Taking notes have been a tussle for me, from swapping between an actual notebook to that of using Evernote with an iPad Pro and then switching back to the Apple’s Notes app and finally back again to Evernote as a plus user. A real rollercoaster ride for me indeed. Ever since the change, I sort of settled into using Evernote almost on a daily basis. And I like the new version, Evernote 8, very much.
On a daily basis, I tussle between my MacBook 12″ and my iPhone 7 Plus to capture notes during meetings and rarely use my iPad Mini for that purpose. Most of the time, I take notes with my MacBook as using a phone during meetings, even though it is to capture notes, may seem rather rude. Due to that, I didn’t really see an updated Evernote 8 for the Mac OS X Sierra yet.
The crux of the matter is, which is faster, taking a pen and a notebook and start writing notes, or launching a notes app on your mobile device and start typing away? Over time, the former has always been the clear winner whilst the latter depended on multiple factors such as the performance of your device, did you already open the app and have it cached in memory or do you have thousands of notes to load up.
Enter in Evernote’s latest update, Evernote 8. It seems clean and best of all, it is quick. Check out the video below for a quick summary of it’s new features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQxMg31rJVg
If it is a battle for a note taking app, I would say Evernote seems to be in the lead over Apple’s Notes app as well as Microsoft One Note as well.
Wired Magazine’s David Pearce has this to report.
O’Neill and his new executive team began an 18-month process of changing just about everything about Evernote. Engineers re-wrote the app’s syncing engine and moved all of the company’s data onto Google’s Cloud Platform. A small team started a project called Honeybee to make all of Evernote’s apps use more common code, rather than having to build every single feature all over again for every single platform. Users didn’t really see any of that, at least before today. But everyone at Evernote sees it as the invisible work that will let the company now do more visible things, more quickly. They even all use the same analogy, and do the same hand motions to describe it: an iceberg, mostly below the surface, just now starting to poke out.
Changes may seem to be in the background but the benefits are enjoyed by users all around. The mantra of speed and simplicity seems to be the key themes of this massive update. It bodes well that the leadership at Evernote is focusing deeply on “the time to note”.
What I am looking forward to, is perhaps an integration together with Siri for iOS and Mac OS X.
