About a year ago, while attending the first ever Digital Life show in New York City, I was introduced to a program called EverNote. This note-taking program was very intriguing to me since I was considering purchasing Microsoft's OneNote program at the time. Since EverNote was free to download from the EverNote site—and still is—I tried out that program and wrote about it in my column in EE Product News. Recently, though, some folks from Microsoft came to visit me at my office and gave me a demo of the latest version of OneNote along with a review copy of the program. It seemed natural that I should do a head-to-head comparison of the two programs.

After working with OneNote for about a month or so, I decided that I don't have enough time or energy to go over all of the features in that program, much less compare them on a point-by-point basis to EverNote. So I've decided to do a shortened version of a review, so that you might get a feel for the two programs, and then I'll send you off to the respective Internet sites for you to make your own decision between the two programs if you care to. It's a cop out I know, but I've got to make a living, and this blog is just a tiny part of what I do for a living.

Let's start with the obvious difference between the two programs—the metaphors that each uses. EverNote is set up as an endless roll of paper in which you can add the daily notes of your life. There's no organizing involved. OneNote, on the other hand, uses the metaphor of a typical spiral bound notebook, with multiple sections. In this case, you probably will give some thought as to how all your sections and notebooks are organized. So whether one or the other metaphor fits you better is a personal choice.

Now for the notes. If you're used to taking notes with a pen or pencil, you can still do the same with both of these programs, provided you have a device that accepts a pen input. Otherwise, you will be typing your notes into the program. Beyond text, both programs will accept images to enhance your note taking and make it easy to grab information from the Internet and include it into your notes. During the demo of OneNote, product manager Roan Kang, hooked up a PC cam to the USB port of his notebook and captured a video and accompanying audio of our meeting into OneNote—that was impressive, and easy to do. You can't do that with EverNote as far as I know.

Beyond metaphors and note-taking, including multimedia, there's a sharing aspect of the two programs that you might want to investigate before you make a commitment to one or the other. It seems to me that OneNote is farther along with this aspect of the program, although EverNote makes it fairly easy to e-mail your notes to colleagues. Here is an excerpt from the OneNote product guide that engineers might find quite compelling:

EXCERPT

Real Time Sharing in OneNote

You can share your notes and drawings with others—and see their comments and additions, all in real time—using the Shared Session feature of OneNote. You can create or join a peer-to-peer network session in which multiple users can interact on shared OneNote pages using the Share With Others task bar or by clicking Shared Session in the Tools menu. For example, you're in a teleconference and need to draw a diagram to explain to the other person what you are thinking. If both of you have OneNote, you can work together on the shared note surface, using it like a combination notebook and whiteboard.

END OF EXCERPT

Both programs accept handwritten input and will act on it if you want. OneNote has the ability to recognize handwriting, search on it, change it to typewritten text and so forth built into the program. If you want to do the same thing with EverNote, you have to purchase EverNote Plus, which includes these features.

So that's it. If you want to investigate further, see below.

EverNote 1.1, EverNote Corp., free to download at www.evernote.com.

OneNote 2003, Microsoft Corp., $99.95 www.onenote.com