User:Kaykim309
| Developer(s) | Evernote Corporation |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 4.5.2.5904
/ December 5, 2011 |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows Mac OS X Chrome OS Android BlackBerry OS BlackBerry Tablet OS iOS WebOS Windows Mobile Windows Phone 7 |
| Type | Notetaking software |
| License | Freemium |
| Website | evernote |
Overview
[edit]Evernote is an application where users can save anything they want to remember and/or access them from any device with a connection to the Internet. The user can then sync all their data and information across all their devices, making it readily available wherever they go. It can be used to document ideas, lists, academic notes, photos, audio notes that the user wants to keep for themselves or share with their friends. Evernote can be used in conjunction with other applications such as a Google Chrome browser tool that can capture things you find while surfing the web and then save it as a note.
Technological Infrastructure
[edit]Functional Tiers
[edit]
Evernote, like most web systems, has a method for collecting, storing, and delivering information to and from their users. This method is composed of three functional tiers; the upper most tier is the presentation tier, the middle is the processing tier, and the lowest being the data tier.
- Presentation: This is the tier the user interacts with the most in the form of a browser, delivering and collecting information to and from the user.
- Processing: This tier manipulates information, uses data, and sends it to the presentation tier using servers. It does so by using algorithm analysis or a set of processes to manipulate the data in the way the user requests. For this application, the algorithms take in the data the user inputs and outputs it as a note stored wherever the user designated it.
- Data: This tier stores information and is furthest from the user. The information is housed in database servers and is a separate tier to improve the performance of Evernote.
Major Features (Functions)
[edit]Functions are an application's purpose, user interface, or user procedure that has some impact on data. Functions have algorithms behind them or a set of processes for reaching an end goal. The functions of an application tell you what the system's purpose is. Evernote's main functions include: becoming a member, creating/editing notes, tags, notebooks, and stacks, sharing content, accessing/adding content from mobile devices, and searching for previously created content.
Becoming a Member
[edit]Users must become a member to enjoy the services of Evernote. Similar to other networking sites, registration for their free, basic account requires a name, email, and consent of their terms of service with acknowledgment that you’re over 13 years of age. Also available to users is the paid “premium” account service which costs $5 per month or $65 per year and boasts features unavailable to basic account members such as greater upload capacity per month.
Once you type in your name and email, you must create a unique username and password, agree to terms and conditions, then pass a CAPTCHA to have a confirmation code sent to your email. Upon receiving the confirmation code, you must enter it into Evernote to unlock your account.
Creating/Editing Notes, Tags, Notebooks, and Stacks
[edit]A user can create and edit stacks, notebooks, notes, and tags. The main purpose of Evernote is to create notes that are then tagged and grouped though the initiative of the user. The majority of creating and editing takes place with notes. If a consumer uses Evernote for academic purposes they might create a new note for every lecture they attend. The user can format the text of a note, add a URL, attach up to ten files that do not exceed 25 MB, and tag notes in order to be easily looked up later. For instance, if the user is taking a biology course they could tag that note with "biology" or "anatomy" to be more specific or add the PowerPoint presentation associated with that lecture. The user can also create a notebook for a specific course they are taking where they can store a collection of notes for that class. In Evernote, a stack is a collection of notebooks. A user could create a stack named "Winter Quarter" where they keep all their notebooks for that quarter.
All stacks, notebooks, notes, and tags are stored on the user’s account and can be accessed through any of the web, desktop, or mobile applications. The user can go back and edit the name and/or content of any of these information types whenever they want. This function incorporates the use of all information types; the user, notes, notebooks, stacks, and tags.
Sharing Content
[edit]Evernote allows members to share their notes or notebooks with other users not only through Evernote's desktop and web applications, but also through their mobile application. Sharing options vary in different ways. Individual notes can be shared through SNS (Social Networking Services) such as Twitter, Facebook, email, or the web. Evernote now provides a feature that connects a user's Evernote account to Facebook and Twitter. Users can share by simply clicking the “Share” button on their computer or mobile devices. Similarly, notes can be shared through email by using the same method but instead clicking the “Email Share” button. If users would like to share their notes to any other website, they can just copy the URL and link a note to other websites.
Other than individual notes, notebooks can be also shared and users can track all the notebooks they’ve read before. Notebooks are shared in a similar way as notes; private sharing between users and public sharing with non-users by access to the notebook’s URL. Information types are the sharing button attached to note or notebooks and a place where you share to.
Accessing/adding Content from Mobile Device
[edit]The Evernote application is available across many platforms; desktop and web applications for desktop computers Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X are available. Evernote’s mobile application is available for Android 1.6(Donut) or higher, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7[2], Symbian S60 5th Edition, WebOS, Maemo, all BlackBerry platforms, and all Apple mobile platforms(iPhone and iPad). Currently, there is no official native client that supports Linux.
For many users the mobile platform is their main way of interacting with Evernote. Any changes made by the mobile application will be instantly synced to the other platforms made possible by Evernote's Data Access and Management (EDAM)[3] protocol. It’s an Application Programming Interface (API) that securely accesses the user’s data by using standard web protocols. All of Evernote’s client applications use this API internally, also these API are available for other third party developers to integrate in to their applications.
Searching Notes, Tags, and Notebooks
[edit]
Searching is a feature that gives the user the ability to quickly find and jump to the item they want. The user must select the level at which they want to search; that is, they can select that they want to search for a notebook and only see results of notebooks matching their search. If they want to search items that have the tag they are looking for, they must click on tags then input the tag for which they want to search. The same holds true for searching within notes. To find a note with that contains the words the user is looking for, they must be looking in either “All Notebooks” or within a specific notebook. The search for a specific word is not able to look across notebooks. So, if "Notebook 1" has a note with the word “foo” in it but the user has "Notebook 2" selected, searching for “foo” will return an empty result set. However, if the user is in “All Notebooks” or in the stack that contains that notebook, the search for “foo” will return the note that contains that term.
Premium users have the extended ability to search through PDFs that they have uploaded.
The algorithm for searching is a simple list of terms evaluated within a notebook, or "All Notebooks," to find a match. The default behavior of a search is to return the intersection of the notes that contain the search term, but this can be modified to return the union by using the “any” modifier in the search. Matches are not case sensitive.
Information Infrastructure
[edit]Info Model
[edit]
The info model of a web system is a diagram of the information types from the user interface and presentation tier, and their relationship with one another, as well as the attributes of the information types.
Info Types and Relationships
[edit]In the info model for Evernote, the main information types included are users, notes, notebooks, stacks and tags:
- Users are the consumers of the service that use the site.
- Notes are the the pieces of data the user is able to create and store on Evernote.
- Notebooks are a collection of notes designated by the user.
- Stacks are a collection of notebooks designated by the user.
- Tags are words that the user can assign to a note, which are then indexed and allow for easy querying.
Starting at the user info type, we can see that a user is able to have multiple notebooks, as well as multiple stacks. From there, we know that a stack has multiple notebooks, but that a notebook is assigned to only one stack. Similarly, a notebook has many notes, but a note is assigned to only a single notebook. If a user is inclined to do so, a note can be duplicated and stored in another notebook. Moreover, a note can have multiple tags, which are only related to notebooks and stacks if they contain a note with said tag.
Once the relationships of the information types are outlined, we can look at them separately highlighting the attributes and value patterns each type has.
Stack
[edit]
Stacks are a tool to organize the user’s notebooks into a more cohesive and clear structure. The user can create a stack that will contain a collection of notebooks. The idea is for the stack to contain related notebooks. This structure mimics the physical world in that an Evernote stack is analogous to an actual stack of related physical notebooks. For example, a user might have a notebook called “INFO 101” that contains the notes from that class as well as another notebook called “INFO 330” that contains notes from INFO 330. These two notebooks can then be put into a stack called “FALL 2011.”
- Attribute --> Value Pattern
- Notebook titles --> Character, no limit
- Number of Notebooks --> Integer, no limit
- Stack Title --> Character, no limit
- Date created --> Date/time, mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm
- Date Modified --> Date/time, mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm
Notebook
[edit]
When you first register for Evernote, each user is given a notebook (i.e. "abc123's notebook") where all the new user's notes are stored by default. The UI affords for the user to see the number of notes they have in the notebook. Users can create new notebooks as well as group notebooks into a stack or collection of notebooks. Though it is not displayed in their UI for notebooks, date created and date modified are attributes that are part of the information type's backend data. See the screenshot of Evernote's notebook UI design to see its hierarchical organizational structure.
- Attribute --> Value Pattern
- Notebook title --> Character, no limit
- Note titles --> Character, no limit
- Stack title (if applicable) --> Character, no limit
- Number of notes --> Number
- Date created --> Date/time, mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm
- Date Modified --> Date/time, mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm
Notes
[edit]
The ability to create notes is Evernote's signature feature. Users are able to input a title, tag, add a location as well as format notes any way they see fit. The UI is very similar to any word processing program, making it intuitive and user friendly. The hierarchical structure of the note editing UI allows for the user to designate a variety of attributes within the note, differentiating each note from the previous. While the "Date Created" attribute is not inputed by the user, it is still an attribute of the note that is derived from backend data.
- Attribute --> Value Pattern
- Title -> Characters, less than 255 characters
- Content -> Characters, no limit
- URL -> www.abcdef.com
- Location -> Latitude and Longitude
- Tags -> Characters, no limit
- Attachment -> File type: .jpg, .doc, .pdf
- Notebook -> Character, no limit
- Date Created -> Date/time, mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm
Tags
[edit]
Tags help users to search easier and save time. Users can attach tags to their note and search a tag to find notes; for instance, ‘movie’, ‘food’, or ‘clothes’. Adding tags can be done by dragging the tag from the tag list and dropping it into the tag field or by typing in a new tag. Title, notes associated with tags, date created, and number of notes tagged are the attributes of the tag information type. Actions such as ‘new tag’, ‘rename tag’. ‘delete tag’, etc. are not made visible until the user right clicks a tag in the tag list or tag creation field.
- Attribute --> Value Pattern
- Number of tags --> Depends on user's monthly usage (MB) and account type
- Title --> Characters, no limit
- Date Created -> Date/time, mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm
- Number of notes associated with tags --> Number
User
[edit]
Every Evernote subscriber has one user account in the Evernote service. Every account has a set of information that can be configured by the service. Every subscriber starts with a free account. It's up to the user if they want to upgrade to a premium or paid account which extends the user's abilities and access to Evernote's service.
- Attribute --> Value Pattern
- Username --> Character, no limit
- Account creation date --> Date/time, mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm
- Account type --> Free/premium (paid)
- Approximate notes remaining:
- Web clips: --> Number
- Camera phone: --> Number
- Audio: --> Number
- High res photos: --> Number
- Web clips: --> Number
- Usage --> Amount of KB used
- Email address --> abc123@xyz.com
- Name --> Characters, less than 16
- Language --> English, Spanish, German, etc.
Organizational structures
[edit]Hierarchy: Evernote Trunk
[edit]A hierarchy is an information organizational strategy that arranges many information items into levels or classifies items into groups. Evernote Trunk is an app store for hardware, applications, and notebook that can be used in conjunction with Evernote. This simplistic user interface uses a hierarchical structure that allows the user to navigate between New + Noteworthy, Mobile, Desktop + Web, Hardware, Gear, and By Evernote pages of items. These sections sort hardware, applications, or notebooks and display them in categories that Evernote determined.
Sequence: Notes in Notebook
[edit]By default, the notes within each notebook are organized in a sequence by date created. Users can re-arrange this order by clicking "View Options" and opt to sort notes by title, date created, date updated, source URL, and size. This organizational structure is useful for users who would like to view or search the brief overview of each note at once in any available order. There is also a number that indicates how many notes are in that folder.
Index: Tags
[edit]
Tags in Evernote are organized in an index. In the left hand column of the UI is an alphabetized index of all the tags you have created in Evernote. Clicking one of these tags brings up the set of notes in the current notebook that have the associated tag.
Links: Evernote Ads
[edit]
Ads are located to the bottom left of Evernote's web platform.
Hierarchy: Sidebar
[edit]A hierarchy is a way to structure and organize information in a set of steps or levels. The uppermost parent step is the broadest level that encompasses all, while each subsequent child step gets smaller and more refined, ultimately ending at the smallest unit of information for that hierarchy.
The sidebar of the Evernote application, be it on the web, your phone or your operating system, organizes your notes and information in these levels, with larger groups of information at the top, and the smallest pieces of information, notes, on the bottom.
Users are able to select “Notebooks” from the sidebar, which then displays all the notebooks the user has created. From there, a user is able to select a individual notebook, wherein all the notes within that notebook are displayed and available for individual selection.
Much like the notebook hierarchy, users are also able to select “Tags” from the sidebar which displays all the individual tags a user has created. Upon selecting a tag, all the notes that contain said tag are displayed, where the user can then proceed to select an individual note.
- ^ "Alexa evernote.com traffic results". Alexa. Retrieved July 18, 2011.
- ^ Duffy, Jill (June 17,2011). "Evernote Unveils Windows Phone 7 App". Retrieved July 9,2011.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=and|date=(help) - ^ Evernote API, (December 8,2011). "Evernote using EDAM". Retrieved December 7,2011.
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