OneNote joy

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how it appeared to me that the new ‘Evernote‘ had rendered my previous OneNote setup unnecessary.

While I still think that the new incarnation of Evernote has been a huge step forward in many respects… it turns out its not quite there yet.

I’ll say upfront that the mac client is a pleasure to use. It just gained support for PDF files, and has a very mac feel to it… if you know what I mean. I you don’t…well, I feel for you…

About the PDF support… how come this can be a novelty? I mean… its not like the PDF file format has not been there for years and years.

In my main to areas of activity, legal practice and lately, as well, academia, for any app. to be seriously considered PDF support is a must. No wonder how apps. such as yep, papers and skim became very popular and, I assume, successful, immediately after their release.

Evernote lets you ‘ink’ in its windows version. And I’ve been exploring those inking capabilities lately. I’ll say that inking on Evernote, overall, is an OK experience. But, in my humble opinion, not close to the one OneNote 2007 provides.

I wouldn’t know how to describe this other than saying that it just doesn’t feel the same to write on OneNote than on Evernote. And its not just the app’s appearance, the eye candy… where OneNote also excels… I mean, I love notebooks, I love paper… and the more I use OneNote the more I fall in love with it.

But that wouldn’t be my major gripe about Evernote. As I noted nearly two months ago, while ‘ink’ notes show up normally on the web app., they don’t on the mac client. And this is a big, major gripe.

Like I described before, the presence of this ‘ink’ notes is acknowledged by Evernote’s mac client… but a standard picture saying that ink support is coming is all we get for those. And its been two months.

I was only too happy when I discovered Evernote’s foray into the web… and the mac! Now that I carry a macbook air and I have huge space constraints, I was really worried about not being able to replicate the previous overkill setup I had for always keeping my OneNote notebooks with me. Evernote sort of alleviated this anxiety. Two months later, the anxiety is slowly growing back.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been evangelizing around for Evernote a bit… (even in class at the places I teach…) For the price they charge, you can’t get better quality. So a big thanks from here. But until the ink support gets there… well, I already have Yojimbo for storing clips from the web and all that. And sugarsync for the syncing, at which by the way, you can throw almost any kind of file format.

Cheers! TFS