My Choice for Replacing Google Notebook

So, after asking last week for recommendations, I’ve moved forward and decided to go with Evernote as my note-taking, organizational tool of choice, since Google is no longer going to be developing Notebook.

In the couple of days since I made the choice, there are a few things I really like, and a couple that are somewhat irritating, but I can live with them.

The biggest weirdness, for me, is that the interface is ever so slightly different between the Windows and Mac clients. The Windows client has a view option that is similar to the view I used in Google Notebook. I can have a given notebook open, and all of the notes in that notebook will display in one window, where I can simply scroll through them. The Mac client doesn’t appear to have that, going with a more Outlook-like view where you open each note individually. Why would you include that view in one client and not the other?

The other thing is that in the Mac version, I can right-click a note and have the option to move it to another notebook, in the Windows client, when I right-click a note, the option to move it isn’t there.

These differences make it just a little more irritating for someone who is constantly going back and forth between the Mac and Windows environments. There are quite enough small differences to keep in mind between the two operating systems without a program that’s supposed to work in both throwing in a few more.

That being said, I’m enjoying Evernote’s ability to sync notes across all my computers, and the web version for computers I don’t want to, or can’t, install a client on. I love that it has a OneNote import wizard, so I could not only move my Google Notebook stuff over, but also the stuff I had kept in OneNote because I didn’t want it online with Google’s service. I also love that I can encrypt portions of any notes, which helps me feel better about storing certain things and letting them sync across computers than I did with Google.

I also really like being able to have an “add to Evernote” feature built in to Outlook, and the web browser, not to mention the screen clips. (Though those features seem to be much more prevalent, again, in only the Windows environment.)

Hopefully, at the end of the day, synching all of this info makes me more organized, and therefore, productive. That’s the whole point, and Evernote has proven useful so far!

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