Evernote for Mac

CNET Editors' review

by: Paul Hughes on May 09, 2012

Evernote for Mac is just one part of an excellent, access-from-anywhere note-taking system. In addition to the Evernote desktop client, you can create and get to your notes from a variety of mobile devices (including apps for the iPhone and iPad) and any Web browser on any computer. A free Evernote account links all your notes together.

Evernote is a mature and popular application, with an impressively streamlined interface that shares similarities across its multiple platforms and gives you many different ways to create notes and collections of notes called notebooks. Your notes can be text, images, or Web clippings, but with a premium account you can save other file types, too.

In addition to typing in notes via Evernote for Mac's three-paned interface (using word-processor-style formatting tools), you can drag and drop text and images, click on buttons to record audio or iSight notes, and drag files directly to the Evernote icon in the Dock. You can also access note-taking options through a menu bar icon, hot keys, and contextual menus, and an optional Web Clipper tool puts a button for saving Web content right in your Safari or Firefox toolbar.

You can tag and search all your notes from anywhere (with fairly amazing character recognition in images), see word and character counts, and export notes in a variety of ways (including Facebook sharing and the option to save all attachments from a note or notes), and Evernote automatically syncs up your info as often as you want. You can scroll through all your notes in a thumbnail-style Card View, which quickly shows you the title, creation date and time, and a preview of each note -- although, unfortunately, this view completely replaced the app's previous (and in some ways more flexible) Thumbnail View, which was often better suited for quickly scanning image-based notes.

There's a lot to like in Evernote, and the fact that it's free makes this app easy to try out. If you're looking for a note-taking app -- or just an easy way to keep track of your digital odds and ends -- Evernote is a worthwhile download.