A First Look at Evernote Home

Let's dive into Evernote so that we can look at Evernote Home in action for a first look. Now, this is a beta version of Evernote, so some things might be ever so slightly different than the version that you see that rolls out in your system. Now, Evernote Home is actually accessed from the left navigation pane. If you go to the left-hand navigation pane here at the top, you'll see that little Home icon and the word Home, and that will give you access to it. I'm going to go ahead and shrink our left navigation menu so it goes out of view and we get more real estate here going forward. Now note, I am in my own account, so I'm not going to show you all that much stuff in here just because of privacy reasons, but I want to show you the various features. So as we noted earlier, Evernote Home gives you this dashboard so that you can see all of your content in a convenient and streamlined view. And so the 3 widgets that come with Evernote Basic are displayed on screen here, and you can see here you have notes, and we have an option for a recent tab as well as a suggested tab. And this is, I'm guessing, an algorithmic filter of notes that Evernote believes you'll want to look at. They have— we have this scratchpad here, and the scratchpad allows you to be able to type those quick notes, as I said. And then over here we have the recently captured, and we have several tabs. We have the ability to filter to web clips, things that you've used the Evernote Web Clipper in order to capture into Evernote. We have Evernote images, and so any images that are embedded inside of a note, documents, audio, and emails. And presumably there will be more of these tabs in the future. I'm not sure, but I'm, I'm guessing there might be. Now on each of the widgets you do have a three dots icon, and you can go to all notes here for the notes one. You can also remove the widget. Now that is in essence how the widgets work. The widgets are all just operational from the menu options. You can click on any one of the notes and those will take you to the note itself, so it'll just jump you over to the note, which is very convenient. Now something that I didn't note so far is that at the very top here we have the header, and the header up here gives us a, an image, a background image, and in the top left-hand corner here we have Good morning, Ray, because it's morning my time, and it will say something like good afternoon, Ray, and so on and so forth. So just making sure that your account has the right name so that when it does greet you in Evernote Home, it goes ahead and has the right name. We also have the day, month, day, and year associated with your day, that is the day registered, and so that will then go ahead and display up here as well. Now, over here we have a Customize button, and for those of you who are capable of customizing in Evernote Premium and Business, you'll then be able to click on Customize. Once you go ahead and click on Customize, you then get this dropdown menu for Cancel and Done, but more importantly, you get the other available widgets. And so at this point, we can go ahead and drag and drop any one of these widgets to the, the Evernote home area. You can see here it tells us that we can drag the widget here. Now of course we can drag those widgets almost anywhere. We can put them between things, we can put them in new, new rows, but we can actually also have it take over another column. And when we do that, it gives us the ability to go ahead and select, in this case, a note to pin because it's the pin note widget. And so, uh, we can then, uh, uh, hover over any one of these when we're in the customizer home space. And we are then able to go ahead and say, we want this to be only, uh, small, which is one column width, two column widths, or three column widths and take the full spread of the home screen. And so again, we can do that with each of these. We can drag them in and out. We can organize them. In whatever way we want, and that gives us the ability to customize these pieces. So very, very powerful to be able to give you this flexibility in managing the various widgets the way that you want to be able to see them. So lots of flexibility there, and I'm very excited about that. Now, while we're in the Customize Your Home Screen, as I said before, you have this header area, and that header area has your good morning, good afternoon, your name, the date and time, and this background image. You are capable of changing the background image, and I'm again presuming this is an Evernote Premium and Business. You can go ahead and click Change Background, and then it gives you the option to go ahead and select a background. Now note that I created a custom background here using one of the Evernote Community images. They come with a default of these— looks like 12 images that you can select from. These will pass forward to Evernote Mobile in the home screen there as well. So it's very nice because it all kind of translates over. All of your widget setup and everything else like that should translate over and be the same on mobile and desktop. And these images are JPEG or PNG if you want to upload one, and they have to be under 5 megabytes and 2000 by 1280 pixels. So just something helpful to note when you go ahead and want to upload any custom backgrounds. And so once, once you have gotten yourself customized and you have everything in the space that you want it to, say that you decide, oh, you know what, I want this to be 2 and I want the scratchpad up here. I want this then to be 3 columns wide. Great, done. And Voilà, now the home screen will pop up and you now are ready to interact with your Evernote notes. So that was a first look at Evernote Home. I hope you have a chance to play around with it. Let me know your thoughts and good luck with everything. Here's to your productive life.