Evernote 5.2

Evernote is perhaps the most popular note-taking application right now. It is available pretty much in every major platform, including Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. Most importantly, when you sign up for an account with Evernote, all your notes will be synched across these platforms, which means that you can create a note from the comfort of your desktop and then read it on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

If we consider all the features that Evernote has to offer, there really is no competition for it. As I noted above, it has great platform support, but it also has robust search features, including tagging, it lets you save clippings of webpages into new notes quite easily via the menubar helper, and there are also a handful of global shortcuts that let you access some of the app's features even when Evernote isn't the active program. For example, you can press Cmd+Ctrl+N to launch the Quick Note window. There, you simply type what you want to add to a note and it will be added to Evernote. Some of the other features include Atlas, which shows the locations where your notes have been added, Trunk, from where you can download other great applications and Reminders. This last one lets you set up the application to e-mail you on the morning of the day where your notes are due. This only works, of course, when you add a due date to one of your notes.

In the past I have worried that running Evernote might make my Mac slow, but recently I looked at Evernote's memory and CPU utilization numbers and while active, the application only used 0.1% CPU time and only 150 megabytes of RAM, which by today's standards is not much.

A lot has happened in the development of this application since I reviewed version 2.0 back in January of 2011. Graphically, the application looks pretty much the same, but the number of features and performance fixes and upgrades is just amazing. Some of the features I wrote about above weren't available back then.

There is also a premium subscription which adds awesome features like OCR, more upload capacity, smarter searching and support for offline notebooks in mobile devices, which speeds up the process of finding notes.