Expand Your Brain with Evernote

A new school year is just around the corner, but this semester you're looking for a safer way to enhance your brainpower than getting all hopped up on caffeine pills Jessie Spano-style. This year, the robust note-taking software Evernote is your answer. Let's take a look at how you can use your computer, cellphone, and digital camera in conjunction with the free, cross-platform application Evernote to remember everything for the rest of your life—or at least until the end of the semester.

Why You Should Be Using Evernote

A universal capture application is only as good as its ability to catch information no matter where you are and what you're doing. With support for accessing and adding notes from your cellphone, through any web browser, or through the desktop version, the most popular note-taking application Evernote is perhaps the closest option to a true universal capture tool available next to plain old pen and paper.

So why Evernote and not just pen and paper?

Evernote Can Capture Virtually Anything—from Anywhere—in Seconds

Evernote can capture information in tons of formats in several different ways.

From your desktop:

When you're just starting out, you'll probably be using the desktop or web versions of Evernote. From either, you can capture entire web pages or documents with the click of your mouse, by using the Evernote Firefox extension or bookmarklet for web content or the desktop versions for Windows and Mac.

Don't want to clip a whole page? Just select the text and or images you want before clipping to Evernote. There's even a universal keyboard shortcut (Win+A in Windows, Cmd+Ctrl+V in OS X) to create a new note from your clipboard.

You can also capture and upload screenshots to Evernote using Evernote's Windows system tray application or the Mac OS X menu bar app. On a Mac, you can even create a new note from your iSight webcam, and—naturally—you can upload any photo you take with your digital camera.

If you receive an email you want to add to your Evernote notebook for later, you can forward it to your private Evernote email address, which turns any email it receives into a new note. (You can find your private Evernote address in the Settings section of the web site.)

From your phone:

The iPhone version of Evernote creates and syncs text notes, snapshot notes, saved photos notes, and even voice notes. You can tag, upload, sync, and search any of your notes from your iPhone the same way you would on your desktop. I haven't tried Evernote for Windows Mobile, but it appears to support many of the same features.

There is no shortage of ways to add information to Evernote, which is sort of the point. No matter where you are, no matter what you're doing, you can capture a note to Evernote with as little effort as possible.

Evernote Is Completely Searchable

You can search the contents of any note from any device you're using with Evernote. It even searches text within images by scanning and analyzing for any image for text—including pictures from web pages, documents, photos, screenshots, or cameraphone pictures you upload.

Evernote Bolsters Your Pen-and-Paper Notes

Since Evernote can recognize text within images—including your handwriting—you can still stick with pen and paper if that's what you prefer in certain situations. Once you've taken your pen-and-paper notes, though, consider scanning them or snapping a picture and adding them to Evernote. Now your handwritten notes are also searchable, and they're sitting in the same bucket as all your other notes and bookmarks. My handwriting, as you can see in the screenshot, isn't the cleanest on the planet, but Evernote still does an formidable job of recognizing most of the text within my handwritten notes. Try to keep your images or scans as light as possible, though—uploading 1MB-plus images will eat up the Evernote upload allowance on free accounts really quickly.

Evernote Supports Tagging and Advanced Search Attributes

Love tags? Evernote supports tagging like gangbusters, including auto-completion for quick and easy tagging. While the search features of Evernote are robust and very useful, you can narrow down your results considerably if you're using some tags as a starting point. Tagging is essential to really slicing and dicing through notes and data with Evernote.

Similarly, Evernote supports tons of useful search attributes to help you narrow down results. You can filter notes based on when they were created, modified, what kind of media they contain, or the tool you used to capture them (web, mobile, desktop, etc.).

Evernote Replaces Bookmarking Apps

Unless you're set on the social aspect of many bookmarking applications, Evernote is the only bookmarking tool you'll ever need. It does everything Delicious does (short of the social stuff), and—even better—it makes the content of your bookmarks searchable.

Evernote's web-based interface is both attractive and powerful, with a nice desktop feel complete with cool features like drag-and-drop tagging and editing of notes. In fact, the web interface is nearly as powerful as any of the desktop offerings. That means if you bristle at the idea of replacing Delicious with a desktop application, you don't have to. Just stick with the web version of Evernote and you've got all the bookmarking tools you need.

Clever Uses for Evernote

Once you're using Evernote regularly, the possibilities are endless. As a student, you could use Evernote for everything from snapping a quick picture of a handout to taking a photo of the phone number on your hand before it smears off (with any luck, the name and number will be searchable).

I'm no longer a student, but I use Evernote to make my life easier every day—whether I'm using it to take notes or tackle other chores. With that in mind, here are some of my favorite ways to use Evernote:

• Grocery Shopping: If I find a recipe online that I want to make, I'll clip the recipe and ingredients with Evernote. When I'm at the store, I fire up Evernote on my iPhone and browse to the recipes tag. Now I've got my grocery list at my fingertips while I'm walking up and down the aisles.
• Read it later bookmarks: I almost never read things I've bookmarked when I'm sitting in front of my computer. After all, if I were going to read it there, I would have read it the first time around instead of blindly bookmarking it. With Evernote, I can access any of my bookmarked pages at any time—particularly when I'm waiting around somewhere with my iPhone in my pocket—and I can catch up on the reading I would never have gotten around to otherwise.
• Personal library: While I'd hardly call this a novel use of Evernote, it remains one of the most excellent uses of the app. Since I started using it, I've been trying to get into the habit of clipping info any time I see information I want to remember. It's a great way to build up a personal knowledge database that you can quickly search through any time you need answers and don't have them on the tip of your tongue. The whole point of Evernote is to expand your brain, after all.

You can also use Evernote as a code snippet library or receipt/serial number bucket, and we've already shown you how to get voice-to-text notes from Jott into Evernote, but if you've got a favorite use of your own, let's hear more about it in the comments.

from: http://lifehacker.com/5041631/expand-your-brain-with-evernote?mail2=true#mail2friend