There are lots of quick ways to capture notes to Evernote when you are on the go, but the problem is they are usually unstructured.
You can capture the notes quickly, but then later you need to name and possibly tag them.
I was recently contacted by the folks at Cloudmanic about their new tool Evermanic that promises to solve this: you can create repeatable templates for Evernote, and then use them to quickly create named, tagged notes on your mobile device going forward.
The Cloudmanic folks threw me a review copy of Evermanic so that I could check it out. At the moment it is iPhone only, but their site shows that the Android version is coming soon.
I can see an app like this being really handy for people who need to create the same type of notes over and over again when they are away from their computers.
Set Up Your Profiles
When starting up Evermanic for the first time, you are asked to sign in with a Cloudmanic account or create a new one. Why do you need a Cloudmanic account? To be honest, I am not exactly sure. I am guessing it is to support future integration with their other products, but it’d be nice if there was an option to just use Evermanic without an account.
With that out of the way, you create your first Profile.
When you create your Profile, you give it a name, then you give the notes a default Title, and then you assign the Notebook and Tags that this note should be given.
One minor nitpick: it doesn’t seem as if you can create tags when you are creating a Profile. It’d be nice to have that ability to go beyond your existing tags.
Create Notes
Once you have a Profile (or Profiles) set up, and for subsequent launches, you are presented with a screen to choose your Profile and choose which type of note that you want to create: Text, Audio, or Photo.
Let’s create a Text note. Once you choose your Profile and you tap the type of note that you want to create, you can type your note and customize the title (In this example I have typed – 1234 Wark St. at the end of the existing Property Inspection title from my Profile.
You can not choose the Notebook or modify the Tags. Those are coming from your Profile.
When your note is created, it is uploaded to your Evernote account, tagged and titled.
Here’s what that note looks like in Evernote.
Here’s a Photo note. Since I used the same Profile, it is tagged and titled appropriately.
Issues And Suggestions
I think that Evermanic is a nice first version of an app that many people will find handy.
I did come across one possible showstopper issue. Remember how you are able to create three types of notes: Text, Audio, and Photo? For some reason, Photo notes did not work for me. I tried it at home on my wi-fi and at Starbucks on 3G, and the note seemed to upload but never actually appeared in Evernote. Very odd.
I don’t know if there is a bug or some sort of service issue. For me, this wouldn’t be a big deal because I would use this for text notes (which worked perfectly), but it is something to be aware of.
Update: This was a temporary server glitch. Photo notes now work for me.
Some suggestions for future releases:
- It’d be nice if you could use Evermanic without needing a Cloudmanic account, unless there is a really compelling reason to need one.
- It’d be nice to be able to create templates for the note contents themselves when creating a Profile. For example, you might be creating a Support ticket and want to have “Problem: Steps To Replicate: Resolution:” pre-populated in the note.
- To be super useful, the delineation between “Text” and “Photo” notes could be eliminated. In my Property Inspection example, someone would want to be able to create a Text note, but then would want to be able to attach photos.
- When creating a note, it’d be nice to have the ability to add additional tags. For example, you might want to have a Profile pre-populated with Tags to be applied to all instances of a certain type of note, but then for individual notes you might want to be able to add a certain customer’s tag.
Who me, greedy?
Despite my suggestions, I think Evermanic fills a need and I look forward to seeing how it grows over time. At the time of writing it is $1.99.
What sort of Evernote templates could you see yourself creating?