I’ve made it known how much I like using Evernote. It’s fitting that just a short while after showing why I like using Evernote the company let me know that a new version 3.5 has entered a public beta for Windows. It’s available today but they let me have access to it a couple of days early and I loaded it up on the ThinkPad x200. Let me tell you, I love this new version. It looks and works better, making using it more productive and dare I say it, fun. Rather than tell you the long list of improvements, here’s what the Evernote folks say about it:
Visible improvements
Three different ways to view your notes:
- Thumbnail view: Rendered thumbnails showing the contents of your notes, images, and PDFs for easy browsing and filtering
- Can zoom thumbnails to see more detail
- List view: Multi-column “List View” with sorting on any column
- Mixed view: Mixed thumbnail + detail view
- Can display thumbnail or mixed views in visual groupings by date, size, source URL domain, and start of title
- Auto-zoom feature for thumbnail view allows you to see more notes at once
- Faster viewing of single notes
Note editing:
- Auto-complete tagging and easier tag creation
- Spell checking as you type
- Better support for advanced markup
- Can now create tables within notes
- Can specify default font size for text in notes
- Better handling of longer text notes
- Creating ink notes in easier with new canvas-like layout
- Find and Find next/find previous (both within and across notes)
- Better consistency across the Mac and Windows versions of Evernote
- New icons and buttons
- More user-friendly “Folder Import” feature to automatically create notes from a watched folder–great for scanner and other integrations
- More functions available in single-note editor window:
- Detailed note information and attributes
- Emailing notes
- Printing notes
- Editable description of the search filter
- Ability to add or remove individual criteria from current search filter
- Can save the current search for use later as a Saved Search
- “View on Map” button opens geo-tagged notes in Google Maps
- Evernote for Windows introduction video included on launch
- Multi-lingual spell check included in application
- Quick access to your online account information
- Improved screen clipping requiring fewer steps, with on-screen explanations
- Menu options for attaching files to notes without requiring drag-and-drop
- Extend note search capabilities with ANY or ALL search criteria
- Remove tags from notes with a single click
Under the hood
- Advanced note text editor based on Google Chrome
- Improved synchronization performance via networking optimizations
- Improved database performance for faster searching and sorting of notes
- Single binary for all supported languages
Yee haa, finally thumbnails in Windows. I like Evernote, but have been using Paperport since the late 90′s and love the thumbnail pdf desktop view. The evolution of Paperport with Nuance never happened. Evernote ever promising and ever developing shows the difference between a company driven by marketeers and a company driven by innovators and developers.It has been torture to see Mac users with thumbnails and Windows without. Finally the barrier is being removed and a whole host of new cool features to boot. Looks like it’s time to become a paid up Evernote User. Great work
If I could only use ink on top of any note like in journal or onenote, evernote would be become my one and only. I wish they’d make it tablet pc friendly for ink more.