Evernote had a big update today. I just now tried out the new goods. Here’s a quick review:

Mac Desktop client:
+ I love, love, love the new “Merge Notes” feature. Great way to clean up a big notebook. Thank you Evernote!
- Unfortunately, there’s no way to export a merged note to anything other than an Evernote Archive. For instance, if you merge a bunch of jpeg images of scanned document, that you’ve brought into evernote, you cannot export them as one big jpeg image. Bummer.
~ I’m undecided whether the Growl notifications are nice or not. Maybe I’ll get used to them.

Safari web clipper:
+ It works with Safari 4 public beta (build 5528.16). What’s nice is that it takes the title of a web page and saves it as the title of the note. A small thing, but saves 15-30 seconds each time you clip, which adds up when you clip many times a day.

Firefox web clipper add-on:
- Does NOT grab the title of a web page, as the Safari web clipper does. Duh. I can’t tell what advantage the web clipper add-on provides over a bookmarklet. Uninstalling for now.

You using any of the new Evernote versions? If so, what do you think?

Hate Office 2007? Try Search Commands.

If Office 2007 has been as frustrating for me as it has been for me, check out a new feature from Microsoft Office Labs called Search Commands.

The problem that Search Commands solved for me is this: even after using Office 2007 for a few months, I still can’t easily find what I’m looking for, and still get frustrated having to look at many toolbar icons that I’ll never use. The way I solve this problem today is by either digging through the Ribbon and cursing, or using Google. Surprisingly, the latter method is often faster.

Search Commands solves that problem, by letting you "google" your Office 2007 commands, and find the right one. It might seem kind of odd to search for commands rather than use a menu, but consider that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint each have at least several hundred commands. It’s a lot faster to type a few keys than it is to browse and scan through a dozen drop-down menus.

If you like QuickSilver, Firefox search keywords, YubNub, the Unix command line, or other keyboard-oriented ways of working, you’ll probably find Search Commands a welcome addition. It’s not perfect, but it’s a big step forward.

One last thing: Search Commands is still considered by Microsoft to be an experimental feature, meaning that it might not be rolled into the Office 2007 code base. This is surprising given the positive feedback this feature has received, and we’ve known for over a decade that the majority of users like to search, not browse. So, if you like Search Commands, express your support here.

Review of Evernote for Mac

I recently learned about Evernote for the Mac on the Lifehacker blog, and that I’d give it a try. Here’s my review of what I learned.

First, here’s why I thought of Evernote in the first place.

My main reason for trying Evernote is to archive meeting notes that I’ve written by hand onto a notepad. While I prefer to take notes directly into my laptop, this isn’t always possible — sometimes I don’t have my laptop, sometimes my laptop is tied up displaying a PowerPoint presentation, sometimes I can’t type in my laptop without the keyobard clicks annoying others on the conference call.

I’ve tried special pens that have a camera built in and require special paper. The problem is that this pens ar huge and basically make you look like a dork. Not the best thing when you’re trying to establish credibility during a customer presentation.

Given the challenges above, I’ve stuck with good old pen and paper. The problem is that retrieving information in notes from more than a couple of days in the past is a time-consuming, page turning exercise.

Evernote is a nice complement to pen and paper, handwritten notes. It archives them on both my laptop and the web, and most impressively, makes most of the actual handwritten text searchable. This is really amazing. My handwriting is not that great, yet Evernote indexes it, and makes it instantly searchable, a la Spotlight or Gmail.

So, Evernote is off to a good start, especially considering that they’re only on version one of their Mac client.

Here are some additional things I’d love to see in the product in future versions:

1. For the web version, support Firefox keyword searching. This way, I could type in the following into my FF address bar: "evernote <text to find>", and the Evernote Web site would return search results.

2. Better integration with HP scanners. (Mine is an OfficeJet 5780.) I’d love to be able to scan directly from the scanner to the Evernote OS X client. Should be technically feasible, since the HP scanner can today scan to Preview, iPhoto, Finder, etc.

3. Reduce the size of JPEGs of notebook pages that I’ve scanned in. The HP scanner by default makes them around 2.5 MB for an 8.5 x 11 page. This is overkill. Would be ideal if Evernote automatically crunched these down to a JPEG that’s around 300 MB. That provides enough information to be readable on a screen.

4. Let me use Evernote to quickly concatenate multiple scanned in images into a single image. This way I don’t need to have a bunch of separate JPEG files in Evernote, as in "Acme Corp meeting notes 1", "Acme Corp meeting notes 2", etc.

5. It would ideal if Evernote let me take pictures from the iSight camera built into the monitor. This means I would not have to open up Photo Booth, and would be a time saver.

6. Better still if Evernote provided a hook into QuickSilver, which let me take pictures from the iSight camera just using a keyboard command. Perhaps this could be implemented via a special utility app (or droplet) that Evernote provided, sort of a "gui-less" app that quickly starts up, takes a picture, and puts it into the Evernote database.

7. Spotlight integration. Right now, items in Evernote don’t seem to appear in Spotlight.

So, if you can live with the above shortcomings, Evernote is definitely worth a look.