Get Evernote Hello 2.1 for iPhone

Business Card Scanning

The business card scanning feature in Evernote Hello is really great. It’s a Premium feature, but we’ve decided to extend our preview for Free users. It makes adding people to Hello as simple as snapping a photo. Plus, if you connect the app to LinkedIn and Facebook, we’ll build rich profiles automatically. Learn more about business scanning with Evernote Hello.

Flash controls
In our tests, we’ve found that enabling the flash is the best option for consistent business card photos. There are cases, especially with glossy cards, where the flash ends up interfering with our ability to recognize the text. That’s why we added the iPhone’s familiar flash controls to the camera. If you’re snapping a glossy card, you can turn the flash off—just try to be under good lighting conditions.

Better support for iPhone 4
We’ve made a number of improvements and adjustments to the app to make sure that our iPhone 4 users have a great business card scanning experience. Give it shot.

New Premium Feature: Passcode Lock

For an extra level of security, Premium users can enable a passcode lock, which will display whenever the you launch the app. To set the lock, go to My Profile and swipe to the bottom of the screen.

Visit our Evernote Premium page to learn about all the great features that come with Evernote Premium.

And more…

In addition to everything above, we fixed lots of issues, improved the app’s stability and let you update the Title and Organization fields for your Hello Contacts. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Get Evernote Hello 2.1 for iPhone

Many seasoned Evernote users have been saving recipes to their Evernote accounts for a while. If you’re like us and you’re more than a little obsessed with collecting recipes, then your food-related notebooks may include recipes in various formats, from JPEGs to web clips to scanned and hand-typed ones.

With Evernote Food 2.1, you can now import designated notebooks with all of these recipes into My Cookbook in Evernote Food. You can also do this with tags if that’s how you organize the notes.

Don’t have Evernote Food 2.1? Download it for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now ».

Let’s review how this feature works.

1. First, launch the app and tap the elephant icon at the top left corner of the screen.

2. Scroll down to Recipe Settings. Tap ‘Include Recipes from Account.’

3. To select Notebooks, tap ‘Include notebooks.’ To select tags, tap ‘Include tags.’

4. On the Notebooks screen, choose the Evernote Notebooks that contain the recipes you want to see in Evernote Food. You can select as many as you want. Don’t worry, you can change your selections whenever you like.

Bonus Tip: make sure to edit your recipe notebooks in Evernote before getting to this step, so only the recipes you want to import show up in Evernote Food. If recipes show up in the app that you don’t want there, you can hide them by tapping the edit tool at the bottom of the recipe screen and then tapping ‘Hide.’

The steps are exactly the same to select tags assigned to recipes you want to see in Evernote Food.

5. Once you’ve made all of your Notebook and tag selections, exit from Settings and open the My Cookbook section in the app. Et voila! You’ll now see all of your recipes in one place within Evernote Food. Give this feature a spin and let us know how it works for you.

Want to learn more about how to use Evernote Food? Check out the following blog posts:

Build a Restaurant Wish List
Build Your Own Cookbook
Chronicle Your Culinary Adventures

For more information on using Evernote Food, check out our Evernote Food user guide and also stop by our Evernote Food Facebook page for regular tips.

Get Evernote for iOS from the App Store »

Snippets on iPad

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that our users love having options when viewing their notes. That’s why we’ve added Snippets to our iPad version. It’s a new note list mode that makes it easy to quickly scan your notes and jump to any month with a handy date scrubber along the right edge. To switch to Snippets, pull down from the top of the note list and tap on the icon.

When you’re viewing Snippets and you tap on a note, the note slides in from the right over part of the Snippets list. This design lets you view and edit the note, while also letting you scroll through the note list.

By default, Snippets contain the title, date, tags, an image, and some text from the note’s body. If you prefer seeing less information, simply tap on the gear icon in the lower right corner of the screen and choose what you want to see.

Improved PDFs

For this update, we’ve embedded a new PDF viewer that makes reading PDFs a much better experience.

• Multi-page: Jump to any page in your PDF by tapping on the page images along the bottom of the PDF or the grid icon in the top left corner.
• Search: Tap the magnifying glass to search within the PDF. Premium subscribers will also be able to search inside scanned PDFs.
• Landscape view: Turn your iPhone or iPad on its side to get a two-page view.
• Rotation lock: Tap the rotate icon in the top right corner to lock the PDF in place so it doesn’t move when you turn your device.

New Formatting Options

In past updates, we’ve given you the tools you need to add all sorts of text styling and formatting to your notes. In today’s update, we have two new options to strip unwanted formatting away. To access the options tap on the “A” above the keyboard on iPhone or the “no-formatting” icon above the keyboard on iPad when editing a note.

• Simplify Formatting is great for cleaning up any formatting issues that you may encounter in a note. This is particularly useful for cleaning up web clips.
• Plain Text removes all rich text, formatting and images from your note leaving behind only the text.

New Evernote Business Features

This update adds two great new features for our Evernote Business users.

Offline Notebook Support
Evernote Business users can now download any or all of their Business Notebooks to their device, allowing the notes to load instantly even without a network connection. Select the Business Notebooks you wish to take offline by going to the Business Premium view on the home screen, then tap “Offline Notebooks.”

View the Business Library on iPad
The Business Premium view also lets iPad users view your company’s Business Library. From there, you can see all of the Business Notebooks published by your colleagues and choose the ones that you’d like to sync to your account. Once you join and sync a Business Notebook to your Evernote account, it will appear in your notebook list.

The Evernote Trunk on iPad

There are thousands of amazing developers across the globe building integrations that extend the power of Evernote. Now, you can explore everything that our community has to offer right from the app. Tap on your user name in the top-left corner of the home screen and select the Trunk. When you see an iOS app that you like, you can install it right from the Trunk, no need to go searching in iTunes.

And More…

In addition to these great features, we’ve also improved our handling of large notes, fixed tons of bugs, and we now let you open PDFs and images in other apps. We hope you like the latest version of Evernote of iOS. Let us know what you think.

Get Evernote for iOS from the App Store »

Dolphin, the popular mobile browser, recently released a new version for iPad that integrates Evernote’s Web Clipper technology. This means, for the first time, you can seamlessly clip web pages to Evernote from your iPad, and get the same quality experience as when you use the Evernote Web Clipper on desktop browsers. Add that to Dolphin’s other features, such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks, and customizable gesture-based navigation, and you have a great browsing experience on your iPad.

Download Dolphin now in the Evernote Trunk.

Clip on the Go

Whether waiting for your plane at the airport or sitting in a coffee shop, you can look up whatever is on your mind, and clip it to Evernote to reference later. Anything from travel information to discounts you discover to information for a research project can be clipped, and Dolphin will format it properly in Evernote where it will be searchable and accessible. Just as with the Evernote Web Clipper, you can specify the destination notebook, and add tags or comments. Additionally, taking advantage of the iPad’s touchscreen, you can annotate your Web Clips to note anything you don’t want to forget.

Working Closely Together

This is the first time a partner has integrated Evernote’s Web Clipper technology to provide the best clipping experience on iPad. Previously, Dolphin had an Evernote plugin available only on Android, but Dolphin heard from the Evernote community that they wanted the full Evernote Web Clipper experience on iPad. “We listened to their feedback, and worked closely with Evernote’s Dev Team to make it happen, and we are very happy with the result,” said  Edith Yeung, Head of Corporate Strategy at Dolphin. Working together with our partners to create the features and experiences that our users really want is the kind of integration we strive for, and the Dolphin Browser for iPad is a great example.

Enter Our Swag Giveaway!

To celebrate the integration, we’re giving away two gift packs that include Evernote and Dolphin t-shirts, a Dolphin notebook, and Evernote stickers. We’ll randomly select one person from our community of beta testers who helped polish the integration, and one from those who comment on this blog post. For a chance to win on the blog, please leave a comment by noon February 15th, with the hashtag #Dolphin, and let us know why you like Dolphin.

Are you a developer interested in joining the more than 20,000 developers worldwide who are building with Evernote? Visit dev.evernote.com to get more information and get started!

• 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.

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.

• Name: Justin Nowak
• Evernote Ambassador: Event Planning
• Location: Calgary, AB, Canada
• Profession: Event Planner
• Website: http://justinnowak.com/
• Twitter: @justinnowak

Bio

Justin Nowak is an entrepreneur with a passion for event planning. He is the Event Facilitator for Startup Weekend Calgary and VP of Community and Events for the Canadian Cloud Council. Justin plans all of his events using Evernote.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• Windows
• Mac
• iPad
• Android

I use Evernote for…Event Planning

I started using Evernote a lot when I began planning events. Between organizing large conferences for the Canadian Cloud Council and grassroots get togethers for Startup Weekend here in Canada, I began to get inundated with information that I needed to be able to capture and organize quickly and easily, especially on the go. After reading how other people — especially Evernote Ambassadors — were using Evernote, I realized just how versatile the tool was. Now I use Evernote to plan events from start to finish.

Logistics, research and the planning process

For me, Evernote now starts the planning process for every event. From creating lists of things I need to get done to what sponsors I want to work with, I use Evernote to capture my ideas when I first start to conceptualize an event. I’ll create lists for food, potential event locations, and more.

I aggregate all of my ideas in a unique notebook for each event. This is helpful as I’m often planning multiple events at any given time. There’s a lot of information coming in— contracts from big sponsors, ideas from other people, vendor forms — and this way, I’m able to assign information to specific notebooks to keep things tidy. Having all of this information accessible to me in one place is invaluable. Over the life cycle of an event, I scan numerous documents (using an app called DocScanner for my Android phone) and send them to Evernote. I also forward important emails from my inbox to my Evernote account (including attachments). I never have to dig through emails or a stack of papers to find what I’m looking for; Evernote’s search is so powerful, I only need to enter in a keyword or two to get to what I need. I also rely on the Web Clipper to capture articles with information that’s pertinent to the events I’m planning.

When you’re managing an event, you’re swimming in documentation. Being able to snap photos of or forward receipts to my Evernote account, and capture trip itineraries, means I don’t have to worry about finding that stuff later.

When an event has wrapped, I continue to use my event notebooks, making sure that I’ve closed the loop. I send all post-event related information (like survey responses about what people liked or didn’t and pictures) to the specific event notebook.

Sharing event responsibilities

By saving everything to Evernote, I’m not only able to hash out my ideas and keep myself organized throughout the process, but to also assign roles and responsibilities to key stakeholders right from my Evernote account.

With larger events, I typically work with a core team of people and a number of volunteers. Evernote makes it easy to delegate work and keep track of each aspect of the event and who’s working on it. I share individual notes and notebooks with various people responsible for different parts of the event, and because I can share with one person or more, I can decide who needs access to what. For example, I typically share notes and notebooks that include information about event aspects with the volunteers that are responsible for them, while limiting Shared Notebooks that include information that may not be pertinent to the volunteers to colleagues. I use Notebook Stacks to organize separate notebooks with different types of documents under the main event notebook, and instead of starting a long and tedious email chain with 20-30 people, I simply grant access to the group that needs these documents. This saves me so much time, especially when I’m busy. It also allows volunteers to collaborate on their own time. For people who don’t have an Evernote account, we simply have them email information directly into the appropriate notebook.

The payoff

Using Evernote to plan events has a lot of benefits. For one, I’ve significantly cut down on email, but more importantly, I’m getting a ton more sleep now. I used to run around like a chicken with its head cut off, but now everything is more organized and I feel a sense of calm (as much as you can when you plan events!). On a daily basis, I can just go into my Evernote account, be reminded of what needs to get done, and get right to it.

A few of my favorite Evernote apps

I’ve started diving more into other Evernote apps including Evernote Hello. When I go from conference to conference, I meet so many people. I have a good brain but it’s not close enough to keep track of everyone I meet and how I met them. In a brief 5 minute chat I have with a person, I try to capture as much information about them as possible using Evernote Hello. Back at my office, I can recall if that person asked me questions about partnership opportunities, for example, and follow up. I also use Skitch to quickly annotate notes on the go.

5 Evernote tips for event planners

Since I’ve made Evernote my event-planning hub, I’ve picked up a few ideas for ways to use the tool more efficiently. Here are a few of my tips for using Evernote for event planning:

• Tip 1: Use the email address you get with Evernote. Send everything that’s pertinent to this email so it automatically gets saved to your Evernote account. [How to email things to your Evernote account]
• Tip 2: Use notebooks to their full potential. Make specific notebooks for each event you’re working on, then organize them into Notebook Stacks. You can share individual notebooks with groups of people responsible for various aspects of the event and keep certain ones private. I try to save everything that’s relevant into each notebook as I get it. Keeping notebooks very specific makes it easier to find things later.
• Tip 3: Tagging is huge. I try to tag as I email stuff into notebooks. This is another great layer of organization for notes.
• Tip 4: Utilize the Trunk. I love DocScan for my Android phone; it lets me scan everything from receipts to contracts so I can access them on the road. [Check out the Evernote Trunk]
• Tip 5: Use the Web Clipper. Capture pictures, articles and cool ideas for what you could do for future events.

The Evernote Ambassador Program

Evernote Ambassadors are amazing individuals that are here to teach, share and help you get more out of Evernote. Learn more about Ambassadors and consider submitting your story.

Join the conversation happening in our Lifestyle Forum to connect with Ambassadors and other Evernote users.

Join the conversation

Download Ambassador Guides

Drag and drop them into a New Note or attach them to a note so you can access them from any computer or mobile device where you have Evernote installed!

Joshua Zerkel’s Productivity Tips (PDF)
Brandie Kajino’s Organization Tips (PDF)
Carley Knobloch’s Spring Cleaning Tips (PDF)
Jamie Todd Rubin’s Paperless Tips (PDF)
Jenni Lathrop’s Crafting Tips (PDF)
Lindsey Holmes’ Small Business Tips (PDF)
Krisstina Wise’s Real Estate Tips (PDF)
Rob van Nood’s case study on Evernote for Portfolios (PDF)

• Name: Captain Daniel Ogren
• Location: Potomac, Maryland
• Profession: Captain at Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services

Bio

Daniel Ogren is a Captain at Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services in Potomac, Maryland. His primary job is working for the fire department; however, he also heads up response and disaster management for his unit. On the side, he runs his own photography business. Daniel uses Evernote for everything from organizing procedures for disaster response to running his photography business.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• Windows
• Android Phone
• iPhone
• iPad
• Web Clipper

I use Evernote for…Coordinating and Planning a Disaster Relief Effort

I use Evernote every day, both in my personal and professional life. I’m trying to go completely paperless, so everything from tax documents to receipts gets scanned with my Fujitsu ScanSnap and gets sent to my Evernote account. Evernote has also proven to be hugely helpful for my work in disaster response.

I’m active in coordinating local disaster response efforts, and am also a member of the FEMA Task Force. I first started using Evernote for disaster response back when Hurricane Irene descended upon us. As the person in charge of safety for our local task force, I’m responsible for a lot of planning and management. I work with structural engineers and hazardous material folks to make sure that a disaster scene is promptly and safely overseen. From the moment that something happens (an earthquake, hurricane, terrorist attack) I begin gathering information to get an idea of the scope of our job. I use Evernote to capture and manage all of this information.

Creating a Disaster Relief Plan in Evernote

Whenever a disaster occurs, I usually set up a new notebook with the name of that event. From there, I can use a combination of Notebook Stacks and tags to keep my research, communications, and reference documents organized and easy to find.

I use the Evernote Web Clipper to clip weather reports, research information on chemicals and hazardous materials, and begin contacting people in the service. Evernote is my central hub of information: I clip all my research to it, store our standard operating procedures in a Shared Notebook, and forward important emails and correspondences to a notebook for that specific event. All of this information is available on my iPhone and iPad, and I can even store it offline and not have to worry about an Internet connection [Offline Notebooks are a Premium-only feature].

Creating separate notebooks, both private and shared, for different events as well as for general topics makes it easy to distribute information quickly to the right people. For example, I can selectively share notebooks with volunteers who are working on a certain event, or give access to standard operating procedures to everyone in my organization. This saves me an enormous amount of time and keeps me focused on the task at hand.

Evernote for News Monitoring

Since my job requires me to be on top of what’s happening in the world, I use Evernote to help me manage an inflow of information. I subscribe to federal government sites like the National Hurricane center, and follow a number of news-oriented Twitter feeds, all of which are configured to automatically send information straight to my Evernote account.

Evernote as a Reference Hub

For general information on urban search and rescue, as well as documents, manuals, PDFs, and training documents, I create separate notebooks that serve as an electronic encyclopedia that I can access from anywhere. Many of these documents can be referred to anytime, and some may come in handy someday! For example, I once had to do research on a UH60 Blackhawk helicopter. I wasn’t familiar with this aircraft, so ended up doing a bunch of research online, clipping specifications, pictures and operating procedures to my general notebook. It was useful for the Hurricane Irene effort and now lives in my Evernote account forever.

Before Evernote, I was collecting information from different places; I didn’t have a central, easy-to-access and searchable place for all of this information. The longer I use Evernote, the better it works for me. Every time I deal with a new disaster it takes me less and less time to hit the ground running.

• Name: Chris Murphy
• Location: Austin, Texas
• Profession: Co-Owner/Salon Director
• Company: MFX SalonSpa
• Website: www.maximumfx.com

Bio

Chris Murphy is the co-owner and salon director of MFX SalonSpa in Austin, Texas. Chris works with salon and spa owners throughout the U.S. and relies on Evernote to not only manage his business and various speaking opportunities, but to remember people and improve his company’s recruiting and HR processes.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• iPad
• iPhone
• Mac

Favorite Evernote Products

• Evernote Hello for capturing potential salon candidates

I use Evernote for…managing my salon business

I had downloaded Evernote a while ago but couldn’t really wrap my head around how I could incorporate it into my business until I had lunch with Real Estate Ambassador Krisstina Wise. Once she filled me in on the ways she was using Evernote for her business, I thought that I should really have another look. And suddenly, all of the different ways I could be using it just hit me. Now, I don’t know how I could live without it.

I own an Aveda Lifestyle Salon and Spa with multiple physical locations, so one of the most important things to me about Evernote is that it syncs and information I capture is available anywhere. The salon industry is a labor intensive industry so there are always lots of schedules to stay on top of, reviews to keep track of, etc. Being able to manage this type of information in Evernote and be able to access it from anywhere is so helpful.

In addition to the day-to-day management of information, one of the key areas of business that Evernote has majorly impacted is our recruiting process.

Evernote and Evernote Hello for recruiting

Aveda has institutes across the U.S. and because we have relationships with many of them, we tend to do on-site recruiting at different locations. We recruit most heavily from institutes in Austin, San Antonio and Houston. During our visits we usually give a presentation, after which we get approached by 50-60 people who want to learn more about our company and submit their resumes. Prior to Evernote, we didn’t have an efficient system for gathering contact information on site and staying connected with potential candidates.

Having recently downloaded Evernote Hello, I realized that we could be using it to take pictures of candidates who stopped by our table and capture all of their information right then and there. Because Evernote Hello syncs with Evernote, we could even pre-select a specific notebook (in our case, ‘Job Fairs’) to send all of these notes to. Now, instead of collecting business cards or writing down information on scraps of paper, we capture everything using Evernote Hello. I love that Evernote Hello also uses my phone’s GPS to capture the location where the note was taken — this makes it easy for me to connect certain faces with specific institute visits.

Our company has a 6 step recruiting process, and when you have a large volume of applicants rolling in, you can imagine it’s easy to get tripped up over where they are in the process. Between Evernote and Evernote Hello, we’ve been able to essentially streamline our system.

Creating a recruiting system inside of Evernote

We have several notebooks in a Notebook Stack that we use to manage the recruiting process. All of the applicants we capture using Evernote Hello get automatically saved to the ‘Job Fairs’ notebook. We have a separate notebook that includes all scanned resumes that we receive. We have another notebook that includes all applicants who we are interested in; we automatically send all of these applicants a list of questions as a first step. As candidates move through the process, we take notes along the way and funnel them on to the next step. If we decide not to move forward with a candidate, we add them to a separate notebook that we use as a reminder to notify these people.

Using Evernote as the central hub for our recruiting has allowed us to be a lot more efficient and provided more clarity around the recruitment process. I’m able to share recruiting notebooks with all of my managers, who can see applicants coming in, in real time. Plus, they can add their comments to all of the notes, so the interview and hiring process is really collaborative. Ultimately, we can process a larger volume of information and yet stay organized. We’re not a huge company with big management systems and using Evernote has really helped us! Evernote has completely changed how we do business; we end up hiring more quality people.

Evernote for performance reviews

In addition to being instrumental in our recruiting process, Evernote has also played an important role in the way that we handle performance reviews. We create a note for each team member in Evernote and then refer to the individual’s note during our monthly meeting, adding notes each time. Because everything is in Evernote, multiple people (including myself and a team leader) can edit the note simultaneously; I can have my iPad in the meeting, while the team lead can be taking notes on his/her device at the same time, throughout the conversation. Later, we can share the note with the team member we reviewed so they can have access to all of our feedback.

• Name: Fred Constantinesco
• Location: Dallas, Texas
• Hobby: Fantasy Sports
• Website: http://www.linkedin.com/in/fredconstantinesco

Bio

Fred Constantinesco is a fantasy sports enthusiast. He is getting ready for the fantasy football draft.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• Mac
• iPhone
• Google Chrome (Web Clipper)
• Kindle Fire

Favorite products that work with Evernote

• Google Reader: for reading fantasy football articles quickly.
• ifttt: for sending starred articles from my Google Reader to Evernote.
• Pocket: for reading articles later and sending them to Evernote.
• Wappwolf: for connecting Evernote to my Dropbox account, allowing me to save and sync all of my documents to Evernote.
• Kustom Note: for making templates for my notes.
• FastEver: for quickly jotting down notes on my iPhone and sending them to Evernote.
• Buzzworthy: for sending my Kindle Fire book highlights to Evernote.

I use Evernote for…Managing my Fantasy Sports Leagues

I first started using Evernote in law school. At the time, it helped me keep my notes in order. Slowly but surely, I started using it more until it became a go-to tool for my professional and personal life. Now, I keep everything in Evernote — from photographs of important documents to transcripts, how-to articles and guides, and items related to my career. Last year, while I was researching draft picks for my fantasy football team, I realized that I could use Evernote as a place to organize all of the information I was finding. Since then, my use of Evernote for fantasy football and fantasy sports, in general, has only grown.

There are a lot of logistics involved in setting up a fantasy sports team and participating in a league. Having everything organized in Evernote helps me stay on top of the most relevant information, keep up with dues and end of season payouts, and capture all the important memories (like the times I beat my friends!).

Evernote for researching your draft picks

Fantasy football is about to heat up and right now everyone is researching their draft picks. During the summer months, team owners are collecting information on injuries, position battles, free agency, and the NFL draft. When the time comes for the draft, each of the 10-12 team owners draft players back and forth until all roster slots are full. Each owner gets about a minute and a half to decide on a player and you must think quickly but choose wisely. Like in the NFL, you want to assemble the best possible roster of players, so it is essential to be prepared weeks before the draft begins.

Team owners continue to manage their rosters post-draft, as transactions on the waiver wire (a pool of players who are not owned in a specific league, but can easily become one of the best players of the season). Pursuing trades with other managers can impact your season just as much as the draft process. As I’m researching players online throughout the summer, I clip everything relevant into Evernote using the Evernote Web Clipper or Evernote Clearly. I take note of any relevant player news or new player rankings. Throughout the season, I’m able to refer to this research to not only help my picks but guide my team’s strategy. It sure beats printing out numerous pages’ worth of rankings and projections! Plus, it’s more productive, so I spend less time sorting and organizing information; I can just get right to it. To help this process, I created a group in my Google Reader to capture fantasy football articles from several websites. This makes it easy to scan the titles and see if there’s anything worth reading all in one location. Any article that I find valuable is starred and directly sent to my Fantasy Football notebook via ifttt. In Evernote, I tag my research depending on the category. Leading up to the draft, most of my notes are tagged under a general “Read Later” tag.

For the day of the draft, I create a master note (i.e. cheat sheet) that includes Note Links to notes with my rankings, projected stats, and list of sleepers (players I believe will have a break out season). As we dive into the season, each week my team plays another team. Once the games get going, I pay attention to how teams and players are performing. Being able to closely monitor player statistics and activity helps me analyze future draft picks. I keep one master note that has players I need to drop from my team, replacements for those players, and trade proposals; I’m continually adding to it.

Evernote and Skitch for managing your season

I like to use Skitch to snap photos of the score at the end of each game. I keep these images in Evernote so I can remind friends who bitterly lost and recall some great times we had (note: for obvious reasons, I do not snap photos of my defeats).

Evernote for dues and ‘office work’

Playing fantasy sports involves a fair amount of administrative work. I use Evernote to keep track of information such as who’s paid their dues and who needs to be paid out at the end of the season. I also capture all emails I receive or compose that relate to league administration. That way, all correspondences are also in one, easy to search place.

Overall, using Evernote for fantasy sports has helped me achieve better results because it has made me more efficient and effective in my preparations, choosing my players, and keeping track of how things progress throughout the season. Evernote allows me to prepare for a fantasy season without spending more time than I need to. Having an archive of past fantasy sports seasons in Evernote also helps me look back at previous seasons and analyze what trade proposals were made, why certain trades went through or were declined, and which players I want to stay away from next season.

Evernote for switching careers

I’m currently in the process of switching careers (from being an attorney to working as a Landman in the oil and gas industry). Evernote has proven to be invaluable for helping me make this transition. I’ve been able to keep track of cover letters, resumes, and research on the different companies I’ve been applying to all in one place. I use Evernote as a relationship manager and made a template that I use for each new professional contact I make.

I keep a master note in my account with Note Links to notes with all of my research. Evernote has also helped me remember where in the interview process I am with different companies, what my impressions are of different companies I’ve applied to, and what I might need to do differently with my resume or cover letter in the future.