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Evernote for Windows 4 adds geotagging, improved performance, and more

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A major new update for Evernote for Windows has been announced, and its cup is spilling over with improvements. I’ve been playing around with a preview version for a couple of days. Haven’t gotten to all the new stuff yet, but I like what I’m seeing so far.

Full list of improvements is below. Official announcement on the Evernote Blogcast. Most of it is small things and general enhancements, like faster performance. The big change was a full recode of the application from scratch. Generally, the interface is much the same as Evernote 3.5, so there’s not much re-learning involved. The streamlined top menus are a big lure for me. I loaded the preview on my TEGA v2 and was pleasantly surprised by how good it looks.

The geotagging system could be great for mobile usage, tagging notes with your location while on-the-go. Unfortunately, it requires GPS hardware, something even most mobile PCs don’t have, and I believe Wi-Fi triangulation requires some sort of hardware enabling or service, such as Skyhook. An external solution, such as GPS USB plug-in or Bluetooth connection to a smartphone, might also work. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

I was hoping geo-location meant I could view Evernote notes by location on a map in Windows, as I can on my iPhone, but that hasn’t been implemented. Another disappointment is that the Windows drag gesture does not work on the left-hand notebook panel or the Trunk sub-window, forcing me to use the scrollbar – ugh. Works fine in the other two main panels. Finally, the interface looks great in landscape mode, but it really doesn’t work in portrait. Would be nice if the panels would stack vertically in portrait, but I’m not sure how that would be detected and implemented in Windows. See my suggestion for Urbanspoon on iPad for a basic visual.

Those quirks aside, the new interface is very attractive. Not entirely touch-friendly, but it works better on a small screen than the previous interface and the middle panel is easy to toss around via the drag gesture. Wouldn’t call it a game-changer but it’s worth the update.

  • Faster all around
    • Faster start up time
    • Faster switching to foreground
    • Lower memory footprint
    • Faster searching
    • Faster switching between notes
    • More responsive user interface
  • New and improved user interface
    • Better use of screen real estate
    • Support for Windows Jump List (Windows 7 only)
    • More configurable UI preferences (menu headers)
    • New search description
    • More sort options in mixed view
    • Improved dialog look and feel
    • More responsive activity log
    • Better support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean search
    • More readable release notes
  • All new clippers with rich formatting and attachment clipping
    • Internet Explorer 7, 8 and 9 support
    • Outlook including clipping mail, journal, notes, calendar entries and contacts
    • Firefox (note extension update required)
    • Tag, rename and file when you clip
  • Better editing
    • Better table editing (add/remove columns and rows)
    • More text colors
    • Better font support
    • Better keyboard navigation in tables
    • Better support for bulleted and numbered lists
  • Added Geo-location
    • Geo-location detected automatically (Windows 7 only)
    • Printing
    • Configurable print header preferences
    • Better formatting
5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. Gordon

    10/26/2010 at 11:42 pm

    You missed a few..

    REMOVED – ability to change paper colour for ink notes.
    REMOVED – options for ink notes
    REMOVED – scrolling timeline view.
    NO – ability to annotate an images or files.
    NO – mixed notes (ie:text/audio/ink on same note).

    This program is going backward in many areas. I wont be renewing my subscription next time round.

    Gordon

  2. savagemike

    10/27/2010 at 1:56 am

    Still no templates ??

    this program should be a diarists wet dream, but instead it is a pure PITA to use to keep a log or diary.
    have to enter day/date information manually every time
    no ability to search by date to give me every previous year on this date or every saturday or every first monday of the month etc…

    And how about some custom buttons to have presets for color/font/size etc… so I don’t have to pick three different things to make a similar note in a similar fashion on 70% of the notes I take.
    I should be able to save that text formatting I want into a single darned button and have as many such buttons as I can stand.

  3. Modnar

    10/27/2010 at 3:35 am

    Hmmm if your after using location sensors in Windows http://www.geosenseforwindows.com does an alright job (only if you have a persistant Internet connection though)

    • Anonymous

      10/27/2010 at 2:40 pm

      Impressive. I will need to write something up about this and/or shoot a video demo.

  4. Mr7733

    10/28/2010 at 2:57 am

    Never could get evernote to fit into my workflow.

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