Evernote for Mac Gets an Extreme Makeover

Evernote, the useful and widely adopted note taking application has favored functionality over design. Now Mac uses have both. The new Evernote 5 for Mac is completely redesigned with a beautiful new interface, over 100 new features and more flexibility.

Here are a few favorites:

Shortcuts – Evernote’s navigation is in the left sidebar with access to Notes, Tags, etc. New, is the Shortcuts rectangle on top of the sidebar where you can drag your most frequently used notebooks, notes and tags. Like my blog post ideas notebook that I access everyday. This is useful if you’ve been using Evernote for awhile and have many notebooks and notes.

More sidebar updates include Recent notes for quick access to your five most recently edited notes from anywhere in Evernote, and Notebooks and Tags view with unique buttons that let you access and organize notes more efficiently.

Improved Search – Evernote’s robust search functionality got even better. Type ahead search auto-completes your thoughts with suggestions from information in your account. And the new Search options lets you easily filter your search by notebook, tag, source and more.

Brand new, is Atlas, a feature that allows you to see your notes in Evernote on a map, which helps you remember where you were when you took notes. Evernote Atlas reads the location where your notes were created and intelligently presents them to you on Place Cards based upon their proximity to each other. Seems interesting, but it’s not a feature that I’m likely to find terribly useful right now.

One complaint is that you can no longer delete a note when you’re in it. In the older edition you could delete a note by simply clicking on the ‘delete’ button in the top horizontal toolbar. That button has disappeared along with the option to click File > Delete. To delete the note, you now have to exit the note, find it in the list of notes and hit your computer’s delete button. Not cool, Evernote.

Here’s a list of additional new features and functionality:

Browsing and Creating Notes

* Card and Snippet views: A better way to browse notes
* Scalable note editor: A more elegant way to create notes, both big and small
* Full-screen single note view: Excellent for composing notes without distractions
* Change a note’s location: Type a place manually or click the compass arrow in note info
* Lots of keyboard shortcuts: Learn more on our What’s New page
* Shared banner: Indicates how many people have access to content in shared notebooks
* Better simple and plain text handling: Simplify notes to remove complex formatting or convert them to plain text
* Indent text: Evernote for Mac now supports text indentation
* Notes created on the Mac are now tagged with location information for Atlas

Collaboration

* Better sharing: Notebooks and shared notebooks are all in one place
* Mountain Lion notifications: See Evernote activity in Notification Center
* Joined notebooks can be added to stacks

The new design is beautiful and intuitive. If you’re a longtime user, it’ll take some adjustment, and if you’re on the fence, now is a good time to start using Evernote.

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