EverNote: Neat idea Posted 1:15 PM by Nathaniel

One of my favorite techie "stars" is David Gelernter (also here). Among his many accomplishments (besides having been a survivor of a Unabomber attack!), David has researched and written about the notion of Lifestreams, a time-ordered stream of documents that contains all your electronic "stuff." He founded a company to produce a software product to manifest this approach (Scopeware Vision); it was clunky compared to X1, which is probably why I can't access scopeware.com.

Now comes EverNote from a company of the same name founded by the brilliant Russian ex-pats who brought us ParaGraph, the leading handwriting recognition company of recent years.

I've been using Microsoft OneNote for a while, and I love it. Its free-form nature, its ability to capture ink (from a Wacom tablet or on a tablet pc) as well as text, along with voice and video, are liberating. Yeah, you can do all that with Word, but Word is not designed as a diary or journal.

My only beef: There are so many ways to categorize and mark things that it has taken me a while to develop a sensible working method with OneNote.

EverNote avoids a lot of the perhaps-unnecessary decisions by the simple expedient of presenting the user with a continuous "tape." Your notes are added in a continuous stream (thus the resonance with LifeStreams).



And not just your notes: Drag anything into a note--Web pages, Word docs, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, pictures of all sorts--EverNote takes them in.

Of course, it has wonderfully fluid and fast categories and searches, without which it would be useless. My EverNote "tape" is not long enough yet for me to be able to report on performance, but so far, so good.

Still free, in beta; coming versions for handhelds; no pricing yet. But solid enough to try.