I’m now completely addicted to evernote.  I’ve installed it several times but, until recently, never really used it.  I always thought “what am i supposed to use this for?”. I guess I just didn’t get it. Well… now I do. I watched Merlin Mann’s desktop tour, and it convinced me to give it another shot.  I’ve had DevonThink, Yojimbo, OneNote,  and Evernote all installed, but never really used any of them.

I now dump almost everything into Evernote. I used to use Stickies, random disorganized text files, notes in the margins of notebooks, and half a dozen other tools to record random bits of data. Now, it all goes in Evernote. It’s the bag for all the stuff that has no place.

Evernote is indexed (even uses OCR for text in images), allows tagging in multiple notebooks, syncs to the web and iPhone, and has, I’m sure, dozens of other awesome features I haven’t even used yet. It supports audio notes, which has helped me get my SpeakEasy and old Outlook recordings catalogued for the sake of having a “SINGLE” repository for all of my keepsake junk. I can only imagine the possibilities for how this will help me organize the random emails i’ve sent to myself and all the other inaccessible and redundant pieces of data I have lying about. It is changing the way I use my computer and how I see and organize data.

Evernote even inspired me to start using 1Password for all my password archives. Evernote doesn’t really do this well yet, but 1password is working out great. I used to have passwords listed in plain text in text files in a notes directory on my computer. Since the notes directory is becoming history (all bit by bit getting merged into Evernote), I had to put the passwords somewhere, and it’s a load off my mind having them somewhere secure and available on all my computers and iPhone. 1Password’s browser integration is freakin awesome (it used to annoy me, but now I love it, I guess I just had to submit to the tool .

Evernote and 1Password have now joined Quicksilver, Path Finder, Text Mate, Cyberduck, OmniFocus, vmware Fusion, and Sound Source as my must have Mac applications. There’s currently no Quicksilver plugin for Evernote, but there is a useful applescript for quick note entries. The applescript tool is still not as functional as the (awesome) Quicksilver text file manipulation actions (my former primary notekeeping tool), but maybe it will convince me to investigate Quicksilver’s plugin architecture and try to implement it myself.

Thumbs up evernote for the great work (and for being free so that stubborn people like me will actually use it .