evernote

Evernote extension in Chrome

Evernote offers an interesting alternative to bookmarks, sharing, and other less-than-ideal means of saving Web content. It stores Web content permanently in a free online account that lets you access your saved stuff from your PC, laptop, phone, or other device. With the free Evernote Web Clipper extension for Google Chrome you can access your Evernote account from inside Chrome via the address bar. We tried it in Chrome and Chrome Plus, and we liked it a lot in both. But then, Evernote is designed to work with just about anything and everything, and not just Web browsers.

Evernote Web … Read more

Evernote gets a real Web app

My favorite productivity app, Evernote (download), is getting an updated Web version. It's about time.

The previous version of the Web client for the note-taking and memory-keeping app was a workable fail-safe if you needed to get to your notes and didn't have access to a computer, tablet, or smartphone with the real client on it, but it was cumbersome and stylistically out of sync with the Evernote apps on other platforms.

The new app is less glitzy but far more usable. It's got a three-pane view so you can navigate a large library of notes quickly. … Read more

Evernote overhauls its iPhone app

Starting today, Evernote's popular note-taking app for iPhone and iPod Touch will have more than a few new features and enhancements.

The design is cleaner in Evernote 4 as a whole, and changes include everything from a revamped home screen and note-taking screen to new capabilities--like removing attachments you no longer want or need and adding multiple images at a time to a note.

Notes now appear in snippet form to provide greater context for text-based or mixed-media notes. More photo real estate is also visible for picture notes as the thumbnail view gives way to a full-width slice (… Read more

Evernote for Android revs to version 2.0

The ever-functional and increasingly popular note-taking application Evernote has been available on desktop and mobile devices for a few years, though the app for the Android OS became available only at the beginning of this year. Today, the company made some noticeable improvements to the interface and functionality of the app with version 2.0.

The first thing Evernote addressed on its Android app was the home screen, which is now cleaner and simpler to navigate. Here, you're greeted with six main options: new note, snapshot, all notes, tags, notebooks, and search. This screen also displays sync status, when … Read more

Evernote's Windows overhaul adds speed, finesse

As an Evernote user on several platforms (Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, Android, Web), I've always felt as if the software has had a Jekyll-and-Hyde divide between its offering on the Mac and PC. The Mac version ran better, and had a more consistent interface, while the PC version looked and ran like it had been pieced together out of spare parts.

Luckily, that's about to change.

Evernote is set to release a new version of its note-taking and Web-clipping Windows software this morning that improves speed, looks, and functionality. In short, it leapfrogs the old version, and then … Read more

Evernote secures $20 million in investment round

Evernote has secured $20 million in a Series C round of financing, the company announced today.

Sequoia Capital led the funding round, according to Evernote--a service that enables people to create, edit, and synchronize data across multiple devices and platforms. Morgenthaler Ventures and DoCoMo Capital, which previously invested in Evernote, also participated in the round. In addition, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha will join Evernote's board of directors.

Getting Sequoia Capital's support is no small achievement. The venture capital firm is one of the most successful in the tech world. The company has invested in Apple, Cisco Systems, … Read more

Evernote launches a bookmarking tool for sites

Personal internet archiving service Evernote is taking a new approach to expanding its user base and bookmarking functionality with a tool for publishers and blog owners called Site Memory. In short, it lets users save Web content for reading later, while helping to promote some of the most heavily saved content with Evernote users at large.

Blogs that add the new Site Memory button to their posts (or any page for that matter) let users bookmark and save that content to their Evernote account. Akin to Web bookmarking services like Instapaper and Read it Later, this lets them absorb the … Read more

Thousands of Evernote users affected by data loss

Online note-saving service Evernote on Monday acknowledged that it had suffered a hardware fault at the beginning of July that resulted in potential data loss for more than 6,000 of its users worldwide.

The issue was first reported by blog Techwave, citing a report from Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun. In a Monday note to Evernote users on the company's blog, Evernote CEO Phil Libin explained that the loss stemmed from bad server hardware:

"Every user's data is stored on a 'shard.' A shard is made up of a server together with a redundant fail-over server. If there is any problem with a server, the system automatically fails over to the second server in the shard. We currently have 37 shards. Shard 22 was the one that had problems last month."

Evernote's back-up system stores user data in up to six different places using both on- and off-site servers as well as locally on the user's copy of the software. Though in the case of the problem, which lasted four days, user data was simply being overwritten due to one of these systems not having a working failure routine. "Basically, the shard kept failing over back and forth between two servers over the time period causing some of the data created during that time to get overwritten," Libin explained.

In a call with CNET on Monday morning, Libin said that of the 6,323 users affected by the outage, approximately 70 percent were able to get their data back.

Evernote's software saves a copy of a work in progress before syncing it up with whatever was stored online, so the company was able to pull the complete copies of various files once the problem had been addressed and fixed. However, those who had been working purely on Evernote's site, and whose work was being stored on the faulty shard, had no such protection.

As an apology, Evernote has provided affected users with a free year of the company's $45-a-year premium service. Those who were already premium subscribers get an extra year.

As for whether this could happen again, Libin said it's extremely unlikely."This was a freak of hardware failures. But we've changed the fail-over process so it won't happen again."

Data loss on large-scale Web services is uncommon, but can be extremely hard to recover from. In 2009, social-bookmarking site Magnolia suffered a massive data corruption that resulted in the loss of all its user data. It has since started from scratch with a new version of the site. Prior to that, one of the most high-profile outages was a multi-hour downtime for Amazon's S3 cloud storage service, which many sites use as their built-in storage solution.

At a press conference three weeks ago, Evernote announced it has reached 3.7 million users since launching in June of 2008. In that time, its users have saved 145 million notes, which Libin said works out to 312 new ones every minute.… Read more

Fixes and advancements

On Tuesday, Microsoft released four security bulletins that fixed five holes in Office and Windows. We surveyed the mess, which included a critical vulnerability in a Windows Help and Support Center feature that has been targeted by attacks. The reparations also deal with vulnerabilities in the Canonical Display Driver and Microsoft Office Access ActiveX Controls.

Another noteworthy announcement is Evernote's introduction of "The Trunk," which is essentially an extra button where users can access a directory of third-party sites and tools that make the popular note-taking tool even more useful. In addition, Evernote will offer a feature … Read more