The strange thing is, my typical evernote usage rarely involves me actually writing notes myself. I always find myself spinning up a dropbox'ed tiddlywiki for f

The strange thing is, my typical evernote usage rarely involves me actually writing notes myself. I always find myself spinning up a dropbox'ed tiddlywiki for fleshing out ideas and in general using a pen and scrap paper for temporary notes. Instead I use it as a place to clip anything I read online and find useful/interesting. It is like using a bookmarking site that keeps a copy of the article in case the original vanishes and is searchable beyond the titles. For being sort of a permanent searchable extension of my brain's memory it works really well. I also use it to clip pages I want to read in the future into a 'ReadItLater' notebook; a replacement for readitlaterlist that won't lose my articles if the source vanishes and allows me to search things easily. Due to my hn/reddit/rss addiction the 'ReadItLater' notebook is tremendously valuable for me. I tend to encounter far more things I want to read then I have time to so my backlog is perpetually increasing. However if I am searching I still will get results from this list.. Honestly, sometimes it feels like I am sending myself messages from the future saying "Hey this article is relevant to something your doing. Now is the time to finally get around to reading it". I don't have a premium account yet, but with GDC looming ahead I think I might spring for it so that I can take advantage of the searchable PDF feature. I would love to just dump all the pdf whitepapers I run across directly in rather than my current practice of extracting the contents. As others have pointed out though, Evernote does have some major concerns that need addressed. The native clients are poor (luckily the web client is pretty good), they feel very 'walled garden' (open up, open up, an app ecosystem awaits you!), no linux client, and clipping web pages means settling for an uglified unformatted version.