. Once you’re done, you’ll have a fantastic photo essay of every second. Don’t forget to take photos of the people you’re with too. Add some quick captions to the images, and you’re done.

You now have a perfectly preserved version of the Meal that you can relive and share with your friends over email, Twitter and Facebook.

Related Notes
At the bottom of your Meal, you’ll find a Related Notes section, which helps you discover other items in your account that are similar to the Meal you’re viewing. We base the relatedness on a variety of factors including cuisine, ingredients, titles, and more.

Your Food World

We’re really excited about Evernote Food 2.0. We’ve been using it internally and absolutely love the way a single app can be great for everything from cooking your grandma’s recipe to planning a dining tour of Tokyo. And this is only the beginning. We have lots more to come for Evernote Food, including an updated version for Android. Be sure to take a look at these useful resources.

• What’s New Page
• User Guide
• Facebook Page

We hope you like Evernote Food 2.0 as much as we do. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Get Evernote Food 2.0 on the App Store »

iHealth just released a new wireless arm blood pressure monitor, wrist blood pressure monitor, and a digital body analysis scale that include a seamless Evernote integration so you can easily keep track of your blood pressure or body composition over time, right in Evernote.

Your health information in Evernote

This integration is really interesting because measuring and tracking data over time is key to understanding overall trends. With everything in Evernote, you can add additional notes and access your health history any time. Like everything in Evernote, this data is private by default, but you can opt to share it with your doctor or family.

This integration becomes even more powerful when you use it together with Evernote and Evernote Food. By using the apps together you’ll get even more context around all of the health information that you’re getting from iHealth products.

The iHealth Devices

The blood pressure monitors are wireless, and measure systolic/diastolic numbers, the heart rate, and pulse wave. The body scale measures nine different characteristics of your body composition, including body fat, lean mass, muscle mass, bone mass, and more. All devices send data automatically to iHealth’s free MyVitals app for iPhone. The information is then converted into beautiful results notes in Evernote. The blood pressure notes include a relative graph indicating hypertension levels. If you take more than one reading a week, a summary trend chart is generated once a week.

How It Works

It’s all very easy to use. The monitors and scale automatically turn on when used, so you just open the iOS MyVitals app, hit the start button, and your device will begin measuring and sending data via Bluetooth. Once you’ve set up iHealth with Evernote, iHealth will create a note in your designated Evernote notebook in Evernote containing all of the gathered information.

Our Fitness Ambassador

We asked Chad Williams, Evernote’s Fitness Ambassador and founder of Anthrophysique.com, to use iHealth and explain why this integration with Evernote is useful:

“As an online fitness and health coach, I focus on overall wellness of my clients, not just on numbers. A key component to creating a program is to have baseline measurements so you can set a goal and test for progress over time. If you don’t know where you’re starting from, it can be hard to know if your program is heading in the right direction. iHealth’s blood pressure monitors and weight scale make getting measurements incredibly easy for anyone on a daily basis. By automatically syncing easy-to-read charts to Evernote, you get a solid picture of your overall well-being.”

Chad sees devices like these as key for people who are just getting started on a fitness program and want to lose weight. As a coach, it’s important for him to have as much insight in his clients’ health as possible, and it’s particularly useful to have it all in Evernote for easy sharing. The weekly trend graphs are great as motivators.

The iHealth Evernote integration is also great for:

• Those caring for an older family member, especially if you don’t live close by: have the individual take their measurements, and send the results in a notebook that you both share.
• Those with high blood pressure: whether you are on medication or not, you can add detailed notes to your result notes, and discover patterns in your life that may affect your blood pressure.
• Those whose doctor requires regular monitoring: take your own measurements, and either share the results notebook with your doctor, or show it to them during your next visit.

Giveaway!

We’re giving away one iHealth arm blood pressure monitor (a value of $99.95) so that you can start taking measurements and saving them in Evernote. Just leave a comment here using the hashtag #iHealth, and tell us why you think this integration is important. One winner will be chosen at random. This giveaway is open until December 13th, 2012. Some restrictions apply, and some countries require a customs tax. See rules here.

[Update: This giveaway is now closed.]

Disclaimer: The contents of this blog post are for informational purposes only. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Connect with Evernote Ambassadors

Every Evernote user has his or her own way of making Evernote work for them, and our Ambassadors are here to guide you towards a path of becoming a better Evernote user, whether you’re interested in being more productive at work, becoming a better home cook, sticking to a fitness routine, or running your own business.

With Ambassadors now based in countries including the UK, Singapore, Taiwan, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia, you’ll find it easier than ever to connect with them at local meetups and events, and enjoy their content in your native language.

Check out our community page to get to know our newest Ambassadors.

More Ambassadors to come and how to apply

If you don’t see an Ambassador near your location or one who speaks your language, don’t get discouraged. We’ll be adding more Ambassadors in a variety of categories in cities and countries around the world. Think you have what it takes to be an Evernote Ambassador or know someone who does? Be sure to fill out our nomination form.

Take the Evernote Holiday Pledge, get more tips from Ambassadors

From now through the New Year, you can sign up for the Evernote Holiday Pledge and opt in to receive email tips and guidance from the Evernote team and our Ambassadors about ways you can get more out of Evernote. Participate in virtual events like the Evernote  & Chronicle Books Craft-Along and join our public notebook, which is updated regularly with fresh tips and guides.

For years, we’ve helped people collect and remember everything that’s important to their personal and work lives. Two-thirds of our users already rely on Evernote to be more productive at the office, but up to now Evernote has been a mostly solitary affair. Today, we’re excited to announce that using Evernote at work will help build the knowledge of your entire organization. Today, we’re releasing Evernote Business.

Upgrade to Business Class »

At its core, Evernote Business is Evernote. It’s the same service that’s used by tens of millions of people around the world, but it’s better. We’ve added a number of features and refinements that make Evernote Business a perfect tool for small and medium-sized companies and small teams within larger organizations.

Key concepts
Evernote Business is built around two key concepts: Knowledge Collection and Knowledge Discovery.

Knowledge Collection

The information we need to capture in our daily lives is incredibly varied. This information can take the form of meeting notes, spreadsheets, task lists, web research, presentations, and design mockups. That’s why Evernote is so great for work. You can put everything into it, knowing that you’ll be able to find it later. To make sure that you have more than enough space to work with, Evernote Business upgrades users to Business Premium, which lets them create 2GB per month of new content in Personal Notebooks, plus they and all their co-workers get 2GB per business user to share in their Business Notebooks. That’s four times more monthly quota than with normal Evernote Premium, so you’ll never have to worry about running out of room.

Business Notebooks
When a user joins Evernote Business, they’ll be able to create Business Notebooks. Anything placed into a Business Notebook benefits the entire company. It’s easier to share Business Notebooks with fellow employees, Business Notebooks can be published to the Business Library (more on that below) and these notebooks can be shared or modified by administrators.

Personal Notebooks
Users can also make Personal Notebooks, which are completely private. If you join Evernote Business with an existing Evernote account, all of your current notes stay Personal. Users can add content to their Business and Personal notebooks at will.

It’s important to note that while administrators gain rights to Business Notebooks in a user’s account, they have no visibility or access into Personal Notebooks. If a user leaves an organization, the Personal Notebooks go with the user, while the Business Notebooks stay.

Business Library
Business Notebooks are the first step in creating a more productive workplace. Step two is using the information that’s in those notebooks to make everyone on the team smarter. That’s where the Business Library comes in.

The Business Library is a collection of selected Business Notebooks that are accessible to the entire organization. At Evernote, our Business Library includes everything from important HR documents to design assets to product schedules to media mentions. All employees have the ability to publish some of their Business Notebooks into the Business Library. Administrators have full control over the Business Library, and can further elevate notebooks into a Recommended set that they feel are particularly valuable to employees.

Knowledge Discovery

With Business Notebooks and the Business Library, make all of the accumulated knowledge of the team accessible to everyone. Accessibility is important, but we want to do more. We’ve come up with a knowledge discovery spectrum: four ways to help users learn what their team knows, ranging from the simple to the magical.

1. Browsing the Business Library
The most straightforward way to find what you’re looking for is to open up the Business Library and browse through the notebooks. When you find a notebook that you think is interesting, join it. Once you join a Business Notebook, it will show up in your Notebook List. Business Notebooks are a gray color on Mac and Windows to make them easy to distinguish. On Windows and Evernote Web, Business Notebooks appear below Personal Notebooks.

When users join an Evernote Business account for the first time, they’re presented with a set of Business Notebooks from the Business Library that are recommended by the company. This is a great tool to get new employees all the tools they need to be productive from day one.

2. Search
When you perform a search on your own account, Evernote will also display results from Business Notebooks that you’ve joined. This way you’ll be able to see what others know about the topics that you’re interested in.

3. Related Notes
This is where things start getting magical. In the latest version of Evernote for Mac (coming soon to other platforms), as you type a new note or view an existing one, Related Notes will appear at the bottom of the note area. The more you type, the more contextually relevant the notes will become. These notes may be from your own account or from Business Notebooks your co-workers have shared with you. For the first time ever, you’ll know all the relevant information that your team has right as you start working on something.

4. Web Search

We’ve also updated our Chrome browser extensions (Web Clipper and Clearly) to support Evernote Business. Simply performing a web search will now display related results pulled from your account and from the knowledge of your team right alongside results from Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines. With this feature, we’re surfacing information that could save you hours and hours of work by showing research that others have done, so that you don’t have to start from scratch.

You get all of these powerful feature simply by creating and joining Business Notebooks.

Admin Love

Evernote’s focus has always been on the user, and that will never change. Our goal is to build beautiful apps and experiences that users fall in love with. With Evernote Business, we also wanted to create a great experience for administrators. Here’s what admins can expect:

Easy deployment
You can get your company up and running on Evernote Business in just a few minutes. Evernote is perfect for today’s diverse device environments. At launch, Evernote Business works on Mac, Windows, Web, iPhone, iPad, Android, and Android Tablets. All of these platforms sync with one another, so regardless of what your team uses, Evernote Business will work for them.

Fast onboarding
Admins can choose from two onboarding options. They can either invite individual team members to join the Evernote Business account, or they can set up domain registration. With domain registration, individuals signing up with their work email adress will automatically be added to your account.

Admin Console
Administrators can monitor their company’s Evernote Business deployment through the Admin Console. Here they can manage users, Business Notebooks and the Business Library. They can also set their user number thresholds and payment preferences.

Business-level Support
Admins get our highest level of support. All support requests will be answered by the end of the next business day (Monday to Friday) by our Customer Success Team. For companies of 10 or more users, administrators can even set up a phone call from a member of the Customer Success Team to help work through any problems.

Pricing and Availability

Today, Evernote Business launches in seven countries: USA, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, and UK. In the US, Evernote Business is available for $10 per user per month. The price varies by region and currency. Admins can choose to pay with a credit card or by invoice.

Sign up now for Evernote Business »

The Business-ready versions of Evernote for Mac and Windows are available directly from our site. The Mac App Store update will be available soon. Get them here:

• Evernote for Mac
• Evernote for Windows

Stay tuned for more Evernote Business features on these and other platforms.

Useful resources

We have put together a number of helpful resources that explain many aspects of Evernote Business:

• Evernote Business site
• Security and Privacy overview
• General Evernote Business FAQ
• Admin FAQ
• User FAQ

We’re just getting started

This is just the beginning. We’re excited to bring you Evernote Business and are looking forward to your feedback and suggestions.

For years, our users have asked us to make a version of Evernote that plays nice at their workplace. The funny thing is that we were looking for the same thing for ourselves at Evernote. With Evernote Business, we’re off to a good start. It’s changed how we build and exchange knowledge at Evernote, and we hope it does the same for you.

Sign up now for Evernote Business »

]]> http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/12/04/evernote-business-is-here-start-building-your-teams-knowledge-today/feed/ 31 http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/26/join-the-evernote-chronicle-books-holiday-craft-along/ http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/26/join-the-evernote-chronicle-books-holiday-craft-along/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2012 22:22:48 +0000 Kasey Fleisher Hickey http://blog.evernote.com/?p=25196 At this time of year, many of our users are probably thinking about travel, time off from work, gift-giving, family time, and lots of festivities and cheer. There are lots of ways to make your holiday season better with Evernote — from getting more organized so you’ll stress less to capturing the special moments.

This year, we introduced the Evernote Holiday Pledge; anyone who signs the Pledge opts in to receive useful tips and guidance from our team and our fabulous Ambassadors throughout the season. What’s more, we’re hosting a number of fun virtual events to help you be a better Evernote user, connect with the Evernote community and learn just how much you can do with your Evernote account, various Evernote products and partner products that extend the Evernote experience.

Join the Holiday Craft-Along!

We’ve joined together with our Craft Ambassador Jenni Lathrop and our friends at Chronicle Books to bring you our first Holiday Craft-Along, an opportunity to use Evernote to help you add a handmade touch to your holiday season. Here’s how it’s going to work:

• RSVP to the Facebook Event page
• Complete one of the projects below by December 25th, and share photos of your creations on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #evernoteholiday.
• Be sure to email your best photos to evernoteholiday@evernote.com. We’ll select a random winner from among the email submissions to receive a pretty sweet Evernote + Chronicle Books goody bag (see below for everything that’s included).

Choose one of 5 craft projects to complete with Evernote:

1. Make a homemade gift
2. Create a homemade centerpiece
3. Create homemade table decorations
4. Create a holiday floral arrangement
5. Make a homemade party invitation

Use Evernote to:

• Create a Holidays 2012 Notebook or Notebook Stack
• Download Evernote to your mobile devices (if you haven’t already) for on-the-go access to your notes
• Create a shopping checklist
• Shop in-store and online for craft materials, checking items off your list as you purchase them
• Clip inspiration using the Evernote Web Clipper
• Snap photos of holiday inspiration you see at department stores and friends’ houses
• Create a to-do list for completing your project
• Share your project notes with a collaborator by sharing individual notes or creating a Shared Notebook
• Get organized around all of your holiday plans; download Evernote’s Holiday Guide

Submit photos of your handmade holiday craft, win the Evernote & Chronicle Books goody bag!

Email photos of your completed craft projects to evernoteholiday@evernote.com. We’ll select a random winner from among the email submissions to receive a pretty sweet Evernote + Chronicle Books goody bag (see below for everything that’s included). We’ll add our favorites to our Holiday notebook.

The prize pack includes the following book titles, along with Evernote goodies:

Holiday Crafting & Baking with Kids
A Life In Stitches
Stencil Style 101
Mom & Me Knits
Heart Felt Knits
Liberty Book of Home Sewing
So Pretty! Crochet

Find more tips for using Evernote this holiday season by joining our public notebook (updated regularly) and taking the Evernote Holiday Pledge to receive tips and guidance by email.

]]> http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/26/join-the-evernote-chronicle-books-holiday-craft-along/feed/ 0 http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/19/how-to-use-evernote-for-genealogical-research/ http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/19/how-to-use-evernote-for-genealogical-research/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:47:42 +0000 Jordan Jones http://blog.evernote.com/?p=24941
• Name: Jordan Jones
• Profession: IT Manager
• Hobby/Interest: Genealogy
• Location: Raleigh, NC
• Website: http://www.genealogymedia.com/

Bio

Jordan Jones is a genealogist and director of the North Carolina Genealogy Society. He is also the President of the National Genealogical Society. Jordan finds Evernote to be an indispensable way to gather, store, organize, reference, and retrieve notes, images of records, and research plans.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

 

• iPhone
• iPad
• Mac

I use Evernote for…Genealogical Research

I had been using Evernote on and off for a couple of years and as time progressed, I noticed I was using it for everything from my day job to my personal finances. I wanted to get even more out of it, so I upgraded to Premium and began taking advantage of even more features and monthly upload capacity.

In the genealogy space, Evernote is a popular tool because our work involves building complex databases around the research that we do.

In this day and age, more documents are becoming digitized and the challenge is figuring out how to find and organize them. I use Evernote to capture documents, images, and PDFs I find online, and later add descriptive notes to these pieces of information. Serious genealogists try to keep a record of everything they find, even if it’s full of lies and conjecture. (For example, if you suspect that a document might be fraudulent or inaccurate, you can make a note of it. If you come across it again, you will know that you already saw and evaluated it.) Using Evernote, you can add your own notes, questions, and task boxes to the images of records you find in your research.

Some people outside of genealogy may not realize it, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has the largest genealogical library in the world, a wonderful resource for genealogists. Much of what is in these archives of over 1.2 million reels of microfilm consists of records in the public domain. The church is in the process of digitizing all of these documents, so I’m able to capture a lot of useful information from their website and quickly save it to my Evernote account using the Evernote Web Clipper.

Often times, I find interesting factoids in jpeg, PDF, Excel, and Tiff files, which I save to Evernote and then organize using a hierarchy of tags including ‘genealogy’ or ‘surname.’ I also have a list of tags for individuals so I can quickly search and find all documents I have related to a certain person, family or county. Once I narrow down my notes in Evernote, I can start writing about what I’ve discovered. Having all of the information I’m referencing in one, easy-to-search place saves me a lot of time — not to mention, physical space!

Putting all the pieces together

As I’m collecting my research, I make sure to write source citations so that I or anyone else would know exactly where to find this information and would have some sense of where that document came from, who created it and for what purpose.

If I’m writing the story of a family unit, I add Note Links to information that has an associated notation. That way, I can immediately find where each piece came from, and even quickly refer to related photos and documents that helped me come up with the final write-up, without actually leaving my Evernote account.

“Our goal is to dig through lots of information to figure out what really happened, when, where, and why” — Jordan Jones

The biggest challenge for genealogists is that people jump to conclusions about how history played out. The Internet can distribute these unsubstantiated conclusions very widely. Our goal is to dig through lots of information to figure out what really happened, when, where, and why. Using Evernote to manage the information I find is invaluable to helping me organize my thoughts and never lose sight of my tracks.



Another great benefit of using Evernote for my research and writing is that I have a complete archive of everything I’ve ever worked on. It’s organized by notebooks and tags, searchable, and accessible from virtually any computer or mobile device. You never know where different pieces might come into play later, so it’s important to keep everything I find.

A little background on genealogy, and why we do this

Historically, genealogy has been associated with people who wanted to prove they were related to important individuals such as kings and queens. Personally, I am much more interested in exploring micro history — how common people lived at various times, what I like to call “history at ground level.” Most of the history we learn about from books and in school showcases the lives of generals and kings; it misses popular history, how people actually lived. In my research, I constantly come across things that are interesting, surprising, and hardly covered in history books! For example, I discovered that my great-great grandfather was a ‘galvanized Yankee,’ in other words, he fought on both sides of the Civil War, joining the Union army as a way out of the POW camp. There was a very small group of people who were in this position and as a result, this historical fact didn’t get much coverage.

]]> http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/19/how-to-use-evernote-for-genealogical-research/feed/ 9 http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/13/creating-holiday-memories-with-evernote-food-upcoming-cooking-class-and-the-evernote-holiday-pledge/ http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/13/creating-holiday-memories-with-evernote-food-upcoming-cooking-class-and-the-evernote-holiday-pledge/#comments Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:23:03 +0000 Kasey Fleisher Hickey http://blog.evernote.com/?p=24738 Kristi Willis, our Food Writing Ambassador, shares her tips for using Evernote Food this holiday season.

I love spending the holidays with friends and family and sharing lovely meals. This year, I look forward to documenting our festivities with Evernote Food, which will make it easier to share the memories with everyone, even those who can’t join us.

Of course, the key to creating an unforgettable Evernote Meal is having drool-worthy photos, which is not my strong suit. Fortunately, I have several photographer friends who have taken mercy on me and taught me a few tips that can help anyone take a great photo with their smartphone.

How to take great Food photos with Evernote Food

 

1. Find the light. Light is the most important element of the photo. Good light = pretty food. If possible, put the dish in natural light (I take photos of my food on my patio table) by opening drapes or doors to bring light into the room. If that is not possible, have someone else shine a light on the food but avoid using a flash, which lights unevenly and can throw odd shadows on the dish making it look unappetizing. My friends and I provide light for each other at dimly-lit restaurants by using the flashlight apps on our phones.
2. Set the stage. Remove any items you don’t want in the photo from the table or counter. You don’t want the photo to look overplanned, but you also don’t really want that dirty spoon or empty can of pumpkin in the shot of your gorgeous pumpkin pie.
3. Get steady. If your hands are shaky, it will show up in your photo. One of my photographer friends tells me to tuck my elbows in tight to my body to make sure I get a steady shot.
4. Shoot close. To do justice to your food, get up close to it when you shoot; no one will be able to tell how lovely the turkey is if you shoot the photo from across the room.

I’ve added my own fifth tip to this list.

Since I’m not a great photographer, I take a lot of photos. This lets me pick the best of the bunch and delete my less than stellar work. Evernote Food makes it easy to capture several photos at once. When you click on the camera tool at the bottom of the meal, Evernote Food lets you take multiple photos in the same session. You can then review the photos and delete the ones you don’t need.

Once you have all your photos loaded, you can add notes about your favorite dishes and how they were prepared in the Meal Notes. Because you can come back to the notes later, you don’t have to worry about your food getting cold while you are trying to type up your notes; enjoy your meal and fill in the details later.

Cheers to a memorable holiday season with Evernote Food!

Skillshare Cooking Class: Eat Local: Creating a Locally Sourced Recipe

Home Cooking Ambassador (and Instructional Technologist) Lauren Atkins is teaching a two-week course on how to create a locally-sourced dish using Evernote and Evernote Food. Over the course of the free class, you’ll be able to watch pre-recorded video instructions from Lauren to keep you on track, and benefit from a number of resources including handouts, worksheets, and a weekly Q&A with Lauren to set you up for cooking success. Lauren is teaching the class using Skillshare, a global marketplace for classes that lets you learn real-world skills from anyone, anywhere.

You can sign up for Lauren’s class here.

Take the Evernote Holiday Pledge

Over the next few months, you’ll probably be doing a lot of planning, organizing, shopping, cooking and traveling. The holidays can be as daunting as they are fun, but with Evernote, they don’t have to be! Take the Evernote Holiday Pledge to use Evernote this holiday season to be more organized and less stressed.

We’ve got a lot of fun Challenges planned (did you participate in the BIG Evernote Potluck already?), and we’ll be supplying you with a steady flow of Evernote tips and guidance from our team and our fabulous Ambassadors. Be sure to sign up for email tips by taking the Pledge, and join our public notebook, which we’ll be updating regularly with tips on using Evernote and our family of products throughout the season.

How do you plan to use Evernote and Evernote Food this holiday season? We’d love to know.

]]> http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/13/creating-holiday-memories-with-evernote-food-upcoming-cooking-class-and-the-evernote-holiday-pledge/feed/ 2 http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/09/quick-tip-friday-merging-notes/ http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/09/quick-tip-friday-merging-notes/#comments Fri, 09 Nov 2012 23:42:33 +0000 Alex Muramoto http://blog.evernote.com/?p=23571 Evernote is a great way to collect all your memories in one place. Whether you’re  gathering photos related to a new home renovation with the Evernote Web Clipper, collecting meal ideas with Evernote Food, or jotting down plans for a work presentation directly in Evernote, the number of notes on any given topic can add up fast. Often, organizing notes as you collect them isn’t convenient, and copying content from one note into another later can be a pain. Luckily, Evernote for Mac, Evernote for Windows Desktop, and Evernote Web give you an easy way to merge multiple notes into a single one.

Merge notes by following these steps:

1. Select the notes you want to merge (Command + Click on Mac or Ctrl + Click on PC)
2. A thumbnail view of the notes with options will appear in the Note Viewer
3. Click the ‘Merge’ button

All of the selected notes will be merged into a single note. When merging with Evernote for Windows Desktop and via the Web, the title of the new note will be the same as the first note selected. When merging with Evernote for Mac, the title will be the same as the most recently modified note. The remaining note titles will be included in the body of the new note, making it easy to tell where the content originated from. The original notes will be moved to the Trash.

Please keep in mind that notes originally created in other Evernote apps, such as Evernote Food, Evernote Hello or Skitch, will no longer be accessible in those apps once merged. To continue to be able to view the original notes, simply move the original notes from your Trash back into any notebook in your Evernote account.

Have you used this feature? Share your tips in the comments!

]]> http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/09/quick-tip-friday-merging-notes/feed/ 23 http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/08/the-new-evernote-5-for-iphone-ipad-and-ipod-touch/ http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/08/the-new-evernote-5-for-iphone-ipad-and-ipod-touch/#comments Thu, 08 Nov 2012 15:02:13 +0000 Andrew Sinkov http://blog.evernote.com/?p=24429 Our apps never stop evolving. Every few weeks, we release an update that adds something new or improves an existing feature. It’s not often that we launch a complete redesign. In fact, it happens only once every few years. That’s what we’re doing today with our huge, new Evernote 5 for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Get Evernote from the App Store »

Design Goals

Our goal with the redesign was simple: make all major functions accessible within two taps. Achieving this goal was easier said than done. Evernote is a powerful app that’s used for a huge variety of tasks. Our team of graphic and interface designers spent months developing an approach that fit the needs of our users. From quick note takers to hyper organizers, the new Evernote 5 has you covered.

The Home Screen

We started from scratch when thinking about the home screen. The objective was to let a person create a new note or browse to an existing one with equal speed. To make this possible, we divided the screen into two sections: Quick Notes and Views.



Quick Note Buttons

Along the top of the app, you’ll find the Quick Note buttons. These let you create a new text note, start a snapshot or digitize physical documents with Page Camera. We made the buttons large so that they’re easy to tap, and we eliminated several steps from the process, perfect when time is of the essence.

The Views

Below the Quick Note buttons you’ll find a list of Views. Each is designed to help you get to your notes in the way that works best for you. We never dictate how users should organize their information, which means that some people rely entirely tags, others on notebooks, and others don’t use either. With this new design, we’ve found an elegant way to cater to everyone’s needs. Tap or swipe the green bar of a View to expand it to full screen, do the same to return to the home screen.

All Notes Views
The default All Notes look is our newly designed cards layout. The cards beautifully highlight the content of the note, giving you a good amount of information before you tap. On iPhone, if you prefer a different layout, swipe down from the top of the list to expose the sorting and search options. You can choose the classic snippets layout, as well as a different sort order.

Beside the layout options, you’ll find the search bar. It’s always there at the top of the note list when you need it. As always, you can search your account by keywords and by text contained within photos and images.

Notebooks View
The redesigned notebook list is a huge improvement over previous versions of Evernote. First, it brings all of your notebooks and those shared with you by others into a single list. You can scroll the list to find notes relating to a school or work project managed by someone else just as quickly and easily as you would find your own content. If you want to only see your own notebooks, pull down from the top to show sorting options.



In addition to the unified list, this view also shows Notebook Stacks, displayed as a wrapped grouping of books. Notebook Stacks are now also available on iPad! Tap on a notebook stack to expand it, then tap on the individual notebook you’re looking for.

We also made it easier to add a new notebook. Just tap on the Edit button in the green bar, then tap on New Notebook.

Tag View
If you organize your notes with tags, then you’ll love the new Tag View. Your tags are displayed in a list sorted alphabetically or by note count. You can change the sort order by pulling down on the list to expose the sorting options. You can also search for tags by typing into the tag search bar.

Places View
Location is one of the most powerful ways to remember your experiences. Evernote 5 makes it easy to relive all those memories. If you have location enabled, then every note you create on your iPhone or iPad in Evernote, Evernote Food, and Evernote Hello include location info. Now, you can easily view all those notes on a map. Pinch and zoom to find the area that you’re interested in, then tap on the notes icon in the top right corner of the screen. When you tap the icon, the notes from the selected area will overlay on the screen, allowing you to see the memories associated with that place. To return to the map, simply tap on the pin icon.



Premium Feature View
Evernote is completely free, but for our more active users, we offer some great additional features as part of Evernote Premium. Now, Premium users can easily manage their Premium features from this View. These Premium features includes the ability to download notebooks for fast access any time, PIN lock and more. If you’re a Free user and would like to learn more about the Premium features, just tap on the View.

New on iPad: Recent Notes

The iPad’s larger screen allowed us to add a great element to the home screen: Recent Notes. This horizontally scrolling list shows you the last several notes that your viewed, edited and created on the iPad. Tapping on one jumps you to the note. Recent notes are great for taking notes in a meeting, then looking something else up, then quickly returning to the note you were editing.



Questions and Answers

We created several useful resources to help you get the most of the new Evernote.

• What’s New Page that outlines all of the new features and capabilities.
• Getting Start Guide to help you learn everything there is to know about the app.
• A beautiful new learning experience when signing into the app. If you’re an existing user, I recommend signing out once you upgrade just to see it.

And More…

Not only did we add a ton of great features and redesigns, we also made the app faster, more responsive and more reliable. On top of all that, the new Evernote 5 looks and works beautifully on the new iPad Mini. We hope you like the new look of the app. There’s lots more to come. All of you Evernote Mac users, stay tuned. The new Evernote 5 for Mac is coming very soon.

Get Evernote from the App Store »

Meet the Designers

If you’re interested in learning more about the thinking that went into this and other Evernote apps and products, then join us in San Francisco on November 15th for our Evernote Talks: Design event. Space is very limited. RSVP here.

]]> http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/11/08/the-new-evernote-5-for-iphone-ipad-and-ipod-touch/feed/ 166 http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/10/29/trunk-spotlight-the-new-livescribe-sky-wi-fi-smartpen/ http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/10/29/trunk-spotlight-the-new-livescribe-sky-wi-fi-smartpen/#comments Mon, 29 Oct 2012 22:31:28 +0000 Mie Yaginuma http://blog.evernote.com/?p=24062  

Livescribe has been a longtime Evernote partner. With a Livescribe smartpen, you can take notes with pen and paper, capture audio as you write, and then enjoy the benefits of having a digital copy saved to Evernote that is always accessible and searchable.

Today, Livescribe launched the new wifi-enabled Sky smartpen that makes the integration with Evernote absolutely seamless. With Sky, students and professionals can focus on their lectures and meetings knowing their notes and audio are saved in Evernote automatically and wirelessly. It’s practically magic.

Evernote and Livescribe for better notes

With the Sky wifi smartpen, you take handwritten notes in your Livescribe notebook as you regularly would in meetings, lectures, or conferences. To record audio, just tap the pen on the Record button, and the pen will record as you take notes, linking the written and spoken words together. Notes and audio are stored on the pen, and when you’re in wifi range, it will sync all the content with Evernote. No special software or cables needed.

Once your handwritten notes are in Evernote, they will be searchable and available wherever you have Evernote installed. To view your handwritten notes, simply click on the Evernote note. To play back corresponding audio, click on the page image and the Livescribe Player will load where you can watch ink and audio playback together. Click on any location on the digital page to jump straight to that point in the recording.

We think the Sky wifi smartpen is especially useful for:

• Students: For recording lectures. With the audio recording, you only need to take notes about the key topics, and later refer to the audio for details. Once saved to Evernote, share your notes with your study group.
• Professionals: For capturing important information from a meeting without having to take detailed notes. Quickly review exactly what was said before your next meeting to stay on top of details.
• Teachers: For creating lessons, such as how to solve a math problem, and share with students in an Evernote Shared Notebook. Students can listen to your audio as they watch you show your work.

A look into the integration

We worked closely with Livescribe on this integration and are excited about the seamless experience users get when writing and and syncing their notes.

Bonus 500MB of monthly uploads for Evernote users

You’ll find yourself taking a lot of text and audio notes with your Sky wifi smartpen, so you’ll be happy to know you won’t run out of space; Sky users will receive a bonus 500MB of monthly uploads for notes they capture with their smartpen. The Sky comes in 3 models: 2GB ($169.95), 4GB ($199.95), and 8GB ($249.9). The 8GB Sky includes 1 year Evernote Premium. If you already have Premium, an additional year will be added to your subscription.

Find more about using the Sky wifi smartpen here.

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