Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine
blog.evernote.com
blog.evernote.com
This could very well bring me back to Evernote. Not sure if it's worth $24+, but if it works, maybe... I do take an awful lot of handwritten notes, and I'd love to digitize them easily.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5897/new-asus-transformer-book...
What I also enjoy about this idea is that it is like a physical version of Paper By 53. Although now instead of emailing Evernote my sketches via paper I can now snap a picture from Evernote itself. Seems like an interesting product tie-in that has me wanting it more than I want money.
I'm also a paper note taker but I don't see myself moving to Livescribe (though I haven't tried it) or taking photos of pages in Evernote. I'm pretty organized, though, so I'm not dying to have everything digitized.
The only thing I didn't like about the pen was that it was ballpoint - I'm oddly particular about this; I like Uniball or fountain pens, and I find ballpoint pens a bit irritating to write with.
But other than that, I didn't have any complaints with the pen - if you're like most people and don't mind using ballpoint pens, you probably won't mind the pen either.
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. And if you draw the same thing every day you get pretty good at keeping it consistent.
I bought a stylus marketed specifically for the ipad and it sucked. The tip was this big soft spongy foam thing. It was nowhere close to the immediate, reliable experience of putting pen to paper. I was left assuming that the current capacitive technology in these devices is just not up to the task of making pen input work well.
Maybe it can be done easily, but it just wasn't high enough on the priority queue. Maybe Microsoft will do this well with Surface, since it would differentiate them and after all, they were doing tablets with pen input over a decade ago.
Whatever the holdup, I'm still looking forward to tablets that are as easy to write on as pen and paper.
http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/25868-news-penultimate-...
I assume Evernote's products are overly complicated, but I'd like to know if they just botched the Skitch acquisition. Does anybody have any insight into this?
I agree with you on the Skitch integration, the startup screen has driven me bonkers.
My guess is that they'll sort it out, the last release seemed a little better.
Then I saw 'new iOS app' in the copy and my expectations disappeared. :(
And the idea of taking pics of my notebook pages with my phone is too clunky.
However, I'll grant that this is why this doesn't work * for me * and express envy for those for whom it does work for, since "on paper" all of this seems like a great idea. Having notebook pages scanned and sortable would be wonderful.
- Address existing need that few other products addresses
- Helps generating new customers by removing some of the barriers - "I like to create my notes with a pen on a paper"
- Involves non-trivial blend of hardware and software
- Involves non-trivial business partnership
- Serves as a test-bed for bringing the solution to more people by refining unskewing algorithms
- etc. etc.
Well executed, Evernote!
BTW, for those buying, unless you're a reporter, I highly recommend the large size. If you look at the notebooks of great men, most tend to be closer to the larger size. Michelson is the one that sticks in my mind, since I walked past those notebooks every day for 7 years.
However, while I do agree that Moleskine notebooks are absolutely gorgeous, I usually buy other types at about 1/3rd of the price.
Their diary/planner, however, is merely on the high price end for such things, not by a factor of three. And in the years I've used one of those (I use a much tinier planner now), I kept on being pleasantly surprised by their attention to detail in the design of tables, grids and bubbles you'd find in a planner, all of it really well-thought-out. But then, a pre-printed planner is not the same as an empty notebook.
I used to do that as well, and felt Moleskines were just too expensive. Then I splurged on one a couple of years ago, and never had that feeling again. Don't know if I just feel that I get my money's worth, or that my brain just simplistically adjusted to the price.
Empty pages is also my thing. In general I have four, pocket sized one, A5 sized main notebook, A4 sized sketchbook for drawing, and a reporter style watercolor pocket one (I love the panorama-like landscape format for pictures).
Just to clarify: this would really be made for those who have awful handwriting (like me), so only a small part of your page would need to be written carefully and eventually digitized to be searchable.
But, Evernote's Page Camera feature that was added to the iOS app does seem to work just fine with other paper (I tested Field Notes w/ graph paper). It's just 'optimized' for the paper in these notebooks, whatever that means.
If it does make a significant usability difference, that would be pretty cool and I'd love to get some insight into why dotted lines would be simpler for image processing software to work with than straight lines, but... For now, I'm gonna keep on trying to bury myself with post-it notes...
$25/notepad is way of the charts for the types of notes and sketches that I actually need a notepad for.
It gets harder if the notebook doesn't lie flat, though.
Unless scale is important but I can't see how that could be.
It most likely helped a good amount in bringing this feature to market as quickly as possible, and it'll be interesting what they do with the dotted pattern concept in the future (I see it either fading into an edge case of the software that becomes a technical debt for the remainder of its lifetime as the algorithms for handling the base case of any arbitrary notebook paper improve, or evolving into the base of an Evernote certification process for notebooks).
Personally, for me this feature is the tipping point between "yeah, Evernote seems kinda cool" and "I'm actually considering using Evernote (assuming the feature finds its way to Android)". The only improvement I would make that would really seal the deal would be the ability to fax all my notes to Evernote instead (seems like much less a pain in the ass for digitising volumes of notes than meticulously photographing each page), though I suppose that as long as they support manual uploading of images through their desktop site this would be fairly trivial to script myself.
Not far. Most of the features, it seems, do not really require the notebook. But it also seems that it wouldn't be difficult to eventually add support for any old notebook to allow for automatic alignment.
So when you say....
> Requiring special paper automatically limits the feature's utility.
...I can't help but think it allows them to get the feature out sooner before refining it.
> Once their "limited edition" notebooks sell out
they'll be offering normal edition notebooks, as well as providing better support for other notebooks.
I really don't see the features here as something they are just going to limit to a limited time physical product.
I just see a marketing partnering stunt here?? Am I missing something?
>How accurate are the sketches?
In general, sketches with Inkling will be accurate to within approximately +/- 0.1 inches (+/- 2.5 mm) in the main drawing area of an A4 page, and within (approximately +/- 0.2 inches (+/- 5.0 mm) at the edges of the page.
2.5mm is quite a large fuzz factor. Enough to make me think this could be great for very-rough sketching / outlining of a design, but not enough for replacing scanning / doing (essentially) OCR.
If you check out that review it shows that the product definitely needs to mature. I can't see the wacom one being used for professional purposes until they up the accuracy. I was going to buy one for my finance for her birthday (she has a cintiq but wanted something for the go) but decided it wasn't worth it.
On top of that inkling requires that device to help read from the paper which limits its usefulness some (for me at least).
Hopefully they improve on it because it's definitely an interesting approach to this problem.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...
The Moleskin/Evernote dot pattern is merely alignment marks to help unskew photos taken with the iPhone. Not sure why that's even necessary as many iPhone apps which take photos do this automatically.
In my opinion this is a good glimpse of digital and analog life working in harmony instead of dictating you have to live with either one.
Great job! Ordering mine now :)
Few things that could make this easier: - Add machine readable page numbering to the notebook - Some kind of annotation scheme, like (1) I could use to refer to the drawings on the notebook.
On laptop I could refer to the pictures with <page number>:<picture> style notation.
Would be actually nice to follow similar workflow with laptop and iPad. Write text on full keyboard, draw diagrams for the same note on iPad at the same time. Maybe this is already possible, have never tried this.
It should be a lot better than a photo of a book, and much much better than a magazine.
Generally in ranges of hundreds of rupees.
I use Evernote for nearly everything I do. Task lists, projects, ideas, goals. Evernote saves me one of my most precious resources: time. I've worked Evernote into my daily workflow for getting things done.
And I have a stack of Moleskines I've used for reminders, sketches, random thoughts that I scratch down in a hurry throughout my day.
This is the perfect product for my everyday use. Looking forward to when they arrive (they will ship in October). I just wonder if I bought enough of them.
But I wonder how long this will be the case. Anecdotally I'm seeing more people choose Android (or at least Samsung Android phones) - with a bigger user base, how long before the subset of early adopters/higher spenders is as big or bigger than those with an iPhone?
Device Support
Page Camera is currently available only on iOS (iPhone / iPad), but will be added to Android and other mobile platforms in the future. iPhone 3Gs, iPad 2, and earlier models are not optimal for Page Camera due to absence of flash and low camera resolution.
EDIT: Formatting.
Does anyone know of a good intro guide to Evernote?
quality is worth paying for...
You mean just like a standard 1€ spiral bound notebook with 80g paper?
They're nice and easy to find though, and the form factor's lovely.
For a heavy note-taker, regular notebooks are probably better. For drawing, I would look at specialized notebooks. But don't dismiss valuing usability in intermittently used products as mere posing.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moleskine-Pac-Man-Limited-Edition-No...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moleskine-Limited-Brick-Plain-notebo...
etc.etc.