‘Product updates’ Blog Posts

A couple of weeks ago, we introduced multi-selection checkboxes to Evernote Web. Now, we’re taking that once step further with the addition of drag-n-drop.

Here’s what you can drag

• Drag notes between notebooks
• Drag notes onto tags or tags onto notes
• Drag notes, tags, and notebooks into the trash
• Create nested tags

Give it a shot.

Evernote for Mac version 1.1 just came out, and it’s full of the most requested features and improvements.

PDF Support

You asked for it and now it’s here: Evernote supports PDF files! You can now drag a PDF into an open note, onto the dock icon, or into a notebook. You can also combine multiple PDFs, text, and images in a single note. Notes with PDFs will get synced like any other notes (unless you specifically put them into a local-only notebook, of course), so you can access them from any computer or device capable of viewing a PDF. The Mac version will even search the text within PDF notes.

You can also “print” right into Evernote from any Mac application, just go to the File>Print menu, push the PDF button, and select “Save PDF to Evernote.” A fully-formatted copy of your web page or document will automatically be added to Evernote. This works great with Safari, Firefox, iWork, MS Office, whatever. Try it with this blog post!

Our image-recognition technology won’t work on images within PDFs yet, and the Windows and Web clients will currently display PDFs as attachments, and will not automatically search within them. We’re working on it…

Spotlight

Evernote is now fully integrated with Spotlight. Now, you can search through all of your files and all of your memories in one place. You can also make Finder “smart folders” that include Evernote content. Just set the “kind” drop down to “other” and type “Evernote” into the field that opens up. Neat!

New “Mixed View” Mode

Evernote for the Mac now has three views: List, Mixed, and Thumbnail. The new “mixed view” mode shows you a single column of small thumbnails and metadata for each note. Now there’s a view that’s perfect for any set of notes, monitor sizes, and user styles. Try them out and find the one the works best for you.

Vertical Preview Pane

The Mixed and and Thumbnail views now offer a resizable and collapsable vertical preview pane on the right.

The currently selected note is displayed in the preview pane and is fully editable, scrollable, and shows live search results. If you have the screen real estate, try opening the preview pane to a generous size and you’ll never need to leave your favorite viewing mode again. Hitting “New Note” in Thumbnail or Mixed view will no longer force you into List view. You can still open a note in a separate window by double clicking on it. Of course, if the preview pane is taking up too much room, just drag it closed and it’ll stay that way.

The List mode keeps the preview pane on the bottom of the screen to accommodate more horizontal columns in the list.

Encryption

Ok, technically we rolled this out in the last build, but for some reason the announcement fell through the cracks, so let’s pretend that encryption is a brand new feature. Just select any portion of text in a note, right-click on it, and select “Encrypt Selected Text.” If you haven’t selected a password yet, you’ll be prompted to do so. To decrypt text, just click on it. Notes with encrypted text can be synced just like any other notes, and are fully interoperable between the Mac and Windows clients; you can encrypt stuff on a PC at work and decrypt it on your Mac at home, or vice-versa.

There’s currently no way to decrypt stuff on our web or mobile versions. You’ll see that a note has encrypted information, and you’ll be able to see any unencrypted content, but you won’t be able to decrypt it yet. We do this because we don’t ever want you to transmit your password over the network and we never want to see it on our servers. There are ways we could work around this restriction, but they’re not trivial to implement so we just haven’t had the time to work on them. We’ll get to it sooner or later, but in the meantime just keep your secret spy stuff to the Mac and Windows versions.

Don’t forget your encryption password! We never see it or store it anywhere on the service, so if you lose it, you won’t be able to decrypt your secrets. Seriously.

Bug Fixes

Version 1.1 also has many bug fixes and stability improvements: you can now drag-n-drop images, text, html, and supported audio into a note, thumbnails look better, and everything is just a bit smoother. Of course, this is still beta software, so if you find any bugs or issues, please send them to us.

If you’re already using the Mac client, just select “Check for Upgrades” from the “Evernote” menu to upgrade to version 1.1. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you can always get the latest version here. If you need an Evernote account, just sign up.

Thanks to everyone who’s tested our Mac client. It may be the newest addition to the Evernote software lineup, but it’s really starting to look pretty good. Keep the comments coming!

Last night we released the latest versions of Evernote for Windows and Evernote Web. Here are some of the user-facing enhancements (there are a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements). We’ve also added a ton of new hardware in response to our fast user growth.

Bonus: We’ve given everyone more invitations!

Evernote for Windows [Download Now]

• Search: Searching is now significantly faster, especially over large notebooks and databases
• Synchronization: Sync now works through password-protected proxies
• Stability: Major improvements in stability and overall performance

Evernote Web

• Multi-select checkbox: Now you can move, delete, and tag multiple notes at once
• iPhone: iPhone users are now automatically redirected to the iPhone-optimized web version
• Search: Note searching is now faster

Thank you beta testers. You’re helping us make a better product.

We are huge (HUGE) fans of the Apple iPhone. While the current Evernote mobile web interface works well on iPhones, it’s just not the same as having an application that’s tailored to the device.

Today, we’re unveiling the new Evernote iPhone web interface at:

http://www.evernote.com/iphone

We’re still testing and improving it, but we didn’t want to wait to give you access

In creating the Evernote iPhone web interface, we were able to rethink our mobile user experience. Whereas our standard mobile web application allows users to find notes by performing text searches, the iPhone version adds the ability quickly filter notes by navigating through lists of tags, notebooks, and note attributes to construct complex searches without typing. We think users are really going to like the ability to search and filter on their phone just as they can on the web or desktop applications.

One challenge we faced when designing the iPhone web interface was how to deal with large, complex notes. We decided that although the iPhone UI makes it easy to zoom and pan a web page, for Evernote the best experience should be more like reading email. Also, as in the standard mobile web version, we scale all the images on our servers, so you don’t have to download your 12MP images to your phone’s small screen. In addition to being able to email and delete notes, you can also zoom into a note, which will open it up in a separate browser tab with the full size images.

We know you’re going to ask, so here are the answers to some questions:

• Yes, we will begin auto-detecting iPhones soon. For now, iPhone users will need to go to the URL above
• You can use the two-finger gesture to pan around large images

History

In the early stages of the Evernote Service development the Web Clipper was just an easy way for developers to get content into the development notebooks quickly. It also helped us test our HTML sanitizer which makes sure no nefarious javascript makes it into users notebooks. First there was a command-line version, then a little clipper that just sent the URL’s to Evernote but didn’t work on secure sites. As we approached the final weeks before the beta launch we decided that the Javascript Web clipper was going to be part of the core service offering. We debated a little, each of the native clients support clipping and screen shots so it wasn’t clear that we really needed another way to clip content, but there was a strong lobby for not wanting to leave the web when you’re capturing web content.

Ultimately we decided that we needed a really good browser based clipper because a key part of the service launch was letting users capture from anywhere.

The version we released did a lot of what we wanted: one click capture, easy install, instant feedback, image and HTML document capture, capture selections of text and images or the whole page. We also support clipping from password protected sites like web-based email clients (which turns out to be kind of tricky).

Launch
Probably 15 minutes after we launched we realized the Web clipper was going to get a lot more use than we planned. In many ways it was just what we’d hoped for, users merged their personal photos and notes with information they gathered from around the web; Evernote helped them bring it all together. The Javascript clipper isn’t entirely bug free, each browser is different and mileage still varies. Also, there are a lot of really bad HTML pages out there and cleaning them up into our own internal variant on XHTML can be tough. For the first month or so I’d get a list of errors logged when the clipper could not save the clipped content from remote web pages. This list of different sites has provided a great source for testing and bug fixing.

Clipper Revisited
With this release the Web clipper has finally become really useful (at least for me and I hope for you).

Tagging and filing the clips as you clip them makes it so much easier to find pages later. I’ll clip sample code from articles, blog posts from Google Reader, recipes and put them straight into the correct notebook.

Some older features also seem more useful. Whenever you clip content, Evernote sets an attribute so you can view all your web clips and then filter by tags, notebooks or other criteria. If you are feeling a bit more adventurous, you may want to try filtering based on source URL. In the search box type: sourceURL:http://www.nytimes and you’ll be able to see all the notes you’ve clipped from the New York Times.

If you put clipped pages into public notebooks or email a note from a clipped page, your friends will also be able to access the source URL.

More to do

I’ve still got more features to add to the web clipper. At the top of the list is “search as you type” tags. Clipping from sites with frames is still a little flaky espacially on Safari. Lastly, I’ve been toying with the idea of recommending tags based on the clipped document’s similarity with other documents you have.

We released a whole bunch of updates over the past 24 hours. Make sure to click on the "Check for Updates" menu item in your Evernote clients.

First announcement, all accounts now have invitations to send out. Click the link in the top link bar on Evernote Web.

Here’s a shortlist of some notable items. For more details, see our release notes.

Evernote Web

• Switching between Thumbnail and List views now keeps the user scrolled to the same spot in the result set
• Single-Note view now displays the source URL from web clips and other note attributes
• Thumbnail and List views now immediately adjust their scrollbars to reflect the total number of notes in the result set making it easy to find other notes and keep track of where you are.

Evernote for Windows (download) 

• Improved handling of image attributes
• Improved synchronization logging
• Fixed conversion of ink notes from Apitek tablets
• Added the ability to select between ’system default’ mail client and ‘user default’ mail client

Evernote for Mac (download)

• Todo checkbox support
• Note Info panel now shows image recognition status, when applicable
• Spell checking is now enabled in the note title field.
• Bold, italic, underline and strike thru formatting are now preserved when syncing and copying/pasting.

Evernote for Windows Mobile (download)

• Added ink edit toolbar/color selection dialog
• Added scheduled upload support on non-Latin language phones

Plus a ton of bugfixes everywhere.  Keep that feedback coming!

We’ve added 5 invitations to current user accounts. If you don’t see any in your account yet, give it some time.

The invitation link will appear up near the Setting link in Evernote Web —just like in this screenshot.

We teased you with the Mac client a couple of weeks ago in our overview video, and now it’s here. Trust us, it was worth the wait. Evernote for Mac has all the features you expect —advanced image search, synchronization, new note authoring, tagging, and note sharing— and some amazing extras:

• Thumbnail view — Zoom in or out and visually scan through your notes
• Snapshot note — Photo Booth-like interface that takes a snapshot and adds it to a notebook
• Notebook publishing — Publish any notebook for the whole world to see right from your desktop
• Mac clipper — Turn screenshots and copied content into new notes

Check out our new, more comprehensive Mac video:

If you have an Evernote account, go ahead and download the Mac client here. If you’re still waiting for an invitation, Download Squad and TechCrunch are giving out a whole bunch today, or you can register here.

Evernote for Mac is designed for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

In related news, Evernote Web now supports Safari 3. We have a few short tutorial videos on how to install and use the browser web clipper with Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer here.

Once a week (or so), we’ll be posting about our latest features, enhancements, bug fixes, and other useful information.

Web clipper tutorial videos

We added two short video tutorials on how to install and use the browser clippers, which allow you to save web pages directly to your account — €“text, images, and all, not just a link.

• Firefox 2 (video with sound)
• Internet Explorer 7 (video with sound)

Install the Web Clipper by dragging or adding this Clip to Evernote button into your browser’s link bar.

Windows Client updates | Get the latest version

• Improved speed of tape scrolling and saved searches
• UI improvements — new and improved icons and icon placements
• Synchronization logs now available on double click of synchronization bar
• Improved import of databases from pre-3.0 versions of Evernote
• Implemented ‘Attributes’ section
• Increased efficiency and speed of indexing

Evernote Web and Mobile Web updates

• Improvements to the web clipper
• Login on mobile device now uses SSL
• Improved detection of mobile browsers

Evernote for Windows Mobile updates | Get the latest version

• Improved synchronization and handling of snapshot deletion on the device

psssst. the mac client is almost ready. stay tuned.

We know you IE7 users were getting a bit jealous of the Firefox 2 crowd having all the fun. Well, the wait is over. Evernote Web now supports IE7.

Stay tuned, additional browser support is on the way.

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