Evernote-taking is Clever Notetaking

Hey, so sorry for the major delays.  It’s been a seriously tiring couple of weeks 😦

But FINALLY, I’m getting around to writing another post.  I’m so pumped about writing this article; I’ve been wanting to write about Evernote for about a month now when I asked my friend if he knew what Evernote was…..and HE SAID NO! WHAT?! Seriously. Everyone deserves to know about Evernote.

Evernote is pretty much the greatest notetaking/reminder/sharing-y thing you can think of. And every single time, they come up with something new to add! Seriously, I’d be SO out of ideas at this point.  Anyways, let’s get started.

First things first, can we talk about how adorable the icon is? Totally cute. Elephants are definitely some of the cutest animals out there.  Special shoutout to anyone who agrees with me ❤

Alright, so if you open up the app, you’re taken to your menu of notes.

And of course, you have options for your menu: like sorting by different properties, or viewing things as cards instead of as snippets.

You can add notes (which is the entire basis of the app). And there are lots of cool features and formatting stuffs as well.  You have all the average formatting, and alignment, highlighting.  It’s one of the reasons I used Evernote for taking notes in class.

Unfortunately a lot of the more helpful features were added later 🙂  But that’s still good news for you!

The Attachments

One of the sweeter features are the attachments you can add.  As you’ve probably guessed, tapping that iconic paperclip will take you to the magical menu of attachments!

Obviously the camera, saved photo, and even audio can be pretty standard, but document cameras aren’t found as commonly as the rest.  Also, they give you three types of “documents” that it can analyze: post-it notes, documents, and average photos.  Once the documents have been scanned in, Evernote makes all of them searchable as well.  Definitely making it easier to, you know, search through class notes. (THAT’S WHY THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN A GREAT FEATURE BEFORE!)  And, once they’re pictured and what not, you can add cute little annotations.

You have little arrows, highlighting, adding text, adding shapes, and you know that weird button on the top….WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR. So……it’s to pixelate stuff. So you can blur out names or something! How cool, right! However, I guess that’s not that helpful for school notes…

Whatever. Close enough! Still an awesomely fun feature!

The Reminders

And the last feature: a quick one. A Reminder thing.  So, for example, if I feel like I’m going to forget to go to work tomorrow….

Then I can have my Evernote app remind me!  It could also send me an email in the morning on the day of my event!  Exciting stuff 🙂

Syncing Connections

One of the best things about Evernote is how everything is connected.  More than you think it is.  A couple posts ago, I talked about an app called Food.  That’s connected to Evernote.  You can access all of your notes from online on any computer.  All connected to Evernote.  And on top of all of that, there’s an extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera called Evernote Clearly.  (Sorry, IE users out there; you have nothing. But, in my opinion, you should just get a better browser.)

So what Evernote Clearly does is that it creates a distraction-free environment for reading….which with my ADD-ridden mind is pretty much what I need! Also, this extension is good for taking notes on readings, highlighting, and alllll of it is saved to my Evernote account!

And since that’s it for today, download and enjoy!

Hopefully the next update will be soon 🙂

DO it all with Any.DO

Look at me actually posting on a Tuesday! How consistent of me!! (I better get candy for doing this.) Lol whatever, today I’m going to introduce you to a Productivity app called Any.DO.

I really thing that you can do anything with Any.DO, and Any.DO can do almost anything too! (Bonus points for counting how many anys and how many dos were in that lol) So, this app is a to-do list with a good number of cool features. For someone who needs to be walked through being productive, this is a pretty savvy app. Although, I am quite an exceptional case of unproductivity; people don’t just call me Prakrastinator for nothing.

This app is good about keeping you on track. For people who like to plan out their days in the morning or make lists for themselves all the time, this is pretty great. Every morning it’ll give you a notification telling you to “Take a moment to plan your day.”

And then it’ll go through pending tasks and ask whether you’ve taken care of them or not.

Just the average list view

What a nice app. Making sure I do my stuff!

Each task you have also gives you lots of options along with it: like, when should it remind you. So you can set it to remind you when you get home tomorrow….which I think is a pretty snazzy feature.

Choose your location.

A small thing that just makes all the typing slightly easier is the whole auto-complete thing.  I guess it has a collection of common tasks and when you start typing what you want to do, you can choose one of the options below, if they apply.

Tell it when to alert you.

In case you’re one of those people that like to say their lists out loud, there’s an option to listen to you speak to add tasks. And as far as I’ve used it, it’s pretty accurate with the speech recognition. There are also various language options in the settings menu, in case English isn’t your first language preference for your to-do lists. (Unfortunately for me, Hindi wasn’t an option) 😦

One of their last features (which I think is kinda recent! Or at least it took me until now to discover it….) is they have a Chrome integration option. You can download a Chrome extension that syncs with your phone.  That way you can also tell it to maybeeeee email you reminders for a certain task or give you a follow-up alert.

Sync with Chrome from your phone

Chrome extension

The entire package of this app is pretty sweet, and I definitely think they have the right idea in mind for people who are crazy for lists.  And good news for Android users, this app is available for Android and iPhone! So, download and enjoy!

Good job, Any.DO!

P.S. – While doing research for this app, you inspired me to download your calendar app as well (called Cal). So, expect a post on that soon as well!