Evernote joy

Up until yesterday I had been longing for what I thought was the only way of accessing my handwritten notes on my mac.

See, four months ago I finally found the time for implementing somewhat of an overkill… a really nice setup for having on my mac an always available copy of my handwritten notes in OneNote 2007…

This setup, on the mac side, involved:

.- an eighteen gigabyte bootcamp partition
.- a Microsoft Vista license installed in the bootcamp partition
.- a Microsoft Office license on top of both the above
.- VmWare Fusion
.- some OneNote syncing magic…

It looks complicated, I know… but as a result of it I could carry and access my handwritten notes and all OneNote goodness (search capabilities within an index of words in handwritten notes, –how cool is this?!–), in the same machine where I would be working in on say Tinderbox, Scrivener or Ulysses… just to name a few of my favorite working apps.

The brand new evernote beta mix (web + mac & windows clients), which I accessed yesterday for the first time, just rendered all this a very obsolete and inefficient use of technology (money and technology I would dare to say…), and I couldn’t be happier…

I couldn’t be happier because since two weeks ago I was missing very much that setup. The story goes like this: Two weeks ago I moved from my 24-month-old, not-anymore-trusty macbook pro, to a brand new macbook air.

So far so good, but space constraints on the new MBA had forced me to temporarily abandon the above outlined setup. While I’ve kept on taking notes on my tc1100, those have remained there isolated from my main working machine… If for some reason I’m not able to take the tc1100 with me… well, I lose access to all my handwritten notes.

With the new Evernote beta, as of today, I’m able to access handwritten notes taken on the tc1100, on my mac… seamlessly, without any need for intervention on my side… There is a minor issue though: While notes show up almost instantly on the web app, the mac client seems unable to show them… As of now, it seems aware of the existence of the note though it shows a graphic with the following message: “Ink Note Support Coming Soon!”

Notes to the developer:

.- It would be great to have a button on the toolbar to set a note as an ‘ink’ note, without the need of punching a keyboard combination… While working on a tablet pc, in slate mode, it is possible to easily reproduce the keyboard combination… though this adds some extra steps that could easily be avoided imho.

.- No Spanish recognition on handwritten notes? I see there is Russian, French, et al. but no Spanish… Guess which is the most spoken language out there right after English? Right.

Great piece of software. Thank you so very much Evernote folks!