Want iPhone Notes Sync? No Problem for Evernote
by Andrew Lunde on 16/04/09 at 1:41 am
Andrew Lunde is an iPhone and Internet applications developer. He is the President of Lunde Cognitive Effects Inc. and a Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.
Editor’s Note: Read Andrew’s follow up article: iPhone 3.0 Notes Sync? Sure, But Evernote is Still King
Back in July, I was one of a “few” crazed people to stand in line for the iPhone 3G. With all the proclamations that Mobile Me was the “Exchange for the rest of us”, I was happy to kill off my Sprint contract and my $20 hosted Exchange account. I just assumed that Mobile Me had Notes capability, but that was just not to be.
I found myself with a dilemma. I was sure that Apple would add notes synchronization with iPhone OS 2.1. I mean it’s an obvious need and me complaining about it isn’t going to make Apple get it in there any faster. I’d prefer the Apple way as opposed to going with a 3rd party solution and I was willing to wait… for a while.
Fast forward a couple weeks to the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement and yeah, they mention that Notes sync is a coming, but now I’m reading that Apple’s idea of Notes sync is still going to fall short of expectations. Add to this that I’m switching over to a new MacBook Pro from my old PC. I’m running VMware so that I can keep some critical win apps, but I’m trying hard to find native OS X solutions for as many of the Windows programs as possible (Hello Open Office!). From what I’ve heard, there will be no Notes sync with Windows Outlook so there won’t be an easy way for me to import all my notes into Mobile Me and eventually my MBP and iPhone. I need something better than that! I don’t plan on going back and forth between my old PC and my new MBP.
Enter Evernote 
. I’m not going to go into all of Evernote’s features because I haven’t explored them all yet. First, I installed Evernote on my iPhone and created an account. Pretty nice because some apps will immediately send you to the web browser to get signed up. I then installed the Windows app on my old laptop and it put a nice “Add to Evernote” in the right-click context menu when it’s running. This allowed me to quickly go through all my notes in Outlook and right-click and add them to Evernote pretty quickly. I then installed the OS X client, signed in and voila! All my notes synced and were there. iPhone, same deal so now I can theoretically add/change/delete a note from any of those devices and have it synced up across all three. Excellent!
Each client makes it easy to search for notes by typing in a few characters which is great especially on the iPhone. I haven’t tried out the web interface yet, but the Windows and Mac clients are easy to use and straighforward. From my limited experience so far, these capabilities outreach what Apple has planned for 3.0. Evernote will allow you to enter info in a bunch of ways. Here’s are some features taken from Evernote’s site:
* Create new notes using desktop, web, and mobile versions of Evernote
* Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We even recognize text in the image.
* Clip entire webpages, screenshots, and just about anything else you can copy
* Drag and drop content into the desktop clients for Mac and Windows
* Email notes directly into your account using your personalized email address
* Scan receipts, recipes, tags, brochures, and anything else into Evernote
* Record audio wherever you are and listen to it whenever you want
The free account allows you to store up to 40 MB of notes. If you want more you can pay $5/month or $45/year and that’s probably not bad for heavy usage. I’m going to see how far I go before I need to upgrade to a paid account. I’m not planning on putting up audio, video or pictures, but we’ll see. Overall I’m quite impressed. I have a feeling that I’m going to be sticking will Evernote long after Apple gets their act together.
Jon Shurtleff
Aug 2nd, 2009
It would be a great feature if EverNote would import existing notes from the iPhone notes program
EddieW
Oct 15th, 2009
Yeah, tried Evernote. I had several notes starred as my favorites and usually they'd show up fine. However, there were too many times when I'd be in a meeting without cell signal and needed to get to some of those favorite notes only to find that they were blank. They'd try to sync with the network, but no cell signal, hence no sync. After a few embarassing moments like that, I stopped using Evernote.
EddieW
Oct 15th, 2009
Yeah, tried Evernote. I had several notes starred as my favorites and usually they'd show up fine. However, there were too many times when I'd be in a meeting without cell signal and needed to get to some of those favorite notes only to find that they were blank. They'd try to sync with the network, but no cell signal, hence no sync. After a few embarassing moments like that, I stopped using Evernote.
fp
Mar 5th, 2010
When the Evernote button in Outlook is used all the notes are sent to Evernote but none of the outlook categories are in any way preserved.
fp
Mar 5th, 2010
When the Evernote button in Outlook is used all the notes are sent to Evernote but none of the outlook categories are in any way preserved.