Evernote Note Launcher

Busy year for Evernote it was/is…. updates for webOS in January, updates for android & blackberry in February; complete redesign of iPhone app, Evernote web and chrome extension in March, notebook sharing in April along with even bigger updates to the android platform and now, finally… a feature that a lot of people have been asking for:

The update has been out since Friday but i only noticed it yesterday morning when i was checking the android marketplace for updates. (28-05-2011: officially released on Windows v4.4 today)

They should look something like this when you make them:

just right click on a note thumbnail, then copy&paste into a note. simple

What is good to see is that you can use the links in exactly the same way you would use hyperlinks in Evernote, so instead of a list like the one above, you can put the links in with the text you are writing like this (that link doesn’t go anywhere).

For those of you that don’t know how to add a hyperlink just highlight the word you want to put a link into and press Ctrl+k then copy and paste the link.

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Visual Note Links

More importantly you can still use the same hyperlink method to insert note links into images as well as adding normal web links, which opens up a lot of new ways of navigating through Evernote. You could do anything from placing small icons in certain parts of a note that link to related notes, to full blown note launcher/dashboard/directory/ type notes that could link to all your most used notes like this:

i just made this yesterday testing it out using the Evernote clipper to make the images, putting them inside a grid (using table width in pixels) and then adding the hyperlinks/note links into the images, this one is a bit messy but you get the idea, your only limited by your imagination yada yada yada…

something like this with no text and the same size squares would look even better:

and yes, that is a grid within a grid with in a grid! woah! (and those tiny clipped images that you're squinting to see actually still work as links too, just so you know)

i made up this neater example using my flickr photo icons but when i get the time to do one up properly the right place to go would probably be somewhere like the noun project or anywhere that has some good icons/images that would suit what you’re linking to, then just let loose with the Evernote clipper and paste them all into the grid.

Or not. You don’t have to go to all this bother at all really, just plain text note links would do the job either, im just more of a visual type, i find that it’s a lot easier to find notes if they have images in them rather than having to scan through screens of text. Thats why i started adding images to the tops of some notes once i began storing more and more of my junk in Evernote:

Using a grid would still be useful though even if your just using the text links on their own since it allows you place links horizontally across the note as well as vertically.

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Command Line Switches

So anyway, the next logical step would be to go here (how-to geek) and figure out how to set up an ENScript, assign it to a keyboard shortcut so it will open up the note with all your note links in it when you type in the shortcut.  Then you can just keep that note open in its own window and whenever you want to open any note links you just have to Shift+click on a link to open it in a second window, (just clicking on a note link normally would open it in the same note, much like clicking a link in a web browser would)

but i havnt got around to trying that bit myself yet, something for another day…

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Update: Note links in your web browser or windows shortcuts

Enscript is handy if want to search for notes that have specific words or tags but if you just want to open a single note you can do that now by creating a shortcut in windows (right click anywhere/new/create shortcut) and paste in the note link then add a name for it.

With your web brower you do much the same, bookmark a blank page (or anypage) then go and edit the bookmark and add in the note link where the url should be then change the name of the bookmark to suit.

If you want these note links to open in their own separate windows go to tools menu in evernote on the desktop: options/note/ and tick “open note links from other applications in a new window“.

(via: elektricforest)