Work

Windows: If you’re a happy Evernote desktop user and only wish it looked nicer, moved faster and was smarter about how it handled your organisation tools, the just-released 3.5 beta will make you very happy.

Evernote for Windows doesn’t get one big, shining, brand-new feature in this release, but a lot of annoyances were removed, code cleaned up and fine-grain features were implemented. Click the image above to check out some of Evernote’s more polished look in the “mixed” view mode, providing both note item details and the ability to sort by creation date, size, title, and other features.

Search, in particular, got a pretty nice overhaul that will please power users. Choose a notebook and tags you want to start under, then start your search in the right-hand search bar. The whole thing is written out as a sentence, one you can remove or add descriptors and restrictions to. Better still, once you’ve got your long, intricate searches figured out, you can set them as Saved Searches to run at any time. That, at least for this editor, is a big, big relief.

If you’re a text fiend, Evernote 3.5 has a lot of tools to offer. It can import and understand tables, bullet points and other rich formatting, and recreate them from its own editor. Misspelled words are underlined in subtle red, Firefox-style, and you can set a default font style and size if you’re sick of squinting at your notes. Hand-drawn “Ink” notes also look a lot more polished, and Evernote’s team says there’s “better handling” of long text notes, though I’ve never really encountered problems with my own massive missives.

Ready to jump in and grab the beta? Don’t be so quick. Evernote suggests that if you’re already using Evernote for Windows, you need to take a few extra steps:

1. Export any local notebooks
2. Completely quit Evernote 3.1 (including the taskbar clipper)
3. Install Evernote 3.5 Beta
4. Allow Evernote to sync your notes from the server (this make take some time)
5. Import the local notebooks

Evernote 3.5 Beta is a free download for Windows systems only.

Evernote’s Big Win(dows) Beta Release [Evernote Blog]