This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Navigating in Evernote
All of this talk about notes and notebooks probably has you wondering exactly how it all works. Keep in mind that the Evernote app looks a bit different on each platform. And Evernote doesn’t sit still either—the company’s cadre of programmers seems to update the look of the service a few times each year, so keep this in mind as you view this chapter’s figures. What you see may not be exactly what you get.
Because this book focuses on the iPad, that’s the version of the app you’re seeing in Figure 4.1.
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FIGURE 4.1 The iOS version of Evernote for the iPad.
Figure 4.1 shows the basic control panel for Evernote, and if you look carefully you’ll see a few sections—Notes, Notebooks, Tags, Places, and Market. Each of these has a small number to the right of its name—I have 27 notebooks, for example, and 197 notes.
Each of the sections can be opened by simply tapping its name or number. Figure 4.2 shows that the Notebooks section has been opened and is now displaying the various notebooks I’ve created to store my notes.
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FIGURE 4.2 The Notebooks section lists your Evernote notebooks.
A Notebook can contain many sub-notebooks (but it stops there—no sub-sub-notebooks), and when you perform this kind of action, you’re creating what Evernote calls “stacks.” Tapping the DIY – Electronics Stack expands it to show the subnotebooks I’ve placed inside (see Figure 4.3). One of them is currently empty (DIY – Electronics has 0 notes) but the Maker Pro Newsletter has 38 notes tucked inside.
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FIGURE 4.3 Expand a stack to see all notebooks contained inside.
Notebooks are all about storing notes. Notes are the building blocks of Evernote, and as I mentioned earlier in the book, notes can contain text, audio, photos, videos, and more. After I tap the Maker Pro Newsletter notebook (shown in Figure 4.3), it opens and shows me all the newsletters that I’ve dragged and dropped into this Evernote notebook. Figure 4.4 shows that this list of notes is displayed with the most recent at top. Swiping from the bottom scrolls the list so all notes can be viewed.
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FIGURE 4.4 The individual notes stored in a single notebook.
Evernote does not store every note on your iPad (or iPhone)—if this were the default setting, many iPad users with large Evernote collections of notes and notebooks would find themselves running out of space. This is why Evernote works best with an Internet connection. If you have an Internet connection and tap on a note that contains anything other than text and try to open it, you’ll see a screen like the one in Figure 4.5.
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FIGURE 4.5 You’ll have to download the note to view it.
As you can see, there is a button labeled “Tap to Download” that will grab your note from the cloud and allow you to view it on your iPad. Depending on your connection speed, this may take less than a second or up to a minute or more for video or audio. Figure 4.5 contains a PDF file, so it’s not stored on my iPad until I need it.
After the note has been downloaded, it will open full screen for you to examine. Figure 4.6 shows that the PDF file is open and contains seven pages that can be navigated using the thumbnails at the bottom of the screen. Swiping left and right will also move you back and forth between pages.
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FIGURE 4.6 Open a note to read it full screen.
To return to a previous screen, tap the Close button (when reading a note) in the upper-left corner of the screen or tap the small Elephant icon or the Back button in the upper-left corner to move backward from notes to notebooks to the original control panel shown back in Figure 4.1.