Evernote 1

For all my Notes of anything/everything I think would be useful or worthy of future reference, I use Evernote 印象笔记.  Evernote was started in mid 2008 in English, got it’s Chinese version in 2011 and from mid 2012, started in China.  So there is no doubt about it’s support in at least English and Chinese.  It totals over 100 million users by 2014 and is workable in any popular platform – Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, ……  It has data servers in both US and China, and is very much active with both support from evernote.com and user forums.

Evernote Corp call it The workspace for your life’s work.  Users…Users described Evernote as an “outsourced brain” that helps you remember everything; 免費記事大王,…  It is structured like a searchable notebook.  Below are some advantages and characteristics of Evernote:-

• Notes can be text, images, or audio. Images of text can be OCR to make it searchable.
• Input/ searched output can be in any popular platform/devices – be it a PC, iMac, iphone, Android phone, ipad or other tablets, …  And you can use all these for your single database system.
• Can sync amongst all your devices
• Available at your fingertips anywhere, e.g. while you travel, while you’re in a conference, presentation, reading magazine in a library, …..
• Readily searchable anywhere;
• Clip a selected section or the whole from webpages while your surf with a click
• Email (or forward useful info via email) directly to your database
• Take a photo of a magazine article with your mobile, record a talk, take notes, ……. click to share with others, collaborate, ….. – the use is limitless!
• You can read more about it’s uses here 30 Ways Evernote Can Improve Your Life | One App to Rule …; 20 Tips Every Evernote User Must Know – PC Magazine

The more you use it, the more quickly you’ll develop your own system. Best of all, you’ll stop trying to remember everything and trust Evernote to do the work for you.

It’s 2 versions- free and premium. I suggest you start off with their free version and see if it is really what you want/like, and in many cases, you may find it sufficient. But you’d give yourself a couple of months to get use to it, always remember to put and find everything in there.  I’ll share my experience of efficiently using it later in the blog.

Download it from here, you’d get 1 month free subscription for Premium, and I’d get the same too.  No credit card info required, after setting up your Evernote Account and register, the Evernote app would download automatically, Install and start using it!  After 1 month on Premium, you can always revert back to the free user status, and you won’t lose anything you stored in your database with Evernote even if that’s above the free user limit.