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Evernote 2.0 for Mac is now available
It was just two weeks ago that we looked at the Evernote for Mac beta. Today Evernote 2.0 for Mac is finally available, with a slew of new features like notebooks stacks and sharing, UI improvements and more. Here's a quick look at Evernote 2.0 for Mac. One of the marquee features is notebooks stacks, and it's what I'm most eager to play with. You've got many notebooks in Evernote, some on related topics. Stacks lets you organize those into a single location. Create stacks by dropping related notebooks on top of each other, and click the disclosure triangle to see what's in there. Another cool feature is notebook sharing right from the app. This was previously only available through a browser. To get started, just tap the new Shared button. You'll see a list of notebooks. To share that awesome Macramé notebook with your Aunt Shirley, just click the Start Sharing button and you're off. Notebooks can also be shared with the world at large or a group in addition to individual sharing. There's a lot more, like a re-designed left panel, support for up to 250 notebooks and the ability to attach files to a note. We'll have a more thorough review up soon. Until then, grab it and start playing!
Beta Mac client for Evernote adds sharing controls, notebook stacks
The perennial TUAW favorite 'bucket app' Evernote has added two intriguing new features in the beta version of the Mac client: in-app notebook sharing controls and Stacks for notebook organization. Both are available immediately to free and paid Evernote users who choose to update to the beta (just check "include beta versions" in the application's update preferences to see the new build). The sharing controls in-app look much the same as they do on the Evernote website, and they provide the same level of custom access. You can decide whether to share a notebook with the public at large, or with specific individuals. Premium subscribers can also allow sharing partners to edit, create or delete notes if desired; they also get a history view of shared notes, so they can see exactly when things went off the rails. The organizational power of Stacks means that you're no longer limited to a flat list of notebooks; you can sort and group your notebooks into whatever piles you need, and collapse/expand them as needed in the app sidebar. Right now the only place you'll see your Stacks is in the Mac client, but as the new features roll out to the other Evernote flavors they will show up in those spots as well. I'd love to tell you how these new features are working for me, but unfortunately my notes database is hanging up during the upgrade process. You might want to backup (or redownload) the stable version, just in case. [Hat tip to DLS/Switched]
Evernote hits 5 million users
Cloud memory service Evernote has reached 5 million users and continues to grow, according to an official statement on the company's blog. The service is gaining tens of thousands of new users per day and has recently seen its highest daily revenue from premium users, plus big jumps off of Apple platforms, on Windows, Android, and BlackBerry. The five millionth user also marks the fastest million users the company has earned, as you can see from the blocked-off sections in the chart above. That's pretty phenomenal growth; it's on an exponential scale, too, so there's probably more where that came from. Meanwhile, Evernote also promises updates are coming on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad side of things. Just a few weeks ago, the company raised a round of US$20 million from some venture funding. 2010 has been a good year for Evernote -- we'll have to see what happens in 2011. [via TechCrunch]
NTT Japan builds a USB box for sharing with the cloud
This unassuming black box, the N-Transfer, has one purpose and one alone -- to stick Japan's USB 2.0 storage devices, scanners and printers firmly in the cloud, without the need for a intermediate computer. In that respect the device is much like a certain Pogoplug, but telephony provider NTT Japan's doing the formula one better, as this box doesn't just share a pair of USB ports across a web interface. You can transfer up to 500MB files point-to-point across the company's high-speed fiber optic internet with boxes at either end -- each equipped with gigabit ethernet -- or upload documents from a Fujitsu ScanSnap or Epson Colorio scanner (and hopefully others) directly to Evernote. If you live in Japan, have access to a fiber optic connection and don't mind the copious amount of hate regular ol' DSL users are directing at you right now, you can grab one for ￥7,350 (about $90) at Amazon.
148Apps creates an App Hall of Fame
Jeff Scott of 148Apps has finally revealed his App Hall of Fame project -- he started it up about a month ago, and asked a number of personalities around the iPhone/iPad app scene (including yours truly) to nominate and then vote on a few App Store apps, with the eventual goal of inducting them into a Hall of Fame. We made our nominations and voted a little while ago, and the first inductees into the store are now listed on the site: Angry Birds, Flight Control, Doodle Jump, Shazam, Evernote, Plants vs. Zombies, Pandora, Simplenote, the official Twitter app, Instapaper, Homerun Battle 3D, and Fieldrunners. You've probably heard of all of those already, but that's the point: the Hall of Fame aims to honor "the very best mobile applications and games." There will be 12 inductees honored every month going forward, so the collection should grow bigger pretty fast. The nomination process is all done by the selection committee (not the public), but if you want to follow along, you can sign up on the mailing list (and have a chance to win some of the nominees for free every month). It's a fun project -- the App Store has been around long enough now that some super popular apps have risen to the top, and this is a good way to keep track of the absolute cream of the crop over the App Store's whole life. At the same time, I'm sure we'll see some interesting decisions in the months to come, so stay tuned for that.
Best apps for road warriors and business users
Business Insider has compiled a list of the 10 best free iPhone apps for business and the 20 best iPad apps for business travelers. The lists are pretty comprehensive, and just because you don't fly around from one meeting to the next doesn't mean you need not check them out. From Todo and Evernote for the iPad (which has been extensively covered here on TUAW) to Yelp and Bump for the iPhone, there are some real gems to help you stay ahead of the game. If you've got a shiny new iPad or iPhone, but you're struggling to sift the good from the bad on the App Store, this is a great place to start. Business Insider even points out that, if you put the apps to good use, maybe you can claim the paid ones back on expenses. That's good thinking!
Announcing Trunk, an app store for Evernote
Evernote announced a new extension to their platform today, Trunk. It's essentially an App Store for Evernote, highlighting applications, hardware and platforms created by third parties which integrate with Evernote in various ways. Trunk offers easy access to new tech for users, as well as a means for third-party developers to capitalize on their work. Evernote has been a shining example of making good on the "Freemium" business model, where you offer a basic service for free and provide an upgrade path to paid plans (in Evernote's case, a $5 per month Premium plan). It's a very common business model on the 'net, but not everyone manages to turn a profit on it to the extent that Evernote has. The announcement of the Evernote Trunk includes the promise of an App-Store-esque model for developers to make money and share in profits. Among the developers featured on the Trunk and in today's press conference were Egretlist, Voice2Note, SAP StreamWork and social application Seesmic. The latest version of the Evernote Mac client has a button in the top toolbar for Trunk, where you can see services, mobile and desktop apps and hardware which can be added to Evernote to expand its functionality. Some services are free, some are premium. Voice2Note, for example, adds search to voice notes and the ability to add notes via your phone. 5 transcriptions per month are free, but you pay about $30 a year for unlimited transcriptions plus the ability to tag notes by adding "tag with..." to the end of an audio note. Social notebooks from the likes of BlackBook and Make Magazine are now available through Trunk as well. Evernote also mentions potential future enhancements such suggestions (similar to SpringPad, I assume) and semantic analysis. Notable, but not part of any press coverage today, is a change in the tag display of the new Mac client. Selecting View > Show Unassigned Tags will trim the visible tags in the sidebar down to just tags related to the current search or selected note. It's a major improvement to usability and one I'd been hoping would show up for quite some time. Evernote is a free service which can be upgraded to transfer 500MB per month and store any type of file for $5US per month or $45US per year. The desktop client for Mac is free, and so are the iPhone and iPad versions (the iPad app is especially cool). Take a look, and check out the Trunk to see what functionality you might want to add to Evernote.
Evernote launches in Japan, updated for iOS 4.0
Mac & iPhone-friendly memory service Evernote has announced this morning that it's launching in Japan -- a new subsidiary called Evernote Japan will be headquartered in Tokyo. While a Japanese version of Evernote launched a while ago, it's become the company's second largest market, taking up fifteen percent of the daily traffic on the service. What this means for non-Japanese users is that the main app will now also support Japanese character recognition -- while handwritten characters still probably won't work with the service, we're told, printed Japanese characters can be read by the app from photographs and scans. Additionally, the iOS 4.0 version of Evernote already came out on the App Store, featuring multitasking support, as well as improved synchronization. Both the iPad and iPhone versions of Evernote are free, of course, and you can sign up for the service on their website. Sounds like things are growing in leaps and bounds for the folks over at Evernote.
When Seesmic met Evernote
Evernote has announced Seesmic integration over on its blog -- often while reading Twitter on my iPhone, I'll see people tweeting links to videos or long pages that I just don't have the time to check out over my EDGE connection. In the past, I've favorited the tweets, but that's not an ideal solution, especially since anyone on Twitter can see my favorites (and thus see what I've been reading). Enter Seesmic and Evernote: now, when you see a tweet on Seesmic, you'll be able to send it directly into Evernote, and save it there along with the rest of your clippings and notes on the service. Then, when I go back to my MacBook, I can pull up those saved tweets, and read whatever I missed. There are lots of other uses for a connection like this, I'm sure (and a few other ways to solve my problem -- Tweetie and Instapaper is another solution). But if you're a regular Seesmic and/or Evernote user and are looking for a way to more easily integrate Twitter into the "outsourced memory" that is your Evernote database, it's your lucky day.
Big upgrades for premium Evernote users
It's been no big secret that I'm a fan and frequent user of Evernote. It's useful, both as a memory augmentation and as a general information collection utility that makes it easy to locate what I need, when I need it. There are a couple of things that would make the service even more useful, though, and a couple of the most-requested features have been addressed with today's announcement from Evernote. First, there's an increase in maximum note size. Up until now, premium users have been limited to 25M per note. Today, that doubles to 50M, meaning more types of files can be stored in your Evernote account. That's great news for users who want to share files through Evernote, or even just those of us who would love to upload some really large, really long PDF's or store presentations and other file types. It even offers more flexibility for adding audio and video to notebooks. The second announcement, note versioning, is exciting news as well. Several times a day, Evernote will make copies of any notes in your account that have changed. They become available in your Note History, and individual versions can be viewed and exported. This sounds especially cool for shared notebooks, where it means more wiki-like functionality, but it provides security and basic version control for private notebooks as well. This functionality is, for the time being, limited to the Web interface, but desktop versions will be available "very soon." As noted, these upgrades are limited to premium users. The basic service is free, and a premium Evernote account, for $45US a year, gives you 500MB of uploads per month, any file type, publicly editable notebooks, and SSL encryption.
Twenty iPad apps you'll want to see
The App Store is live and running with iPad apps right now -- you can download and buy any iPad apps you want, even though most of them are technically "embargoed" until tomorrow morning. There's a lot of amazing stuff out there, but we'll try to focus you as best we can. Here's twenty apps that you won't want to miss in the App Store -- even if you don't buy them for iPad this weekend, you should at least check out the info and screenshots that are now available. USA Today for iPad is free and is probably the quickest and easiest virtual newspaper experience on the iPad. The Wall Street Journal app is also free, as is the NYT Editor's Choice. Flight Control HD and Plants vs. Zombies HD are two of the most-awaited iPad games. Evernote has released their iPad app. MLB's At Bat 2010 has a new edition, so you'll unfortunately have to re-buy it on the iPad even if you've already bought it on the iPhone. Words with Friends HD and Fieldrunners for iPad are available right now. 2K Games has released Civilization Revolution on the iPad, the more accessible version of Sid Meier's classic turn-based strategy game. Here's the Comic Zeal comic reader app we covered earlier this week, and there's also an official Marvel comics app in the store. Twitterific for iPad is on the store and looking great. Aurora Feint 3 is the newest iPad version of one of the iPhone's biggest titles. CastleCraft is a new strategy freemium MMO from Freeverse and Ngmoco. StumbleUpon will allow you to browse the crowdsourced best of the Web from your couch. iMDb has released a full iPad app of their movie database. Minigore HD brings another big iPhone title to the bigger screen. StarWalk for iPad recreates the popular astronomy app and TUAW favorite. And Let's Golf! HD brings a quality handheld golfing experience to the "HD" screen. There's more -- much more, and obviously we'll be seeing lots and lots of new titles in the very exciting days to come. But the magical revolution that we've been hearing about for months has begun. When the iPad releases on Saturday, there'll be no shortage of great software to run and browse and play with on it. Update: Netflix's app is live as well, as is NetNewsWire for iPad, Galcon Fusion, Articles, and Twittelator Pad. Too many good apps!
Scanner Pro updated, still powerful, still complex
Scanner Pro is a US$6.99 iPhone app by Readdle which will let you easily take a picture with your iPhone. We've looked at Scanner Pro before and now a new 2.0 version has been released with page edge detection, image stabilization, and German, Spanish, French, and Italian localizations. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much to address the UI issues that Erica pointed out in her original review. The UI is complicated, and it took me several attempts to even figure out how to take a picture. The screen shot at the right shows the "workflow" for creating a new document (tap the icons at the bottom, working left-to-right, to step through the process). After I took a picture of a page of text, another menu offered to let me "crop" the scan down to particular sizes. it took a bit of effort to get the margins lined up, and eventually I just hit the "Select All" button instead. Scanner Pro does offer a few advanced features such as the ability to create PDF files with passwords, landscape orientation, manual light/contrast adjustments, Dropbox support, and integration with Print n Share to print your scans. It also supports iDisk (or other WebDAV servers) and Evernote. I tested the Dropbox support and it worked very quickly and smoothly. However when you initially save a document, you are only offered the option to send the file to Evernote, your photo library, or Google Docs. Dropbox is inexplicably missing from the "Send to" menu, which means that you have to step back out of the process and go to another menu to upload it. Frankly I think the whole idea of using your iPhone as a scanner is flawed in the first place, akin to using a wrench as a hammer. If you don't have a hammer but need to whack something, a wrench will do in a pinch, but no one with any serious hammering to do would ever choose a wrench for the job. Likewise, the ability to use your iPhone to capture a piece of paper and send it to someone else or yourself could come in handy in an "emergency" but I wouldn't do it very often. For occasional, light use I still don't see any reason not to use something like Evernote which is free, or just take a picture from the iPhone camera app and email it to yourself later. If you find yourself wishing that you could print and password protect PDF scans from your iPhone, you're much more of a power user than I am, and may find Scanner Pro worth the price. I still wish that the App Store supported time-limited demos so that people could download an app and test it for themselves before buying. I suspect that there are plenty of power users who would be willing to learn Scanner Pro's UI and benefit from what it has to offer. For the average iPhone user, $7 is probably more than they are likely to spend on an app they'll seldom use.
Saving your surfing on the Mac
I'd wager that most of you spend as much of your time on the web as I do, and that it's one of the first places you look for answers to just about any question. As a web designer, I look there for inspiration, solutions and am constantly learning how to improve my design and my code with the help of the internet community. It's become important, over time, for me to be able to re-locate the answers I've found, and to archive things that have made a difference for me. I don't just want a folder full of bookmarks, I want to be able to search my local repository in a more abstract way. The tools for doing this are abundant, and many of them free. I thought I'd share part of my current system for saving my tracks across the 'net.
Macworld 2010: Chatting with Phil Libin of Evernote
There are some big fans of Evernote on the TUAW staff -- we've talked quite a bit about the app that promises to store important clips and notes from anywhere, and make them accessible at any time. But even if you haven't heard of the app before, the interview with CEO Phil Libin is definitely worth a watch. He explains why the app is both so magical and so hard to wrap your mind around, as he discusses the idea and the mechanics behind what the Evernote team has done. We talk about their retention problem (and I apologize for my investor-rousing mistake), and how Evernote has to actually make you remember to use it before you can use it to remember. He also talks about plans for the future, including the iPad (which is getting its own separate app, though the iPhone app will work on it as well), as well as the way he originally found out about our blog here at TUAW. Hit the read more link below to see the full video.
Report: iPhone, Android, Blackberry users use the same apps
I'm not sure if this is a fascinating peek at the way we're wired or an obvious conclusion based on reason, but I'll let you decide. Despite the fact that they seem to be polar opposites on Internet forums and comment sections, Android, Blackberry, and iPhone users all end up using mostly the same apps. That's according to an "app discovery service" over on Facebook called Mplayit, which tracked 42,000 visitors and the apps they preferred for a set of "genres." Turns out that for the various categories, the same cross-platform apps tended to be the most popular on the different platforms. Evernote topped the charts for Lists and Notes, Shazam and Pandora were on all three lists for music, and apps like Yelp and Facebook sat high on the chart for multiple platforms. In the end, an app is an app is an app, "app"arently, and it doesn't really matter which platform you're using it on. There were a few difference of course -- in the "Utilities" section, things were different for each platform. Bump is the most popular for iPhone, Google Goggles was most popular on Android, and Vlingo won on Blackberry. As far as I know, with the possible exception of Bump, those are all platform-exclusive apps. But in general, if an app is available on multiple platforms, a popular app on one platform means it'll be popular on the other. Good to know both for developers (a hit in one place means a hit somewhere else, too) and for consumers: next time you choose a smartphone, the apps probably won't matter as much as the hardware features.
Evernote's CEO: 5k new users a day, but retention is a problem
Mashable's Ben Parr sat down at CES with Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, which is not only a TUAW favorite, but acts as your "external brain," saving little clips and bits of information both collectible from and accessible by any device you happen to have with you. We love the app, and while it isn't a Mac exclusive, there are both Mac and iPhone versions, and apparently they're doing very well. Libin tells us in the video that not only are they picking up five thousand users a day (!), but over half of their two million users are using the iPhone app [iTunes link]. As Libin says, the app is "very good" -- it's easy to use (and free), the iPhone's camera makes picking up even real-life scraps of information super easy, and Evernote is designed to share information back to your Mac. Libin says that "most" of the iPhone users do access their information back on other PCs. Libin also talks about power users of the service -- there's one in the system that has over 80,000 notes, though due to privacy, Libin doesn't share what they're keeping in there. And apparently one issue they're dealing with is retention, even for people who have used the service. I can identify with that -- while Evernote is a great service, it's tough to remember that you can use it to remember things, and for that reason I think that even with two million users, it's still very underrated. Libin sounds like he's on top of things, though -- he promises that they're always working on not only helping users figure out how to use the service, but also in polishing it and making it even easier and simpler.
Merry Christmas Eve: Evernote for iPhone gets a major update
Evernote for iPhone [Free, iTunes Link] has received a major update to version 3.2.0, which went live late this evening in the App Store and should be arriving in App Store updates soon. According to our contacts at Evernote, the new app is much faster, with speed improvements in launching, searching, syncing, creating new notes, and browsing. As TUAW heard during a November interview with Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, the updated app provides local caching and searching. Any note that is created or viewed on the iPhone is cached locally for viewing and searching, even when offline. Premium users can choose to have any or all of the notebooks they've created fully downloaded to their devices, once again enabling offline usability. Rich text notes can be converted to plain text for editing, and a copy of the original note is moved into the trash for future recovery. Other new features include: In-app purchase of premium accounts A new "sync" tab Ability to search while syncing Additional languages A number of bug fixes and improvements to the app A quick tour by the App Store on my iPhone this evening showed that the update was not yet available, but I was able to download the new version. For all Evernote users, this is a nice early Christmas present.
First Look: JotNot Scanner for iPhone updated to version 2.0
There's certainly no shortage when it comes to iPhone apps that turn your device into a pocket-sized scanner. At various times, TUAW bloggers have reviewed or discussed Readdle ScannerPro [US$6.99 (currently on sale for US$4.99), iTunes Link], DocScanner [US$8.99, iTunes Link], and JotNot [US$4.99, iTunes Link]. Of course, there is also a flock of business card scanners, but what I'm discussing in this post are the apps that say that they'll replace that flatbed scanner on your desk with a device you already have in your pocket or purse. MobiTech 3000 just released version 2.0 of the JotNot scanner app, and the update appears to be quite useful. I've owned the app for a while and have successfully used it to capture documents for posterity. The update provides a few additional features that I had been hoping for: Multipage support Automatic edge detection WebDAV/iDisk support Camera stabilization (requires OS 3.1) Automated backup of scans Reordering pages An extensive web-based help In app support Of the new features, I am most happy about two of them; multipage support and camera stabilization. Multipage support means exactly what it implies; you can scan multiple page documents and have them saved into one PDF document. Previously, JotNot would create one PDF file for each and every document you scanned. That meant that combining PDFs required that you export the files to a Mac or PC, then use something like Adobe Acrobat Pro to merge the files.
Phil Libin on the past, present, and future of Evernote
It must be nice to be Evernote CEO Phil Libin right now. His company's product / service, Evernote, is about to break 2 million customers, they're past the days of initial development and beta testing, and the future is looking bright. I had a chance to chat with Mr. Libin last Friday about Evernote, the service that acts as a cloud-based repository for all of the information in your life. Last year during the closed beta test of the service, TUAW's Brett Terpstra interviewed Libin, who called Evernote "universal human memory extension." Whatever information you want to put into the Evernote cloud -- text, photos, voice memos -- is available for searching and viewing from your Mac, PC, or iPhone. Handwritten or printed text runs through a recognition routine that makes it searchable text, something that I've found incredibly useful when storing my business cards in Evernote. You can send web pages to Evernote from Firefox with the click of a button, or tweet notes to Evernote by addressing them to @myEN. Libin ran me through a short history of Evernote, mentioning that many of the first reviews and discussions of it were provided by TUAW. The Mac app and the service began a closed beta in February, 2008, moving to an open beta in June of that year. As Libin noted, "We never really told anyone when we came out of beta; we just gradually removed the word 'beta' from the site and the software." Since then, Evernote has signed up almost 2 million users. When I asked Libin if Evernote was meeting the company's expectations in terms of growth, he replied that "we're right where we thought we'd be now." In terms of the present and near future, there's a lot going on. Localized versions of Evernote will be available by the end of 2009 for several European countries, with a Japanese localized version on tap for early 2010. Libin noted that "the Japanese market is huge! Evernote is listed in many Japanese magazines, half of our Twitter traffic is in Japanese, and we're even thinking about opening an office in Japan."
WWDC Live: Andrew and Phil from Evernote
This video is from a chat I had with Phil and Andrew, CEO and Lead Mac Developer for Evernote, respectively. We covered Evernote when it first came out a while back, and it's been fun to watch it evolve since then. We talked about WWDC and recent Apple news, as well as some upcoming improvements in Evernote for both Mac and iPhone (searchable voice notes! UI improvements!). The interview ended up running quite long, and while it's still a bit lengthy, this version is cut to about 1/4 of the full video. I think I got all of the important bits in, though. Enjoy. Update: This video has been moved to YouTube and is now watchable. Due to YouTube's length limitations, the video has been split into two parts, both embedded here.
