Capture. Sync. Find. And remember everything.

That’s the motto on the Evernote Beta website. I’ve been using this on an experimental basis and I like it a lot! What’s really intriguing to me is that Evernote will even scan images for text and will index that text, so that you can search for the image using the text it contains. For instance, you can take a snapshot of a sign (suppose it says, “Mount Hood Jazz Festival” on it) with your iPhone, e-mail the image to Evernote, and later search in Evernote for “jazz” and locate the picture of the shirt! You can scan a page from a book, and Evernote will index all the text. Drag and drop files onto Evernote in the Dock; it recognizes txt, html, doc, jpeg, gif, and png. (wav support coming soon). Big drawback; it does not yet recognize PDF files! (Yojimbo does; see below.)

Think of all the ways this could be used. Use your cell phone camera to snap a pic of someone’s business card, and send it to your Evernote account: Bingo! You’ve captured all the information into Evernote. Snap a pic of the page of a book when you are researching and you have a searchable copy of that page. (Searchable but not editable; Evernote does not allow you to copy and paste text out of images.)

Evernote gives you a javascript bookmarklet you can paste into your browser bookmarks that, when selected, will capture whatever web page you are viewing, or the selected text on that page. With Evernote you not only get a desktop application, you also get a web repository that syncs with your desktop application. So you can access your Evernote data from any computer with web access; you just log in. Capture data on your desktop, it syncs to the web; capture data on the web, and it syncs to your desktop! Text, images, even audio can be saved. And if you wish to, you can share some of your clips with other Evernote users.

I have been using Bare Bones’ Yojimbo for saving clippings since it came out, and I still like it a lot. I still find its keyboard shortcut method of clipping text, combined with an AppleScript I downloaded from (I think) Daring Fireball that lets me assign tags as I clip, is easier for clipping just text. And I like being able to “print” a PDF of anything directly into Yojimbo. But Evernote is making me think twice about which is best.

Give Evernote a try; it’s free while in beta.