The note-taking, screen-grabbing, content organizing marvel of technology called Evernote is one of the software platforms I spend much of my business life “in.” One of the quirks of power-users of a software is our tendency to fall in love with the specific flow and pattern of how we use the software. This causes us to have a knee-jerk reaction to any change in the product or service–even when those changes clearly improve the way in which the software works.
Review of the Evernote Web Clipper redesign
Good news: Evernote’s recent redesign of its web browser extension, Web Clipper, is an overhaul that takes something good, and makes it even better. (Currently, the new version of the extension is available only for the Chrome browser.)
Key improvement: For those who already use the Evernote Web Clipper as a tool for collecting web-based content for research, the enhancements can be seen in simple changes to the interface that make it easier to save content to specific folders or notebooks, tag content or annotate it. One of the most impressive things about the new version is how some major changes are included but the tool feels and works essentially the same. It takes lots of work to keep things simple.
Still needs work: Evernote has yet to fulfill promises it made when it acquired the screen-grabbing tool Skitch. For example, the lack of multiple fonts, font styles and the fill feature continues to limit the previous versatility of the tool.
It’s worth the price: Evernote is a freemium product: there’s a free version and a paid one. Web clipper works with either version.
Chrome only: Adapting a famous saying by Henry Ford, the redesigned web clipper is now available on any web browser, as long as it’s Chrome.
Bottomline
For those who haven’t used Evernote, the Web Clipper may help you understand why Evernote has such a dedicated fan base who use it for capturing and organizing information from white boards, web sites, product labels, screen grabs and just about any other source one can think of.
Here’s a brief video that provides a sense of how the new web clipper works: