I’m a huge fan of Evernote. It ranks right up there with Gmail in terms of applications I live my life in. When people sit down with it for a while and begin to use it, or have someone explain all the interesting ways it can enhance their productivity, it doesn’t surprise me that they become as hooked to it as I am.

I first became exposed to it when I got an iPhone 3G in 2008. It had existed as a platform a couple years before that and was popular with the Windows Mobile & Tablet PC crowd, but wasn’t really on my radar. At the time, I dismissed it as nothing more than a note taking app for the iPhone. The only reason I started using it was because I wanted something that would sync the notes on my iPhone to another system, since iTunes didn’t do it at the time. Not really something I’d adjust my workflow around.

Sure I’d used it off and on, but it hasn’t been until the last few months that I’ve come to realize all the ways it can be used. It’s more than just a simple mobile app, it exists on nearly every platform and helps sync your documents, notes, images and throughts between computers and between mobile devices. Their cloud keeps all your clients linked together and helps put the data and knowledge you keep in their service ready for use at any time.

I’ve decided to share some of the exciting ways I use (or have seen it used) to make myself more organized, more productive and less scatter brained.

Evernote has begun to replace my normal Windows file system for keeping track of data. Now obviously, when I say everything I don’t mean put your iTunes library in Evernote, or your Adobe Lightroom catalog. No, I’m talking about all your text files, PDFs and screenshots. The stuff that the normal system administrator has scattered all around their hard drives, but would greatly benefit from a centralize repository.

Get the Premium Version

First off, I’m not being paid to say this, but… to really make the most of this program you’re going to want to shell out a little cash. It’s going to set you back $45 a year (or $5 per month.) The free version is excellent, and until you get really into it it’s probably best to wait so you don’t waste your money if you don’t like it. But be aware, you’re going to want to get the enhanced features:

• 500MB of uploads a month (free users get 40MB) means  I don’t have to worry how many screenshots or PDF files I pump into their cloud.
• Premium users also gain the ability to put things like Word, Excel and PowerPoint files into their client. Actually you can put any file, where as free users are limited to images, audio, ink files, and PDFs.
• Automatic PDF indexing, an absolute must. I’ll tell you why in a little bit.
• Offline access on mobile devices.
• SSL encryption of notes. Honestly, I wish this was standard but right now you have to pay. For those of us who are going to store anything beyond a grocery list, encrypting that data in transit is a must.
• Priority image recognition. I’ll tell you why this feature is awesome below, but paying for this gets you higher up in the queue.

Put Everything You Read or Write In Evernote

Up until a few months ago, when I needed to take a quick note of something I’d probably just fire up Notepad. The end result was a bunch of .txt files all over my hard drive. If I needed to refer to it an hour later it wasn’t a problem. A couple days later, it wasn’t so bad. A week later… it got harder and harder to find. Even with Windows 7 and its great indexing, it’s not always very easy to find what you want.

Evernote is only as useful as the content you index with it. If you read it, write it, and want to ever access it again… put it Evernote.

Perhaps the easiest, and yet the hardest, thing to get use to is changing your ‘workflow’ to incorporate it into your daily life. Once you do, you’ll begin to wonder what you did without it.

Put All Your Product Documentation In Evernote

I’ve begun downloading the PDF files for product that I own, from various manufactures, and putting them into Evernote. Everything from motherboards manuals to server documentation. It’s much easier to go looking for help with a product if you’ve already downloaded and indexed the manual than it is to go digging through a vendors website, sometimes months or years after they’ve stopped selling the product.

Make Evernote Your Default Screenshot Program

How many times have you been working on something and got an error message you wanted to refer back to later? You take a screen capture of that message, save it, go along your way trying to troubleshoot. Want to refer back to that screenshot or send it to a co-worker? Hope you didn’t close the program, or else you better remember what you saved the file as, and where.

If you’d put that screenshot into Evernote you’d be able to search of a string of text inside the screenshot and pull the image from it’s archive. No file names or locations to remember.

In this example just searching for a word in the image resulted in what I was looking for. Notice the word ‘protection’ highlighted in the screenshot. This feature is available to both free and premium users, but it’s one example of where paying a little extra helps out. When you sync your data up into the Evernote cloud, their servers instantly begin indexing the content and in this case use OCR technology to turn the text in the image into searchable content.

Install the Web Clipping Tools

Evernote makes plugins for most browsers, to make it easy to take data out of a website and put it directly into their system.

If you’re using Internet Explorer, the clipper automatically installs when you install the Windows client. If you’re using Safari on a Mac, the clipper automatically installs when you install the Mac client.

If you’re using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, there are plugins avaliable for download from the addon pages for each browser.

If you’re using Opera or some other less popular browser that Evernote hasn’t got around to creating a plugin for, you can also use their Bookmarklet. While not quite as elegant as the plugin options, it’s better than nothing.

Also, because you can index the content of a screenshot, if you want to remember the web page exactly as it was when you viewed it, just take a screenshot and then go search for it later!

One feature exclusive to Google Chrome users who have the plugin installed is the ability to search within your Evernote archive for files when you’re on Google.com. Why go looking for something all over again that you may have already found and clipped into Evernote?

Use Automatic Folder Import To Your Advantage

You can easily configure Evernote to index the files in a folder. I use this in combination with a PDF printer like Adobe PDF Distiller, CutePDF or saving as a PDF with Office to “Print to Evernote” from within applications like Microsoft Word, where directly importing the Word document into Evernote doesn’t create as nice of an indexable note.

In this case, Evernote is configured to delete the file as soon as it’s imported. This way you don’t have duplicate files sitting around and you know when it’s gone, it’s in Evernote.

Without the premium version, indexing and searching the contents of a PDF isn’t possible. That’s just one reason why the premium version is so helpful.

Install Evernote on Everything

Sure, there is a nice web interface for Evernote, but what I consider of the beautiful aspects of the product is that it’s a cloud product with awesome desktop applications.

My tower at home has Evernote, my laptop has Evernote. The two are constantly keeping things accessible between both systems. But as mentioned before, I discovered Evernote through my iPhone, so I have it there as well. It’s also on my work Blackberry and when I finally break down and buy an iPad (or other tablet) it’ll be there too. There are also mobile clients for Android, Windows Mobile and WebOS. About the only thing you can’t out a client on is sadly, Linux.

(Evernote, please change this.)

The more places you can easily access your data, the less you have to remember, and the more productive you can be with it.

With a premium account, you gain the ability to sync offline content to mobile devices. While this isn’t a huge advantage with something like an iPhone where you usually have a 3G connection (AT&T willing) to download notes on the go, with an iPad or Android tablet it’s handy for taking it places where you’re not connected all the time.

Make Your Scanner Evernote Friendly

There are many ways to do this, but I accomplished it by using the scanner’s Windows helper application to set my Evernote import folder as the default location for PDF scan jobs. Documents on the scan bed are turned into PDF files and dumped into Evernote. Now it’s easy to take important papers and make them digitally accessible, quickly.

Some scanners are even more Evernote friendly. If you’re in the market for a new scanner look at the Fujitsu, Canon or Lexmark models that support Scan to Evernote built-in.

Explore the Trunk

The Evernote Trunk is a collection of applications and services that make use of Evernote APIs to get your data directly into Evernote without much thought or effort from you.

One program I use on my iPhone is called JotNot, it turns your iPhone camera into a mobile scanner for taking pictures and easily importing things like receipts or product stickers. JotNot dumps all the extra data in the image, converts it to black and white and enhances it for viewing later and to cut down on file size to make it easy to upload from a mobile data connection.

JotNot can also send your image a variety of other places. But it’s just one example of applications that extend the functionalty of the platform.

Use It, Share Your Thoughts

I would encourage you to start using the product and share your thoughts in the comments on ways you can be more efficient with it.

Note to Apple: This is how you can do a Mac vs PC ad, but in a less aggressive way. You can be cute, funny, point out the deficiencies in the other product (like the fact Steve Jobs hates Blu-Ray) but still all be friends in the end.

We’ve covered this before: the need for Mac users to secure their systems with a proper antivirus. But unlike the Windows space, there are not many/any really good, small footprint AV clients that are free. Until now.

Sophos has released a free client for Mac, based on their popular business product, which you can download from their website.

“While most businesses recognise the importance of protecting their Mac computers from malware threats, most home users do not,” said Chris Kraft, product management vice president at Sophos. “By offering free industrial-strength security to home users, we aim to protect Mac users against today’s and tomorrow’s Mac threats. Everyone knows that Macs are beautiful computers – Sophos wants to lend a hand to keep them that way.”

You know what, the weekends don’t have a monopoly on funny technology videos. Enjoy.

Thanks @foodgeekery

Microsoft today released Office for Mac 2011 to the public. What is being lauded by both critics and Microsoft as the best version of Office for Mac ever, it’s probably the first version of Office for Mac in a long time that is at near feature match with the Windows version, although it doesn’t include all of the features. It also replaces the much hated Entourage email client for the less hated Outlook email client.

You can pickup a copy now from the Microsoft store for $149 for Home and Student, or $279 for Business. The business version is the only package that includes Microsoft Outlook, and includes 1 year of free technical support from Microsoft. The home version only includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel and 90 days of support.

MSDN & Technet users can download either from through their respective product sites and generate up to 5 keys.

Office for Mac 2011 requires at least OS X 10.5.8 Leopard with an Intel processor.

Are your feet cold? Mine are, I think it’s because hell just froze over.

9to5Mac has the goods:

A little tidbit from the Microsoft gathering this evening.  While demonstrating Outlook for Mac and the HTML rendering engine, Microsoft employees revealed that instead of using the Word HTML rendering that previous versions of Mac Office used (and the PC version as well), Microsoft has moved over to Apple’s Webkit rendering engine to render HTML mails.  Outlook 2011 also uses WebKit to create HTML mail.

Coupled with the recent announcement that they were moving Windows Live Spaces to WordPress, I think Microsoft has managed to surprise me twice in one month.

The fact that Microsoft is actually using open source code in products is a great start, one can only hope they’re contributing back.

Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac will be released tomorrow.

Microsoft has delivered on a promise to allow Mac OS X users to sync their Windows Phone 7 devices today by releasing the beta of the Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac. This software will sync your WP7 device with your iTunes and iPhoto library, using Apple’s public APIs. According to Tom Warren at Winrumors, Microsoft did not need to consult with Apple in order to implement the connector. Here’s to hoping Apple doesn’t find a way to break it just because. Hopefully Microsoft will deliver a full blown Zune client for Mac users in the future.

The connector requires at least OS X 10.5. You can download the beta, weighing in at a light 1.5MB, directly from Microsoft’s website.

via winrumors.com

Ever since the iPhone supported Exchange, I’ve been a huge supporter. I’ve spent two good years on the iOS with my iPhone 3G. My job bought it for me back in 2008 and I got it shortly after launch. It was a solid phone with a lot of good things to say about it. I evangelized to everyone I knew about how they should get an iPhone, how it’s the best smartphone around. I got a 3GS for my wife, I’ve told countless other family members to get one. In most ways, when it was introduced, it was the best thing around. But things have changed.

When the iPhone 4 was announced, I followed the WWDC keynote with great anticipation. I ooh’d and aah’d at all the advances in design and software. When pre-orders started, our company bought 11 to start, and we waited until last week when they finally arrived (early) from AT&T. I rushed across campus to rip open the box and activate my new toy (err) tool. There it was, the iPhone 4, before most anyone else on the planet had their hands on one. I took pictures, I tweeted about how amazing it looked, how the screen was fantastic (it is) and how fast it was compared to my 3G.

Taking it home that night, I started to notice something was a little off with my phone. In Kansas City, AT&T really is the top carrier, and with my 3G, reception was never an issue. I can think of only one place in the city where coverage is any type of issue, and it’s not an area I frequent. So with the iPhone 4, the fact that I was only holding 4 bars at maximum, and typically 3, seemed a bit odd.

Later, I realized I was on EDGE service with hardly a bar to see, for most of my time before I jumped on my home wireless. As I started reading the news on various gadget blogs, I quickly realized I was suffering from the antenna problems that were plaguing almost ever other early adopter.

I dropped a few calls that weekend, including one to my father who seem’d to have lost my mother, but I could make due. The view from most of the people within the Apple world was that it was firmware related, and would be quickly fixed. Then Steve Jobs opened his mouth.

“You’re holding it wrong.” … or something to that affect.

Excuse me?

Beyond that, one of my co-workers (our telecom manager, of all people) got an iPhone with a totally non-functional home button. The only way she could close apps, is to reboot the phone. Since the Apple stores and AT&T were slammed that week, and the SIM cards are a totally different size, she was stuck with a broken phone until today when she was able to get a new one. I’ve also seen issues with the new camera, taking pictures of solid color backgrounds (especially in florescent lighting), where a green ghost appears in the middle of the image. Many I’ve talked to online (although non of my co-workers) cannot sync their iOS 4 devices to Exchange. My bosses phone started making a horrible clicking noise (what inside this thing moves?) yesterday although it seemed to be a one time event. I could go on and on, but just read Engadget, Gizmodo, or any other gadget blog for the daily iPhone/iOS bug.

Not to mention, simply holding the device in my hands for a couple days already allowed my wedding ring to put a scratch in the back glass so deep you can feel it with your finger.

My point is. Any one of these single events, may be something small and not worth getting upset about. Combine them together, and you have a product that is far from 4th generation and an operating system that already is flawed. Now, I’ve been around IT long enough to know major software releases have bugs, and that major hardware refreshes require driver and firmware updates to correct issues. But maybe I’d come to expect more from Apple, with their integrated platform, to expect something that would be near flawless by version 4.

While I don’t expect perfection in anything man-made, I found myself deeply disappointed in the device and the operating system.

Enough so that I’ve made the switch to Android. Yesterday I announced on Twitter and Facebook that I’d be leaving the job I’ve been at for over 4 years now. As a result, I’m turning in my iPhone 4 and going rouge. My new weapon of choice?

Nexus One

Ordered it from Google this morning, unlocked and out of contract, for AT&T bands. It has shipped, and arrives tomorrow. While I know there are other more interesting phones out there, and some like the Droid X soon to come, I will reserve my explanation for choosing the Nexus One for my next update … after I’ve made the switch and fully integrated later this week.

But this decision has some ramifications. Up until last week, I was all set to pull the trigger on the purchase of a Apple computer, something I’d never done before. I had a bright and shiny new iMac all picked out, and was waiting for some news on the job front to come through before giving Apple my credit card info for my own iPhone 4 and that iMac. But now, given my recent burn by Mr. Jobs, I believe I will be rethinking that decision.

Maybe one of those new AMD 6-core processors or a Intel i7, running something other than Mac OS X, is in my future as a home desktop replacement?

“It is an exciting time for the MacBU with updates to our current products and the first public announcement about the next version of Office for Mac. For several years we have focused on providing the best Microsoft Exchange client for the Mac, and the Web Services Edition delivers that today for Entourage users,” said Eric Wilfrid, general manager for the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft.

While Office for Mac builds on the work done with Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition, Microsoft says it’s more than just a name change. With full support for Exchange synchronization, Office for Mac will also deliver significant changes to better interface with Mac OS X including a new high-speed file-based database with support Time Machine and Spotlight and fully Cocoa based programming.