Evernote for iPhone launched with the Apple App Store, and the app has ungone a number of evolutionary steps in the years since. Today Evernote is unveiling version 4 of their iPhone app and the changes, while maybe not revolutionary, are certainly substantial. The home screen, for example, is completely revamped to show snippets of notes making the app useful as soon as you launch it.
The changes to the home screen look great. Most of the time when I launched Evernote I wanted to look at a note I had previously made, so being able to access this information immediately is a huge time saver.
Creating a new note in Evernote version 4 has been upgraded, too. You can type text as normal, but from the same screen you can now embed images from your photo roll, take new pictures, and record audio. Multiple media types can be added to the same note at the same time, which makes Evernote notes much more useful. From the Evernote blog: “So, if you’re sitting in a meeting or lecture, you can have notes, recorded audio and a whiteboard snapshot all in a single note.”
For folks that use multiple notebooks, you can now view a list of notes in a specific notebook. You can also view a list of all the tags you’ve assigned to notes across all notebooks, so you can find that note you made three months ago tagged “Important” but have since completely forgotten what you titled it.
iPad owners may be a little disappointed that Evernote 4 is currently only for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The changes should trickle into the iPad version soon, though.
I think it’s important to note that almost all — if not all — of the Evernote 4 features are the direct result of user feedback. The folks at Evernote listen to their users, and incorporate useful feedback into a better app for everyone, even the freeloaders like me using the free version.
