I’ve been eagerly reading the Evernote blog and been quite excited about this service. That is until today when I got my invite and rushed to try and use it. I imported an image with text in it, but Evernote couldn’t find the text. I decided to get an easier image so wrote a number on some paper and took a photo – still nothing. Finally I got a high res photo of my screen – couldn’t find a single letter.

I know its harsh to criticise something that’s obviously had so much attention put into it, but after the demonstrations of it finding obscure handwritten text I expected it could at least find massive printed text in an image. It leads me to think that the demos had metadata or something to allow it to find the text, which doesn’t really add to its effectiveness. Bit of a shame really.

Thanks for the update. I just got my invite as well, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it. It’s odd that their demo worked so well and you’re having troubles getting anywhere near reproducing their results. I wonder if it would be any better with typed text such as that on a receipt.

I know its harsh to criticise something that’s obviously had so much attention put into it, but after the demonstrations of it finding obscure handwritten text I expected it could at least find massive printed text in an image. It leads me to think that the demos had metadata or something to allow it to find the text, which doesn’t really add to its effectiveness. Bit of a shame really.

Evernote is great, but if the online version is not free… there’s no point to using it.

I beg to differ. Just because you would have to pay for it doesn’t rule out the usefulness of the service. Several of my friends have already said that they would be willing to pay a few bucks a month for a service that powerful.