It’s hard to get really juiced about a new application these days. So many people are doing so much to connect us to our data, shared or otherwise, in new and different ways, that it’s hard to decide which to even investigate. However, it’s nice to find an app or service that can genuinely add value.

Enter EverNote. So? I was wrong.

I installed the EverNote 2.0 beta upon the advice of Ricardo Vidal, a totally plugged-in friend from Portugal working with us on OpenWetWare as an intern at MIT for the next 6 months. The client was available for Windows, Mac OS, and Windows Mobile clients. EverNote invites you to download clients for any platform you intend to use. As it turned out, I snuck into a 12-hour free sign-up window.

EverNote provides a reasonably intelligent web-based notebook and clipboard. I used Google’s shared browser config service at one point to get at least a few of the features EverNote provides, but gave up on it; synchronizing all of my browser configurations was not as easy to use as I had hoped.

EverNote allows me to copy text or documents to my web ‘notebook’. That’s nice. Not great but nice. It also allows me to do screen captures with the same ease of use as ‘Capture Me’. But, rather than having my screenshot on my clipboard, the image is immediately copied to my notebook on the EverNote server. The client pops up showing me the new entry as soon as I select and save the clip. I can then drag the clip to the desktop. That’s a few keystrokes saved and even better.

The next level of development dazzelry is what makes it amazingly useful. EverNote does an OCR scan of every bitmap and full-text indexes the contents. The OCR failed on the first document I tried it with, a photo of a blackboard with my admittedly illegible scribbles. I tried a second screenshot, this one fled with clearly legible text. It seemed to fail once more.

But, it didn’t fail. The OCR engine took a bit of time to get around to my bitmap but soon had made every word of the document part of the text index. For the first time, it’s almost as easy to grab a bitmap as it is to copy text to the clipboard and save it that way.

For communications with folks asking for assistance, I can simply grab a screen and send it to them. The text is preserved on the server in my notebook making it accessible if I need to do the same thing again. Seeing the exact screen image is a much better way to show how to do something than talking about it. For me at least!

It’s only been a few days. For EverNote to become part of my essential toolkit, it will have to still be useful a month from now. I’ll check back then; let’s see if it cuts the mustard.

For now, EverNote is on the same level as VMWare Fusion and m trusty old “textpad.exe” text editor. I use a mac but I can still do things with TextPad that Textmate on the Mac still can’t do.

For now, EverNote is in the top 50 with a bullet on it’s way up the chart.