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A spirit that is not afraid

App of the week: Get organized with Evernote

Emily Brett / FREELANCE GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Emily Brett / FREELANCE GRAPHIC DESIGNER

There comes a point when a need for organization requires more than notes on an iPhone, lists on brightly colored Post-It notes and a weekly planner. Some things in life are too important to lose track of. Evernote offers a solution for just that.

Virtual notebooks filled with notes are the bread and butter of the app. You can create and name notebooks, and then place as many notes in them as you wish. Although they are called notes, they are not simply for short blurbs or reminders. Notes can hold anything you want-pictures, lists, audio files and PDFs\0xAD-of any length and size.

Evernote has a number of usable features that sync across multiple platforms-including all Apple products, Windows desktop and phone, Blackberry and Android. While the idea of the syncing "cloud" is not new, Evernote allows for easy access to everything in just one place, available on your desktop and smartphone.

A unique feature of Evernote is its ability to search for text inside of images. If you've placed a picture that has any sort of text on it-whether it be in handwriting or typed-it's able to be read and found through the search engine. Additionally, you can use a "web clipper browser extension" to save entire Internet pages to your notes.

That long list of books I've wanted to read, of artists I want to listen to, pictures of ideas to redecorate my room and, yes, even a list of clothes I want to buy are a few of the main things I use Evernote for. So if I'm reading a magazine, perhaps in a car on a trip, and come across the name of a new band that I want to listen to, I'll add it to a note in the application and can look it up later when I get back to my computer.

While I don't use it for taking notes and organizing for classes, that's certainly a viable option. It would be easy to arrange notebooks as classes and have notes as individual class days, allowing for simple retrieval and printing of notes for tests. Similarly, you can use Evernote for research, meetings, recipes, trip itineraries or anything in your life that needs an organizational push in the right direction.

I originally thought that Evernote would be an app that I'd download and never use, pushed back to the last page on my iPhone's menu. It's true: I don't use it much on my phone. The desktop application is where it really shines. There's a reason it's a mainstay on the top free downloaded list on Apple's App Store. I didn't know how much I needed it until I got it.


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