When I think of products that have changed my digital life, I think of the iPhone, iPad, Dropbox and Google Reader. But one app that I use almost everyday in both my personal and business life is Evernote. For those of you not familiar with Evernote, a quick one paragraph tour.
Lets say you come across something on your voyage through the inter webs and you think to your self, “hey, I could really use that later.” Now you have a couple of choices:
- Bookmark the site and pray they don’t remove or delete the post.
- Print it on a piece of paper and get it lost in your filling system.
- Print a PDF of the page and then proceed to lose it on your hard drive.
None of these have ever worked for me. I have folders and folders of PDFs that I still need to go through to figure out what the heck I saved that page for. Then along comes Evernote. Evernote lets you store any document, tag it and access it from anywhere with the help of the web or native apps. I use it for everything from photos to recipes to technical documents I might need later. It is a truly useful service.
Yesterday they had a one day developer conference where they discussed the state of the service and made a pretty big announcement for anyone who does technical things with a Mac. By that I mean writers, support technicians, designers, etc. They bought a great utility called Skitch. So why would they buy Skitch and why is it so cool that they have made it free?
Skitch in its own marketing calls it “Your Image swiss Army Knife.” It really is an easier way to make images for sharing. It allows you to take any image, screen shot or photo, mark it up and send it out to the world. I know it sounds pretty boring, but if you think that before you would open an app like Photoshop or something of the ilk, this little app does the little things fast and easy.
So why did Evernote purchase this company? It’s a great tool that they already use and adds value to their service. Simple. It will allow them to have better image manipulation on all their platforms. Right now you can take photos with Evernote, but you can’t do anything to them. Imagine taking a screenshot of your website. Take it into Skitch/Evernote, annotate it and then share it with the organization with about 3 or 4 clicks. Really a very compelling product.
Best of all, they made it free. It was a $20 buy, but now costs nothing! So if you are used to taking a screen shot, opening an image app, then modifying it, then figuring out how to share it, just give Skitch a try. You really will like it.
Evernote also announced it has 12.5 million users, 4 million “30 day active users” and over half a million paid users. So Evernote is growing. The CEO even stated that he wanted Evernote to last 100 years. A noble goal for a company who’s tagline is “Remember Everything.”
Source: Evernote
Via: TUAW
