
I SPENT AN AFTERNOON listening to nine teams of third level students present ideas on their major creative multimedia projects. As I listened, I snapped my handwritten notes into Evernote.
I am trying to relearn better printing skills and believe those skills are directly related to holding black nibs comfortably. I believe the barrel of my current Cross pen is too slim because I have to work at producing letters slower.
I've shared this blog post to the Evernote Community on Google Plus and into my Audioboo stream. I hope to attract feedback from other Evernote users because I need to do some things better.
What I Need to Do Better with Evernote
-- I need to figure out a way of compressing the time required to upload to Evernote quickly snapped shots of my notes.
At the present time, I use an old Xperia Arc to snap my notes (often in poorly lighted conditons) while making them and they often upload directly to a Dropbox folder where I open them all together in an editing session. I normally tell the software to fix them automatically and that improves the sharpness and contrast on the images.
-- I need to improve the OCR capability of Evernote.
Currently, I put the images of my handwritten notes into specific Evernote folders related to the meetings or projects I'm doing. I often share those folders with collaborators. I create a descriptive title for the notes and often start the note with a date-time-stamp and page number from my Moleskine. (I manually number all my Moleskine pages since that has helped enhance their value in court-directed discoveries.) Evernote's OCR process understands both my block capital writing and my mixed case handwriting.
I've discovered Evernote recognises more than 70% of my handwriting and I'm trying to get to the 90% level of OCR comprehension. The Evernote OCR conversion process works best when I upload no more than three images per note.
-- I need to figure out whether a Livescribe pen would improve my workflow.
I know I'm too entrenched with my practise of using ink on paper so having a way of going directly from my Moleskine notes into Evernote is a big help to me in my fight against senility. Evernote Power Users tell me I'm missing a trick by not trying to augment my workflow with Livescribe. I've annotated their suggestions on my Amazon Wishlist and expect that some form of Livescribe Pen will be in my Bihn bag before the end of 2013.
Mie Yaginuma -- "The New Livescribe Sky Wifi Pen" on the Evernote Blog, October 29, 2012.
Bernie Goldbach teaches Evernote as part of creative multimedia workflows in the Limerick Institute of Technology.