Comments on: Evernote: Never Lose Data or Ideas Again

By: Alejandro

Alejandro — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:17:02 +0000

@EngineeringDoc

Same here: we use OneNote

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:49:42 +0000

Guys,

I am using Scribbly, that is also a great and simple application with Adobe AIR. You should have a look here

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/marketplace/index.cfm?event=marketplace.offering&offeringID=15420

Cheers,
SAM

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:35:25 +0000

Yes, I did mean Evernote. I edited out several instances of “Endnote” in the text of that article (force of habit). I can’t believe I missed the last one. Thanks for pointing it out.

By: Dude

Dude — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:21:59 +0000

“Rather annoyingly, I can’t come up with a 10th idea for a use of Endnote for scientists at the moment. Can you suggest one?”

Did you mean EverNote by any chance?

By: hafizmd

hafizmd — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:58:42 +0000

Thank Nick. This Evernote application will replace my database systems online. I’ll give a try on this. Thanks.

By: EngineeringDoc

EngineeringDoc — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:39:53 +0000

One thing to consider is that you may be violating the rules and regulations of your academic institution and/or funding source(s) by using Evernote on the web. By uploading the information, you may be transferring rights to that information to Evernote. My former university did not allow this type of off-site storage, to Evernote or other web-based locations.

As far as this type of software goes, I have been using Microsoft OneNote for the exact same purpose for over five years, and most of my former labmates also adopted OneNote once I introduced them to it. It made collaborating easier and more efficient. I haven’t tried Evernote, but the fact that it’s free is very tempting.

One last comment: there’s nothing better than being able to search through several years of graduate and post-doctoral notes in a matter of seconds to find exactly what you need!

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:47:30 +0000

Evernote also makes a good to-do tracker. I have a notebook in Evernote specifically for to-dos, and in it a “Current to-do” note and archive notes labeled by month and year. You can make ticky-boxes by hitting Ctrl-Shift-C, so I put all my weekly to-dos in the “current to-do” note, then copy-paste them weekly into the appropriate growing monthly archive note. That way I have a current rotating to-do list, as well as archives of my old to-do lists. If you make your to-do lists sufficiently detailed, you can even search them later (for instance by plasmid or protein name or “westerns” or whatnot).

By: Shea

Shea — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:12:42 +0000

Like I mentioned on twitter, I find Evernote is great for keeping track of any bioinformatics work you do. I primarily use Evernote on my PC, so I often use it to capturing BLAST results (I am constantly re-searching things on BLAST because I never print the results!).

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:55:17 +0000

Ah, great. I forgot about capturing scribbles but I didn’t know that scribbles searchable.

By: iayork

iayork — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:50:04 +0000

You left out my favorite lab use of Evernote: Capture your scribbles. I know I’m not the only one who uses paper towels to hastily note down the order of samples, to make quick calculations, write down concentrations, work out volumes of enzyme for a restriction digest …

Take snapshots of those paper towels and dump them into Evernote (I have a notebook just called “Scribbles”) and then you can update your lab notebook properly. OR even if you don’t use them to update your notebook, you can go back and remind yourself exactly how you made the digest next time around.

Because of Evernote’s scribble-OCR, the scribbles are actually computer-searchable (with lots of errors, admittedly, especially for the more scribbly scribbles).