Each of these apps will have their own unique twist in order to seamlessly work for Google Glass. For instance, Twitter will allow users to tweet to their account, and every tweet you send through Glass will be automatically tagged with the #throughglass hashtag. You can also receive notifications for mentions, messages, and replies.

As for the Facebook app, it too will feature so Glass-centric abilities, including the ability to take and upload a photo using Glass straight to your Timeline, and even add a description to the photo using Glass’s voice dictation feature. Tumblr will also let you do the same thing, by posting a photo to your blog right through Glass.

Evernote’s Glass app focuses on two main actions that you can perform. You’ll be able to take a photo or video and send it to your Evernote account from Google Glass. You’ll also be able to choose specific notes from your Evernote account and send them directly to Glass, so that you can bring it up on the HUD when needed. A great example of this is a grocery shopping list — no having to fish your phone out of your pocket to see what the grab next off the shelves.

CNN’s app is a little self-explanatory, but it goes a little further than just being able to swipe through headlines. You’ll be able to pick the types of alerts you want, such as sports scores or breaking news at certain times. You can also have articles be read aloud to you, as well as the ability to watch video.

Of course, it’ll be a while before Google Glass will be in the hands of the mainstream public, but it’s nice to know that Google is already building up a repertoire of apps that people will be able to take advantage of right away.

VIA: The New York Times

Folks in the US or Europe probably have never heard of KakaoTalk, or if you have, you’ve probably never used it — it’s mostly the chat app of choice amongst those located in Asia, but Evernote is looking to expand its reach into that area by integrating some of its services into the chat window of KakaoTalk conversations, allowing users to share notes, images, and links within Evernote.

Evernote currently has around 1.5 million users in Korea alone, but the partnership deal with Kakao will most likely boost the company’s user base significantly in the country. As for how the integration will work, users can bring up Evernote with a swipe during a chat conversation, which will then them do a variety of Evernote actions without ever leaving the chat client.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin wants to change the way people think about the notes they store in Evernote. Libin says that the note-taking app has “traditionally been quite introverted,” meaning that a lot of users keep their notes, links, etc. to themselves, and it’s not really considered a sharing application, but it seems Evernote wants to change that with the their partnership with Kakao, opening up users to use Evernote as a sharing tool as well.

[via The Next Web]

Each of these sections includes their own little features. The Explore Recipes section is a list of recipes that Evernote suggests trying out. The My Cookbook section stores recipes that you save either from Evernote Food or from the main Evernote app. The Restaurants section allows users to browse and bookmark different places to eat, as well as make reservations using OpenTable, and My Meals is a food journal that lets you record what all you eat throughout the week.

The iOS Evernote Food app has seen a lot of attention lately, so it’s nice that Android is getting its fair share this time around. Both apps feature their own strengths and weaknesses. The Android app has a convenient Recently Viewed window, while the iOS version allows users to share recipes with friends and family.

Overall, if you use Evernote and love to cook, the Evernote Food app may be something that you’ll want to try out. If you’re wanting to escape all of those recipe books that you have scattered around your kitchen in favor of something digital and on multiple devices, you can try out the updated app now, which is available for free in the Google Play store.

You can import single or multi-page PDFs into Skitch, and then you can annotate them with different shapes, arrows, and of course text. This allows you to point out items that need to be changed or want to give special attention to. You can also use the Highlighter tool to draw attention to a specific section of text or imagery.

The new stamps feature includes five stamps. There’s a red “X” stamp for bringing attention to things that need changed, an exclamation mark to draw attention to something that possibly needs attention, a question mark for items that may be confusing, a green checkmark to give the all clear, and a heart stamp for marking something that is excellent and shouldn’t be changed.

Once you place a stamp, you can add text next to the stamp to elaborate on your change that you want made. These features are actually only available to premium Evernote users, but the company is offering a 30-day free period where anyone can use these new features. The update is available now in the Mac App Store as well as in iTunes.

Speaking this week at the New Economy Summit to IDG News Service this week in Tokyo, Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin made it clear that the company will – in a few years – be thinking about creating their own device. Between here and there they’ll be pushing for a co-designed smart handheld. Have a peek at this quote and see what you make of it:

“We won’t actually do the manufacturing, but we’ll do the co-design together. Eventually, in a few years—three, four, five—I think we’ll be ready to do something ourselves.” – Libin

According to Libin, the company is continuing to join up with massive names and services as they move forward. Evernote was one of the first names to join the Google Glass initiative this past year. They’ll also be bringing on two-factor authorization for increased security across the board – starting in May, probably, so says Libin.

With services on the rise, the eventual Evernote device will certainly need to be “new and magical”, according to Libin. Competing with the likes of Apple, Samsung, and HTC (if they don’t join up with one of them for the product) will certainly require more than a half-headed effort. This will also not be the first time Evernote has integrated their software into an existing product – beyond apps there are connections now inside scanners, smartphones, tablets, cameras, and blood pressure monitors as well!

Have a peek at the timeline below to see more Evernote action as the software ramps up toward a hardware unit – only years away!

[via PCWorld]

The teams that will be selected will come from the 2013 Evernote Devcup, in which winning teams will be flown out to California in an all-expenses-paid trip to work closely with Evernote staff on their products and apps. Some of the cost of the Accelerator program will come from Honda and Japanese telecommunications company Docomo.

At the end of the month-long course, the teams will then present their finished products in front of an audience of investors, journalists, and various leaders and executives, with the possibility that these apps could be picked up by investors or other companies, so there’s definitely a huge benefit in the program.

The Evernote Devcup was announced at SXSW, and app submissions opened up yesterday. Any app that integrates with Evernote’s API is eligible to compete in the Devcup. It’s a four-month long competition that challenges teams to come up with the best apps that work with Evernote, and a select number of teams that win will be sent to participate in the Accelerator program.

While you can scan business cards in the regular Evernote app, Evernote Hello is specifically built for it. The app can connect to Facebook and LinkedIn to automatically build profiles of the people whose business cards you scan. The update includes flash controls, as well as “a number of improvements and adjustments” for iPhone 4 users.

Evernote Hello has also added passcode lock capabilities, but it’s sadly only available to premium users. However, that could be reason alone to opt for the premium version of the app. Privacy and security are all the rage these days, and you probably don’t want curious eyes taking a peek through all of your Evernote contacts.

Other than that, Evernote added a host of other improvements, such as numerous bugfixes and general performance enhancements to the app. They also added the ability to let you update the Title and Organization fields for your Hello Contacts, making it easier to tell who’s who while browsing through your contacts.

The home screen has been redesigned in a way that gives you quick access to the features you’ll most likely need when you boot up the app, including creating a new note and searching through notes. The home screen redesign also includes a small button at the top of the screen that quickly gives you access to your account information.

The update also includes shortcuts, which let you quickly jump to anything in your note collection that you access most frequently. All you have to do is long tap on any item and it will then appear on the home screen of the Evernote app. Currently, shortcuts are only available on OS X, Android, and Windows Phone, and they also sync across platforms.

As for the improved tag system, it’s a lot more compact this time around, which allows you to see more tags on the screen without scrolling up or down. Furthermore, the update includes a quick way for you to jump to tags by the letter they begin with. It cuts down on the amount of scrolling you have to do, and it’s a quicker way to jump to the tag you need.

The update also brings Evernote’s Document Search, which is actually a feature only for Premium users, but it’s available for free to Windows Phone users. It indexes any attached Microsoft Word, iWork, or OpenOffice files so that documents show up in your search results. Other than that, the new update includes Notebook Stacks support, checklist support, and a handful of bugfixes and general performance improvements. Evernote is a free download, and the update is available now in the Windows Phone store.

If you’re a mobile, landline, or broadband customer with Deutsche Telekom, you can enjoy a full year of premium service with Evernote, which comes with a handful of exclusive features, including more bandwidth to upload various notes and more-comprehensive note history and sharing features. Furthermore, current Evernote Premium users can tack on that free year to their account easily.

The offer officially begins today and runs through September 25, 2014. That’s right, you have until late next year to become a Deutsche Telekom subscriber and take advantage of your one free year of Evernote Premium — more than enough time to let your current contract with another provider run its course so that you can switch over.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like T-Mobile users in the US can take advantage of the offer (since T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom), and it seems only European customers have access to the deal. As for the update to Android, it’s more up to tune with the iOS version, bringing better camera features and a redesigned user interface, making it easier to sift through notes and create new ones. The update is available now in the Google Play store.

Evernote Recipes allows seamless recipe transfers to the app from your native Evernote app. If you have a bunch of recipes saved up in Evernote notes, you can sync them to Evernote Food. You can choose how you import your recipes, whether its by tags, or by entire notebooks. Your recipes will stay organized the way you kept them in the original Evernote app, so you don’t have to worry about going through that long process again.

After you sync all of your recipes, you can easily share those recipes with any friend or family member. Just scroll on over to the recipe you want to share and send them to others via Twitter, Facebook, or email. And lastly, you can now make reservations straight from your Evernote Food app. The OpenTable system has been integrated with the app, so you can now make reservations at your favorite restaurants within minutes. Also included are FourSquare ratings, so you can see just how popular a restaurant is before you dine there.

Evernote Food is an all-around great app that combines all of the important aspects of food apps into one, single app. You can make a cookbook, have a restaurant wish list, keep track of meals you’ve cooked, and more all with Evernote’s renown organization capabilities. Unfortunately, the Evernote Food update today is limited only to iOS devices, so Android users, you’ll have to wait a little while before you can take advantage of these great features.

[via Evernote]

Google Notebook was axed several years back, however, in one of the company’s regular culls. The company shifted all existing notes saved using the service – which made clipping web content for later review more straightforward – into Google Docs.

According to the early preview, Keep will have both web and mobile views for browsing and searching through notes, and creating new notes and lists. There’ll also apparently be an Android app, of which there’s no mention in the Google Play store at time of writing.

Still, we hope there’s more work to be done before Keep is considered fully ready for primetime, as right now the service is pretty bare-bones. There’s basic color-coding of notes and lists, and support for archiving and search, but Google’s offering pales in comparison to what more established services like Evernote and Microsoft’s OneNote deliver.

That may be offset by Google’s ubiquity, of course. Just as the search giant is pushing Google+ membership with every new Gmail account set up, it could well do the same for Google Keep, as well as bake it into the Chrome browser and Chrome OS devices as a way to store webpages and other content for offline reading.

[via TechCrunch]

The company stated that it had planned on implementing the two-factor authentication sometime in the future, but because of this security breach, it plans on accelerating the implementation very soon. The authorizations can be delivered in a variety of ways, including SMS messaging, a code delivered via phone call, a one-time code delivered by a smartphone app, or perhaps (and least likely) a code delivered via a hardware token, similar to the Battle.net Authenticator.

Evernote isn’t the first company to be taking advantage of two-factor authentication. Like I mentioned above, Battle.net has its own Authenticator that players can purchase to further protect their accounts. There is also a Battle.net authenticator app available for free on Android and iOS. The authenticator was a security feature added after many player accounts were hacked resulting in many valuable in-game items being lost. Dropbox also implemented a two-factor authentication feature when they had a security breach that compromised all of its users’ emails.

There is no specific date as to when two-factor authentication will find its way to Evernote’s services, but it’s a step in the right direction. Security officials stated that Evernote used the MD5 cryptographic algorithm to hash its passwords, but it turns out that that algorithm is considered to be a terrible choice for security. If they had two-factor authentication, Evernote would still have been hacked, but at least its users’ account information would have been protected.

[via Android Community]

Evernote has begun to notify all users by email of the breach, though the company is confident that data itself is safe. “The passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption” Evernote said, “in technical terms, they are hashed and salted.”

“On February 28th, the Evernote Operations & Security team became aware of unusual and potentially malicious activity on the Evernote service that warranted a deeper look. We discovered that a person or persons had gained access to usernames, email addresses and encrypted user passwords. In our ongoing analysis, we have found no evidence that there has been unauthorized access to the contents of any user account or to any payment information of Evernote Premium and Evernote Business customers” Evernote spokesperson

Exactly how the hack took place has not been revealed, though Evernote says its Operations & Security team is still investigating. However, it’s believed to be “a coordinated attempt” to steal, change, or delete user-data.

Evernote insists that its “password encryption measures are robust” but says also that it is “taking additional steps” to bolster security, of which forcing a password change is part of it. The company also suggests people choose more complex passwords, avoiding dictionary words, and don’t use the same password across multiple sites or services.

Says Evernote, one of the things users like is having different note viewing options. Because of this, it has added a new Snippets feature to the iPad version of the app, allowing users to easily scan through their notes, flipping between months quickly and reducing the amount of time spent hunting for that list you wrote last July, for example. The Snippets view can be accessed by swiping down the upper part of the Notes list and tapping its icon.

Another big improvement is in PDF viewing, which is more refined than it has ever been. Version 5.2 contains an all new PDF viewer that offers a multi-page view along the bottom of the viewer, allowing readers to jump to any page in the document easily. Users can search within a PDF, with premium subscribers having the ability to search within a scanned document as well. There’s landscape view when turning the mobile device sideways, and rotation lock to keep it from shifting around when you change position.

Perhaps the best improvement, however, is the new formatting options, which includes two ways to remove formatting that is not wanted. This is nestled under the “A” option for iPhone users, and under “no-formatting” for iPad users. The options include Simplify Formatting for cleaning up formatting problems, while Plain Text is self-explanatory, removing all formatting and generating a plain text document.

[via Evernote]

Overall, Evernote has more than 50m users worldwide, growing by 80,000 or so a day. The UK contributes around 3,000 to that daily figure, the company says.

Launched back in 2008 as a way to synchronize digital notes across multiple devices, Evernote has since expanded with native apps for iOS, Android, and other phone/tablet OSes, plus the ability to search text even when it’s included in a photo. The company has also inked deals with others to expand its footprint, including integrating Evernote into Samsung’s Galaxy Note series, and into Livescribe’s Sky WiFi smartpen.

In both devices, Evernote is used as a sync hub, with Livescribe going one step further and building an HTML5 sharing system that allows handwritten notes stored in Evernote to be reviewed by others complete with real-time audio. There’s more on that in our Sky smartpen review.

Meanwhile, Evernote hasn’t let up on Apple integration, even though the iPad lacks a proper stylus. Having acquired Penultimate, an app for handwritten notes on the iPad, it made it a free download and baked in search for cursive text.

There’s also support for viewing Penultimate notes on other devices than the iPad, thanks to Evernote’s synchronization. You can now open up handwritten notes on your iPhone, on the desktop, and anywhere else you have the Evernote app installed; however, editing the apps won’t apparently be supported.

Notes themselves look better on the iPad’s Retina display, and there’s Russian and Traditional Chinese language support added too. You’ll probably get best results with a stylus, of course, and there are plenty out there which work with the iPad.

If you’re a Penultimate user who doesn’t want to sign themselves up to Evernote, meanwhile, you can keep your existing account separate, though then you won’t get the multi-device access or, indeed, the handwritten note search. You can download Penultimate 4 for iPad here [iTunes link].

Of course, the environmentally-minded among us might be concerned with the amount of paper we use to take down these notes, but thankfully the folks at Improv Electronics have found the answer to that wasteful issue. Say hello to the Boogie Board Sync LCD eWriter, which is outfitted with a 9.7-inch pressure-sensitive LCD screen that lets you jot down notes on the fly and then share them in any number of ways. This isn’t the first Boogie Board eWriter we’ve seen, but it certainly is the largest of the bunch.

The Boogie Board Sync comes equipped with a micro SD slot, so if you’d like to stash your notes on a card and move them to your other devices later, you can certainly do that. There’s also a micro USB port for wired transfer, but if you’re a fan of going wireless, this baby also comes with support for Bluetooth. Using that Bluetooth functionality, you can send your finished note to any other Bluetooth-supported device, whether that’s a computer, smartphone, or tablet. You can also sync your Boogie Board with a second screen using Bluetooth, meaning that what you write down on the eWriter shows up on your second screen (perfect for presentations and the like). Fancy saving your note and uploading it to Evernote to refer back to later? You can do that too.

The models we saw during ShowStoppers certainly look nice, but at the moment, they’re only in the prototype stage. Though they do feel good in the hand at the present moment, we’re expecting a few things to change as we move toward the final product, which is scheduled to be released in time for 2013′s holiday season. Hopefully we’ll get to spend a bit more time with the Boogie Board Sync soon, but for now, have a look at our CES portal for much more from the show.

The update brings with it a better array of tools, such as the Pen tool, which is now said to be more responsive, faster, and smoother. There’s now a Hold and Lock feature for locking into the current tool being used, as well. Intelligent tool tips have been added, making the over all app easier to use. Tool behavior can be altered in “Settings.”

Annotations with the new update now fit with images better thanks to improvements added to content scaling. A home view icon has been tossed into the mix, which makes it easier to access the settings. Says the announcement, there are also a “number pf other improvements [that] make the app smoother to use and more stable.”

The move and pan tool has a new behavior that allows it to become active when a different object is selected, then deleted or de-selected, or when the screen is swiped. Those who use the app regularly will find the couple minutes it takes to update well worth it. The app is supported on all Android devices running 2.0 or higher.

[via Android Community]

Google doesn’t assign any particular ranking to these apps, so none of them are supposed to be considered “better” than the others. Some of them bring online storefronts to your device, while others are services that many users take advantage of on a daily basis. The majority of them are free to install, save for just one app on the list. In no particular order, here are Google’s best Android apps of 2012:

• Evernote
• Zappos
• Pinterest
• Grimm’s Snow White
• Expedia
• Pocket
• Ancestry
• Fancy
• Mint.com Personal Finance
• SeriesGuide Show Manager
• Pixlr Express
• TED

It isn’t very surprising to see Evernote and Pinterest show up on the list, and Zappos is a clear choice considering it seems to be pre-installed on nearly every Android device that comes through our doors. It’s good to see apps like Pocket, Fancy, and Pixlr Express get some much-deserved attention, and it seems that Google has delivered a list that’s quite diverse.

As diverse as it is, it notably doesn’t feature any games unless you want to count Grimm’s Snow White – an interactive storybook – as one. Perhaps Google will also release a list of its favorite Android games for 2012? Only time will tell, but for now, let us know if you use any of the apps listed in Google’s favorites for the year!

[via Google]

Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2012 turned out to be the best ones ever for Amazon’s Kindle family of devices, and Evernote Clearly has added text-to-speech for its premium members, which is a pretty awesome new feature if you ask us. Gmail has added support for 10GB attachments so long as those attachments are stored in your Google Drive account, and Outlook.com was able to boast 25 million users today, with Microsoft telling us that an Android app is on the way.

We heard today that Foxconn might be manufacturing Microsoft’s rumored Surface phone, and Apple reassured everyone today that the new iMac is still on track to launch later this month (November 30 to be exact, which is right around the corner). Cyber Monday sales topped a whopping $2 billion this year, and we learned that Nintendo TVii will be launching in Japan on December 8, which leads us to believe that it won’t be long before the service is available in the US and Europe.

HP and Nomadix have settled their patent lawsuit, while Nintendo launched new nostalgia-fueled DLC for New Super Mario Bros. 2. Fans are petitioning Rockstar to release Grand Theft Auto V on PC, and indie hit Super Hexagon is now available on Steam. Microsoft might be opening its first retail store in Europe as early as next year, the NYPD is building a database of calls made with stolen phones, and Rdio has been updated on iOS and Android with an entirely new UI.

Finally tonight, we have a couple of reviews for you to check out. Vincent Nguyen delivered his review of the new Jawbone UP earlier today, while Chris Burns takes on Hamilton’s Great Adventure THD for some mobile gaming goodness. That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up, enjoy the rest of your night folks!

Evernote explains that the new features is incredibly handy when you don’t have time to actually sit down and read an article. By opening a link to an article and clicking the Text-to-Speech icon in Clearly, the article will read itself aloud to you, letting you do other tasks while you listen. Evernote says that it’s “like instantly turning articles into podcasts.”

However, in order to take advantage of the new feature, you have to be an Evernote Premium member, which costs $5 per month, or $45 for a yearly subscription. But if you use Evernote a lot, we can’t say that Premium membership wouldn’t be worth it. And on top of the text-to-speech functionality, Evernote has included the ability to pause, skip ahead, or jump to different sentences.

This new text-to-speech feature supports over 12 different languages, and Evernote says that when you combine it with the text highlighting tool, it can make for a great language-learning tool. Just visit a site in another language, then have Evernote Clearly read it to you as you follow along with the highlighting. The Clearly browser extension is only available for Google Chrome, but Evernote says that it’ll be available for other browsers soon.

Evernote 5 has a brand new Cards View so you can visualize what you’re opening rather than just relying on text titles. You’ll be able to edit notes inside Evernote rather than relying on 3rd party applications. You can change a geographic location of a note – this along with many other changes may seem small to some, but are game-changing for others.

Evernote 5 for Mac allows you to convert a file to plain text on the fly and works with a new set of keyboard shortcuts. You can use the following to bring on two- or three-click excellence to your Evernote-loving life.

CMD-J: Jump to a notebook from anywhere in the application
CMD-Shift-A: Jump to All Notes
CMD-Option-(1-5): Switch to main sidebar sections (Notes, Notebooks, etc)
CMD-(1-9): Jump to Shortcuts
CMD-L: Edit current note title
CMD-’: Edit current note tags
CMD-]: Indent text

You’ve got several different ways now to view your notebooks and tags including a new Grid view – this stacks all your stacks and notebooks in one place and sorts them according to owner, note count, or name. You have a brand new Atlas mode that allows you to see your notes visualized on a set of maps, map view also bringing you pan and zoom features – much like the updated version of Evernote 5 for your mobile device.

This is just the beginning, too – you can see a full list of feature changes over at Evernote’s Mac Feature Page or just download the app for yourself. Might as well – it’s totally free! Total integration with your mobile devices working with Evernote continues here too – notes for all!

3G Nexus 7s started shipping earlier today, and we found out that Apple stores take in $6,000 in sales per square foot. IHS is predicting that the Wii U will sell 3.5 million units by the end of 2012, and Nokia has announced its new HERE mapping service to take on Google Maps. The release preview of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is now available to check out, and there seems to be a pretty major issue with some of the Black Ops II PC discs floating around out there.

Verizon and Motorola begin sending out OTA Jelly Bean updates to the DROID RAZR M today, while Google started installing its fiber network in Kansas City. BitQwik has released a search app for Evernote users, while Verizon said it will be launching 4G LTE in a bunch of new markets on November 15. mLogic unveiled a new PCIe expansion chassis that’s compatible with Thunderbolt, Android 4.2 has made its way to the Android Open Source Project, and Murfie and Sonos have teamed up to help you move your physical CDs into the cloud.

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm was finally given a release date earlier today, Vimeo has launched a new preview of its upcoming pay-to-view program, and we learned today that the ASUS VivoTab RT will be landing at AT&T later on this week. Finally tonight, we have a few originals for you to have a look at. Chris Davies tells us why the HTC DROID DNA should have been a Nexus device, while Chris Burns gives us his reviews of the Olympus Stylus XZ-2 and the Otaku Camera for iOS. That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up, enjoy the rest of your night folks!

The great thing about this application is its ability to work with natural language – that meaning you can type in basically anything and it’ll know what you’re saying. You can ask it to find “notes that have geese in the title” for something simple or you could ask it to “show me notes with JPG attachments that I added last year and are not tagged with robots or Skype.” BitQwik understands it all.

The gigantic list of possibilities listed by BitQwik shows you that you’re able to work with sources, resources, notebooks, recognition types, encryption, and more. What’s interesting about all of this is the fact that it’s all already built-in to Evernote. The Evernote collection of search operators exists – this environment simply makes it easier than it otherwise would be. You no longer have to recognize the following simply to search for what comes after it:

-intitle:school -intitle:breakfast
created:20120301T000000 created:20120331T000000
sourceApplication:hello

Search for all your notes that do not have the words “school” or “breakfast” in the title, that you created in March of 2012, and were made with Evernote Hello.

All of that is made simple with BitQuik, which you can download right this instant over at BitQuik’s website. Make sure you check this out if you’re a heavy OR a light Evernote user, simply because its fun to see how intense you can get with the language recognition.

Evernote 5.0 brings on a user interface that will make you want to use it more often – a simple concept, to be sure, but not so simple to capture in the real world. The designers behind Evernote 5 have taken it upon themselves to concentrate not so much on the features and abilities of the app, but the usability primarily. Once the usability was made perfect – or perfect as they wanted it to get – they went back and added some features anyway, almost as a bit of a bonus.

Your home screen shows quick access to notes, notebooks, tags, places, and Premium features – now no longer relegated to a web browser. You’ve got your home screen quick buttons up top (or to the side, depending on which device you’re using), and you’ve got a new showcase style inside each section that shows off notes as cards – great for quick previews. Your shared notebook list can be seen easily identifiable (if you’re Premium, that is), with the ones shared with you waiting to be peeked at.

Once you’re gotten past the excellence of not just the interface at the front but the note-taking swiftness as well, you’ll see your tags and places as well. Your places are mapped out using TomTom and Open Street Maps data – and they work fantastically quick. From here, as before, you’re able to see where each of your notes were taken and have quick access to the lot of them.

The iPad version of Evernote 5 has a few unique features that utilize the extra screen real estate you’ve got, with added notebook stack support in Notebooks view and a list of recently viewed, edited, and created notes on your homescreen. Of course the whole app has bug fixes for bugs we didn’t even know existed in the first place and is rather speedy on the whole. Have a peek at this free app right now in the iTunes App Store and also consider upgrading to Premium for extra cloud storage space and some lovely bonus features.

Also have a peek at the timeline below to see many of the other add-ons Evernote has made clear over the past few weeks. This ecosystem is expanding at a great rate!

Creating new notes is streamlined, too, with a quick-note button on the homescreen of the app. Since iOS doesn’t support desktop widgets, the iOS version of Evernote doesn’t get the widget that Android users enjoy; however, Evernote has brought the buttons for new notes/notebooks to more prominent positions, to cut down on unnecessary taps.

Geotagged notes can now be viewed on a zoomable map, and there’s a new shared  notebook list that shows all of your own shared notes, and those shared to you by others. If you’re an Evernote Premium subscriber, you can see your account status and other details from within v.5 of the app, rather than having to access them via the full site.

As always, there’s support for photo and audio notes, together with OCR-enabled search that can pick out text and handwriting in images. You can also use Evernote with third-party products, such as the Livescribe Sky WiFi smartpen we reviewed recently, or special Moleskine notebooks.

You can download Evernote for iOS from the App Store [iTunes link]; Evernote accounts are free, or you can pay if you want to transfer more data into your account.

It’s quite easy to do and backs up your whole text messaging library as it happens in a set of new notes. Each time a conversation continues, that original note is updated. Evernote has made this whole process simple for the folks at mysms to integrate as Evernote’s APIs are both completely open and documented – that means anyone could do this sort of thing, really, but Evernote has officially “given the blessing” in this case.

With mysms you’re able to work with Android phones and tablets, Windows Phones, iPhone, and your desktop as well as inside any sort of web browser. This integration works on certain devices better than others, but iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone are able to save to Evernote with ease.

This app is now part of the Evernote Trunk, a site that brings you the best and brightest in apps connected directly with Evernote in many fun and helpful ways. You’ll also see such gems as Scalar, Found, Cotton Notes, QEver, and Cloud Magic, just to name a few. Have a peek at the timeline below to see a selection of other recent Evernote updates and the apps that aim to bring your Evernote experience to the next level!

[via Evernote]

Says the announcement, “BETA software is not final, which means that using it comes with some risks. These can range from corruption of your notes to data loss. If you’re not comfortable using beta software, we recommend waiting a bit for the general update to go live.” If you’re willing to take the plunge, however, you’ll find a variety of new features.

New features include an improved Notes List, which offers a single list containing both personal and joined notebooks. There’s a Snippets view for seeing a note’s notebook, as well as its shared status. Also added is a Cards view for browsing notes in the form of nifty little cards. Tossed in, among the myriad of other features, are a handful of shortcuts and changes to increase efficiency.

To get the new Evernote 5 for Mac beta, launch the application, then select “Software Update” from Preferences. In the window that opens, check “Update to beta versions when available.” Follow this up by clicking “Check for Updates Now” in the Evernote menu, then sit back and let the magic happen. Evernote lists a few troubleshooting tips as well, so if you experience problems, hit the link below to check them out.

[via Evernote]

The update to Skitch includes a brand new clean homescreen, first of all, making it easier to use and nicer than ever to look at. You’ve got Pixelate and Highlighter now to help edit images, too. With Pixelate you’ve got the ability to obscure part of an image if you want it to be entirely private. With Highlighter you’ve got basically the opposite of Pixelate – it’s the partially transparent paintbrush you’ve been waiting for – highlight those notes!

You’ve got a brand new Planning tool, too – here you’ll be able to select, move, and resize all of your annotations in notes galore. Make sure you’re taking extra special care to plan, highlight, and pixelate with no less than the most refined version of Skitch on the market yet. This version is available for download right this minute from the Google Play app store across the USA and in most regions across the planet as well.

Have a peek at this new version of Skitch and let us know how it’s working out for you – also have a peek at our timeline below to see recent news surrounding Evernote to see how you’ll be able to go cross-platform no matter where you’re going or what you’re working with! Keep taking those notes!

Hardware

At first glance, the Livescribe Sky looks just like a fat pen: perhaps something you’d give a child to more easily grip as they learned to write. Inside, though, there’s a lot going on. Livescribe says that, while externally the design is pretty much identical to its previous Echo model – bar a slightly different color scheme for the lower half – on the inside it’s almost entirely different.

The replaceable nib sits next to a small camera that faces down at the page, tracking what you’re writing. All you get in the way of physical controls is a power button, which sits by a monochrome, single-line OLED display, a microphone, and a small speaker. A 3.5mm audio jack is on the top, which also doubles as a microphone input, and there’s a microUSB port for hooking up your computer or recharging the internal battery.

In the hand, the Sky takes some getting used to versus regular pens. The thickness of the barrel feels strange, oversized, and the taper – which gets broader up toward the top half – can feel unnatural. That can end up making your handwriting in initial notes somewhat more untidy than usual, though you do get used to the feel of it over time. The lid – which slides in firmly to cover both the nib and the camera lens – can be a little tricky to remove, too, and is easily lost since there’s nowhere on the phone to clip it when you’re writing.

With so few controls on the pen itself, actually taking advantage of the Sky’s functionality relies on the specially printed paper notebooks. The pages in these are covered in a unique pattern of microdots, which the camera in the tip can track; each page has a different layout of dots, meaning the record of each note is unique, and – as long as it’s turned on – the SmartPen always knows where it’s pointing.

That’s the case for writing and sketching, but it also means Livescribe can print controls onto the paper and have the Sky recognize those. You get the usual buttons for menu navigation, record/pause/stop, jump forward/backward a few seconds in playback, media position, playback speed, and volume/mute printed along the bottom of the page, and tapping them with the nib triggers the appropriate function. At the back of the notebook there’s a scientific calculator – results are shown on the smartpen’s display – and buttons to set the time and date. It’s all very responsive, with no lag from when you tap.

However, the Sky version gets a new page of wireless controls, printed on the inside front cover of the notebook and – for those with pre-Sky notebooks – sticky labels printed with the same buttons. There’s a big WiFi setup section, with buttons to scan for networks, scroll through the list of results on the smartpen’s screen, and then select it, plus a QWERTY keyboard to enter the password; you also get buttons to turn WiFi on/off, trigger a firmware check, and sync with the cloud. A new block of WiFi Share controls will, eventually, allow you to fire off select notes via email (to yourself), to Google Drive, to Facebook, and to Dropbox, though those features won’t be available until Q1 2013.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to connect to WiFi connections that require you to log in via a webpage (such as is often the case in hotels or cafes). Instead, Livescribe recommends either using the mobile hotspot feature on your phone or laptop, or synchronizing notes via the free Livescribe Helper Application, which pulls them off the smartpen over a USB connection.

Three versions of Sky will be offered, a 2GB for $169.95/£159.99, a 4GB for $199.95/£179.99, and an 8GB for $249.95/£224.99. They store around 200 hours, 400 hours, or 800 hours of audio respectively; the 8GB model also comes with a leather smartpen folio and a one-year subscription to Evernote Premium. All versions get 500MB of dedicated Evernote upload allowance. Livescribe will continue to sell the Echo smartpen as an entry-level model, though it lacks wireless and still demands the old Livescribe Desktop app.

Livescribe Sky WiFi smartpen demo:

Software, Evernote, and Sharing

Ditching the Livescribe Desktop software is arguably the best news about the new Sky smartpen. The old app was functional but didn’t make sharing notes straightforward, particularly if they had audio attached. By switching to Evernote, however, Livescribe has sidestepped needing to handle management software, and the cloud-based notebook service’s own sharing tools – together with some HTML5 magic – mean collaborating with notes is far easier.

When you first set the Sky smartpen up, running through Livescribe’s online guide, you associate it with your Evernote account (or set up a new one). A new notebook is created in Evernote, and any new scribblings you make are automatically filed in there. Evernote already has clients for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and other platforms, or you can access notes via the browser view.

Most of the time you can leave the smartpen to its own devices when it comes to synchronizing. It’s triggered when you come back within range of a previously-saved WiFi network (though we occasionally had problems with the odd wireless network not being auto-resumed, and had to manually search, select, and connect to it, though the Sky smartpen did save the password), and – if a connection is present while you’re actually writing – notes are automatically uploaded when you press the “stop” button to end audio recording. The #1 shortcut button on the top of some notebook pages is also set to trigger a manual sync by default, and there’s another button to do the same printed as part of the WiFi controls layout.

Upload speed itself will obviously depend on how fast your data connection is. Text-only notes are gone in seconds, while audio comes in at between 7.2MB to 35.6MB per hour depending on quality and whether it was recorded in mono through the Sky’s integrated microphone, or in stereo via the optional microphone accessory Livescribe offers. Uploads continue while you’re taking notes, but are paused if you start recording more audio.

Once they’re safely stored in Evernote, you can use most of the service’s regular tools with them. They can be tagged though you can’t change the titles as otherwise Livescribe will lose track of which notebook page relates and you won’t be able to sync any amendments later on; notes with audio recordings are clearly flagged up in the collated list, as well as pulled out into a separate section for easier review. Evernote can even pull up search results from handwritten text, though the accuracy of that obviously depends on your penmanship. We had mixed results, though if you try to get into the habit of writing titles and subtitles in block text, it makes digging through notes with search more consistent.

Evernote also has integrated sharing tools, and coupled with Livescribe’s new HTML5 player it’s incredibly easy to pass notes on to others. If you send an email, the recipient sees an image of the note which, if they click on it, opens up the new player in their browser. A media control bar operates audio playback – the text goes from grey to green as it tracks along with the recording – or you can click on any point in the notes to jump the audio to that specific place. There are easy buttons to flip between pages, along with controls to skip forward or backward in 10 second increments. Any HTML5-compliant browser should be able to view the pages, too, including those on your iOS or Android phone.

You can see a demo of a shared Livescribe note here [opens in new window].

In the Pen Pipeline

Adding wireless to the Sky smartpen is just the start of Livescribe’s ambitions, however. The company is hoping to turn the digital stylus into a platform, not just a product, with multiple partnerships simmering away for launch over the next few quarters.

Arguably most useful will be the extra sharing options Livescribe is cooking up. Pencast PDF is due in Q1 2013, embedding notes – complete with audio – into PDFs that can be opened up in Adobe Reader 10 (or newer). Considering the HTML5 player requires a web connection, that will clear the way for offline playback; it also adds another level of security, since there’s no way to password protect a shared HTML5 note sent from Evernote. As long as someone has the URL, they can play back your recording; Livescribe tells us that updated security settings to address that are coming in the next important feature release.

Also worth remembering is that a shared note isn’t a fixed, immutable thing: if you subsequently add to a page you’ve shared with somebody, they’ll be able to see the sync’d additions by clicking the original link they were sent. There’s no apparently way to limit them to the state of the note at any one, fixed point in time; nor any way to “unshare” that note. In short, don’t add any extra jottings to a note that you might not want anybody it was shared with to subsequently read.

Also being worked on is transcription. Liverscribe is collaborating with Vision Objects on technology to convert handwritten notes into text, and with other developers on the same for audio recordings, though releases for both haven’t been pinned down to anything other than “in the future.”

Before then will be SDKs for iOS and Android, allowing third-party developers to integrate Sky smartpen functionality into their apps. The iOS SDK will arrive in Q4 2012, with the Android version following on in Q1 2013; Livescribe sees huge potential in linking handwritten notes with digital content, for instance.

The company has come up with a few demo apps – not for public release, sadly – such as one which allows handwritten annotations to be appended to PDF documents shown on-screen, by jotting them down on a physical notebook. There’s also a collaborative whiteboard app, which permits up to thirty people to remotely work on a single virtual whiteboard, each making notes on their Livescribe pad. Exactly when we’ll see the first such apps is unclear, and Livescribe isn’t talking about specific developers it’s working with.

Battery

Livescribe quotes 11-12 hours of recording audio with wireless turned off, or 4-5 hours if the WiFi is on. That obviously increases considerably if you’re only taking handwritten notes, not recording audio at all, and an imminent firmware update is expected to squeeze even more runtime out of the smartpen.

In practice, we managed nearly two weeks of intermittent use – with WiFi always on, but turning the Sky smartpen off in-between bouts of note taking – and the battery gage dropped by half. That’s with a couple of pages of notes per day, perhaps a third of which had audio recordings as well.

Wrap-Up

Livescribe’s smartpens always made sense for personal note taking, but they also demanded some extra degree of organization in use: remembering to plug them into your computer to sync, and then sharing them via the company’s awkward homegrown sharing system if you ever wanted to review them from elsewhere. Packaging up the Sky smartpen with WiFi and Evernote support addresses each of those problems neatly: now, all you need do is flip the pen on when you get home and your notes are not only pulled straight to the cloud, but distributed to all your Evernote-sync’d devices.

You can read notes on your phone, on your tablet, via the browser on your computer at work, and anywhere else Evernote is accessible. That will get even better when integration with other cloud services is added at the start of next year. Plus, Livescribe’s HTML5 player means showing other people your notes needn’t be the headache it has been so far.

Some still can’t grasp the value of a digitally-enabled pen, and it’s true, there are many who can take notes on their smartphone or tablet screen just as quickly as they can handwrite. For those who want their sketches to be included, however, or who still enjoy the feel of a physical pen nib on physical paper, Livescribe offers the best of that tactile experience with the convenience of digital backup and sharing. The inclusion of wireless to streamline that process only makes it more appealing.

The sidebar provides access to shortcuts to your favorite notebooks, notes, and tags, making it easy to quickly access your content. Also included is a Recent Notes section, which displays the five most recently-edited notes, as well as dedicated buttons for accessing and organizing notes, and a right-click feature for viewing expanded lists.

Evernote 5 for Mac features an improved Notes List, which now offers a single list of all the notes from personal and Joined Notebooks. Snippets view displays a note’s notebook and its shared status, while Cards view allows users to browse notes in the form of cards. Also added is the ability to add/change a note’s location via either the “Location” text field or a button that automatically inserts the user’s current location.

For the sake of simplicity and time management, Evernote 5 for Mac includes a handful of new shortcuts that allow users to easily toggle to a notebook, switch to All Notes, the main sidebar sections, and Shortcuts, to edit the current note’s title and tags, and to indent text. Grid view displays stacks and notebooks (both personal and Joined) on a single screen, while list view displays the same information in a more compact manner. This is just a touch of the multitude new features, and Evernote users are sure to be pleased.

[via Evernote]

Skitch for Windows 8 has a new interface that includes the familiar Windows 8-style tiles, and there’s also some new features that are included. There’s a Pixelate feature that allows you to quickly pixelate a section of an image out, whether it’d be personal information or even a funny NSFW photo where you might not want to reveal everything.

There’s also a highlighter tool that let’s you quickly highlight text in an image, and you can even change the styling of the highlighter such as color and thickness. And not surprisingly, since Skitch is owned by the popular note-taking application Evernote, the two apps are seamlessly integrated with one another.

Probably one of the biggest new features is the addition of map integration. If you want to tell someone where to meet you by using a map, simply click the Map icon, search for the location, and then just draw an arrow with some text. Then, all you have to do is save the image and send it to your friend.

Both Skitch apps are available now. The Windows 8 app can be found the Windows Store, and the Windows Desktop app can be downloaded directly from the Skitch website.

First off, Evernote added the ability of selecting and downloading multiple notebooks at once, making it quicker to move a handful of notebooks offline. Offline notebooks allows you to access your notebooks quickly and easily without having an internet connection. Then, once you’re back to a WiFi or data connection, you can upload any changes you made.

Evernote also gave a slight makeover to the Note Editor toolbar by cleaning it up a bit and getting rid of some clutter, which was a huge issue for a lot of Evernote users. Evernote moved a lot of the unnecessary toolbar features into the Action Bars along the top. Now, the toolbar only has the necessary editing tools that you really need.

Evernote also made some updates to its widget by introducing a new “Grid” widget, and it’s designed to fit perfectly on any screen, no matter the size. To choose the new widget, just tap and hold on your handset’s home screen and choose the Evernote Grid Widget. Then, just select the features that you want the widget to display, and it will appear on your home screen right away.

The update for Evernote is available now in the Google Play store, as well as the separate Evernote Widget app. Both are free downloads.

While both Facebook and Google+ are social networks, they take very different approaches. Facebook is about friendly sharing: inviting people into your digital life, and dipping into theirs. Google+, in contrast, sits at the hub of all of Google’s services, each of which is focused on a different type of data: email, documents, music and videos, photos, and more.

I’ve been an Evernote user for years now, and a Google+ user since the service opened its virtual doors in mid-2011. Like many, I’ve been relying on Evernote as a digital aide-memoir, a place to gather up thoughts, lists, books I might want to buy, music I might want to listen to. I’ve drafted articles and reviews in Evernote on my phone while sitting on buses and trains, then picked up where I left off in the desktop version. I’ve even relied on its clever OCR – which can pick out text in photos and make it searchable – to store business cards, snapping them with my phone’s camera for easier recollection than digging through a physical stack later.

It’s proved its worth both because it’s convenient and because I’m lazy: I don’t want to have to remember which device my information is stored on, I don’t want to have to remember to synchronize when I get back home, I just want to be able to find data quickly later. In recent weeks, though, I’ve found myself bypassing Evernote and using Google+ for many of those tasks instead.

For those who haven’t used it (or who have turned the feature off), the Google+ app for Android and iOS automatically uploads photos and video you capture with your phone and tablet to a private album. From there you can share it easily, either publicly or to specific circles you’ve set up; or, as I’ve been doing, you can keep it private but use it as a simple way to keep track of information.

In bookstores, I’ll snap a shot of the cover of a book that I might want to check online reviews of later, or I might grab a photo of a particular wine bottle, or a DVD, or an advert; anything I might think I’ll be interested in at some point in the future, but know will slip from my memory before I’m home again. I know Google+ will automatically upload it and it’ll be waiting for me, not only in the browser on my computer, but pushed into the Google+ album in the gallery on all my Android devices.

I could snap a photo with Evernote, but I’d feel obliged to tag it, or sort it into a notebook, and that’s more than I want to do when I’m out and about. Still, Evernote’s organizational systems are far more advanced than those of Google+, since it’s set up to handle sorting and recalling huge amounts of information.

That needn’t always be the case, however. Google has all of the constituent parts to make an impressive alternative to Evernote, building on different aspects of services already on offer. Text and handwriting recognition are already used by search, able to find results in PDFs and translate the scrawl of a finger on your smartphone display: they could just as easily pick out text in snapshots of book jackets and billboards. Evernote’s notebooks could find their equivalent in private Google+ circles: individual ways to gather together content that could – but not necessarily – be kept private rather than shared.

Where Google+ has the potential advantage over Evernote is how integrated it is into our daily lives and the services we rely on, not to mention the social aspect. My photos of business cards currently wait in an Evernote notebook for me to search and find them; Google, meanwhile, could pull out the text and automatically slot it into my Gmail contacts, then sync that with my phone. It could also fill in the gaps based on what it knows about the person: things that won’t fit on a 3.5 x 2 inch card, like a Google+ bio, or a list of sites that person contributes to and samples of the recent content they’ve produced.

Those books I’m curious about, or adverts I’ve spotted, could be recognized with the same technology that powers Google Goggles: then I can automatically see reviews, and the cheapest place to buy them. Maybe there’s a QR code on the advert, something I probably won’t scan at the time – it always seems to be the way that the billboards with QR codes I see are when I’m underground on the Tube, with no signal to look them up – but which Google+ can quietly look up for me itself, and use that information to flesh out what I see when I come back to review my gallery of gathered images. After all, it already knows that I must be interested in that topic, since I’ve been curious enough to take a photo of it.

Of course, Google+ is a social place, and so I needn’t solely rely on Google’s opinions before I make a decision: I can crowdsource it. I’m probably not the first person to ask, either, so if the ensuing discussion is done publicly, Google+ could easily bring together those multiple conversations so that everybody gets the benefit. Google knows masses about me and the sort of people whose opinions I particularly trust – it reads my email, after all, and it sees who I interact with most and what I click on regularly – so it could make sure the most useful tidbits simmer up to the top where I’ll see them first.

I, like a lot of people, am lazy with how I collect my data – heck, sometimes I just email myself something I need to remember, and hope it’ll be somewhere near the top of my inbox when I next open it up – but I expect great things in how I then consume it. Evernote is a brilliant digital alternative to the notebook, but my life has moved on from collating snippets of information through which I’ll browse later on.

If Facebook is about sharing the minutiae of our lives and hoping our friends comment on it, then Google+ has an opportunity to do something new, to bridge our interests and our expansive digital memories and help us process them in meaningful ways. Evernote may get caught in the crossfire, but I doubt I’m the only one who’ll follow the path to the service that helps me get most done with the least effort.

Two versions of the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine are on offer, either with ruled lines or squares, and both use a new micro-dotted paper which works with the tweaked iOS apps. A new Page Camera option in the app shoots a photo of the notebook itself, relying on the micro-dots to correct skew and brightness.

To organize, a set of stickers is included in the back pocket of the notebook. These are recognized by their color by the app, and can be used with various preset tags or customized to suit the individual user. So, you can write a shopping list and slap on a “Shopping” sticker, and Evernote will automatically file the new note with your Shopping tag for easier recall later on.

Meanwhile, Evernote’s existing handwriting recognition is used to allow written notes to show up in search results; there’s also a set of Skitch arrows that can be stuck onto notes to help draw attention to them.

The new Moleskine notebooks will begin shipping on October 1, priced at $24.95 for the pocket-sized version and $29.95 for the large version. They’re up for pre-order now. No word on whether the Evernote Android app will be updated to support the same Page Camera functionality.

We’ve had our fair share of hands-on time with Evernote in the past, so we’ll just concentrate on the new features here. This version of Evernote is made specifically for the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich environment, taking many cues from Google’s own aesthetics in the vanilla version of that new version of the mobile software. This update is primarily for your smartphone, but some features flow on over to the tablet version of Evernote 4.0 as well.

This update brings on an updated notebook list which collect both your own notebooks and your shared notebooks, you’ve got new Action Bars all over the place for much easier methods for inserting all manner of media into your notes, and the whole interface is one whole heck of a lot more intuitive to use. Swipeable actions exist in several places, most notably on the notes and home screen as well as the Notebook to Tag to Place views – swipe around!

Have a peek at our collection of screen grabs here then head to the Google Play app store to pick up your own download of Evernote 4.0 for Android absolutely free – do it now!

Evernote, if you’re unfamiliar, is a popular digital notebook app, supporting text, photo and other clippings, and using a cloud store to synchronize them across multiple devices and platforms. One of its lesser-known but nonetheless brilliant features is optical character recognition: snap a photo of a business card, for instance, and upload it to Evernote, and the OCR system will identify any text and index it for future searching.

A few companies have looked to Evernote – or Evernote-style functionality – to differentiate their tablets. HTC’s 2011 duo of slates, the 7-inch Flyer and the 10-inch Jetstream, each paired their digital pens with a custom Notes app that could sync up with Evernote and use its handwriting recognition system. Samsung eschewed Evernote in favor of its own custom S-Note app on the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note 10.1, but otherwise stuck close to the formula of digital inking.

Ironically, it’s a tablet from a company resolutely anti-stylus that has brought the pen back into vogue. Steve Jobs’ stance on styli was clear, but there’s a growing cadre of apps and users who are turning back to the extra precision and task-specific usability that a pen can deliver. Software like Taposé, mimicking the Courier experience as best it can without an active digitizer, as well as Paper and various graphics apps from big names like Adobe have all sent iPad owners scuttling to find the best of what is, boiled down, a compromise: a faux-fingertip on a stick.

Evernote has been pretty specific about what is planned for Penultimate. The app will stay an independent download – $0.99 for the iPad from the App Store – but gain search and sync support with Evernote accounts. Meanwhile its creator, Ben Zotto, will join the Evernote team and “lead the effort” to integrate handwriting and digital ink support into future versions of the main product itself.

“Our team has been working on handwriting recognition and digital ink forever” Evernote CEO Phil Libin said of the deal today, “and it feels like for the very first time, the experience of writing on a tablet is actually great.” Perhaps he has a short memory, but he might be surprised at how solid Microsoft’s OneNote app and an active digital stylus has been for the past few years. OneNote could recognize digital inking and – without having to convert that to text first – index it for searching nearly a decade ago.

Evernote can do what OneNote never managed, however: turn digital pens into a selling point. Perhaps it took an intense exploration of the limits of the finger – fueled by the huge adoption of the iPad – before we realized quite what else we needed. Microsoft might take a moment to spot the irony, but it can’t afford to do anything but spend fleeting seconds grinding its teeth over it; if I were in charge of third-party developer partnerships for Windows 8, I’d be picking up the phone and talking to Evernote pretty darn quick to make sure there was a shiny Metro version of the app ready in time for the new OS’ launch.

If the rise of capacitive stylii and, perhaps on a smaller scale, the Galaxy Note have shown us, it’s that users often need a helping hand to recognize exactly what they can achieve with new tools. Evernote and Penultimate look to be leading that next charge, and it could be just the shove that puts the stylus back into the limelight.

As part of the deal, Penultimate will see the jump to other operating systems, and major handwriting recognition support will work its way into Evernote in the near future. Penultimate already has some Evernote features, but will see even more as part of the acquisition. Zen Cotto says that the partnership “makes a lot of sense,” and that “Penultimate is only going to get better from here.”

Evernote say that its team has been working on handwriting recognition since the Apple Newton, but has never managed to put all the necessary elements together in a satisfactory way. The company recognized that Penultimate has managed to do just that, and wanted to provide that exact experience for Evernote. The full details of the acquisition weren’t disclosed.