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Evernote - Instant favourite for iPad notes
16 Aug 2010Offline access to notes in Evernote is a must for me. Whilst much of my time is spent in areas with a good enough reception for my phone or with access to a WiFi network, there are occasions where getting online and connected is not so easy if not impossible as anyone who travels the UK rail network will attest to for example. Now whilst the Mac and Windows clients have offline access by default, the mobile clients are not so fortunate.
Whilst many of the other platforms await offline access for premium users (Android certainly draws ever closer), Apple’s iOS platform is ahead on development, and I discovered something particularly interesting about the iPad.
I have used an iPod touch as a staple access point for Evernote for most of the past year. It has no 3G capability so offline access to key notes was imperative for me and rather than getting a premium subscription (which was recently gifted to me by my wife) I took advantage of the option to favourite a note. This made it available offline without the need for a subscription and was as easy as pressing the star next to the title.
My wife does not have a premium account (not yet at least) and is attending a meeting tomorrow where she plans to use Evernote on her iPad, but she is unsure of the connectivity in the meeting location. I thought it would be a simple matter of showing her the “favourite” feature to ensure she had her meeting notes to hand - after all the iPad shares the same app as the iPhone and iPod Touch. I was wrong. After several minutes of looking, I drew a blank … no star, no favourite, no luck.
She then tried the iPad in airplane mode and surprisingly, it could access every note she had viewed. One Google driven scour of the Internet later and I came across a comment that supported this from the iPad app release post on the Evernote blog.
Syl - 06/14/2010 09:11AM
I’m confused. I’m not a premium member, but with my iPhone app, Evernote allowed me to specify favorites that were saved on my iPhone. I can’t find this functionality on the iPad – has it been removed?Andrew Sinkov - 06/14/2010 11:20AM
On the iPad, whenever you create or view a note, that note is automatically saved locally, which means that you will be able to view that note even when offline. This is essentially the same functionality as Favorites.
So it seems that the iPad automatically caches (or favourites) any note you view. I wonder if we’ll see that on the iPhone & iPod (and other mobile clients) in future releases. Even if we don’t any freemium user’s iPad experience is that little bit better once you know this little trick.
