
Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine - zachh
http://blog.evernote.com/2012/08/24/the-new-evernote-smart-notebook-by-moleskine/
======
king_magic
I think this is really quite neat. I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but
I found it difficult to reconcile my handwritten notes (90% of my notes at
work) with what I'd have in Evernote. As a result, I stopped using Evernote. I
always hoped I'd be able to find a good way to record my notes digitally
(e.g., iPad + stylus), but at the end of the day, taking notes with pen &
paper always wins for me.

This could very well bring me back to Evernote. Not sure if it's worth $24+,
but if it works, maybe... I do take an awful lot of handwritten notes, and I'd
love to digitize them easily.

~~~
naner
What's your opinion of Livescribe?

I'm also a paper note taker but I don't see myself moving to Livescribe
(though I haven't tried it) or taking photos of pages in Evernote. I'm pretty
organized, though, so I'm not dying to have everything digitized.

~~~
milesskorpen
I found the huge pen rather clunky, and the spiral bound notebooks really
frustrating. Their software is also rather pitiful compared to Evernote.

~~~
tylerritchie
There's a livescribe->evernote bridge, though, isn't there?

~~~
chimeracoder
Yes, there is, last I recall.

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bradgessler
So far, my experience with Evernote has been watching them make Skitch almost
unusable. The app always forgets my Skitch credentials, keeps displaying the
startup screen even when I check "Do not show this to me again", and tries to
force me into an Evernote account. At one point they changed Skitch to display
10 different things I could do after an upload. They made it a real mess.

I assume Evernote's products are overly complicated, but I'd like to know if
they just botched the Skitch acquisition. Does anybody have any insight into
this?

~~~
juddlyon
Evernote is a fantastic app and not hard to use or overly complicated.

I agree with you on the Skitch integration, the startup screen has driven me
bonkers.

My guess is that they'll sort it out, the last release seemed a little better.

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stcredzero
This is the world crying out for a fast e-ink small form-factor tablet that
just saves everything as digital ink. (Then build-up from there.) Simply
recording time (and optionally location) associated with each page would make
the device awesome. Add the ability to interface with a web app for better
processing, as Evernote does, and you'd take over the world.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
I saw the link, and thought that's what it would be. Just that it synced with
Evernote instead of Amazon or whatever.

Then I saw 'new iOS app' in the copy and my expectations disappeared. :(

------
tcc2161
This should be ideal for someone like me, but unfortunately I can't see myself
using it. I have a shelf full of Moleskins (began buying them in 2005) and I
was a premium Evernote user from 2009-2011. But I canceled my Evernote
subscription because I never used the software - I really dislike their UI.
The only thing that could bring me back to them is a UI redesign, to make it
seem less like an email application and more like a file-sorting system, which
is what it's supposed to be.

And the idea of taking pics of my notebook pages with my phone is too clunky.

However, I'll grant that this is why this doesn't work * for me * and express
envy for those for whom it does work for, since "on paper" all of this seems
like a great idea. Having notebook pages scanned and sortable would be
wonderful.

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vtail
Now, for those of us interested in startups - what a perfect example of great
product development:

\- Address existing need that few other products addresses

\- Helps generating new customers by removing some of the barriers - "I like
to create my notes with a pen on a paper"

\- Involves non-trivial blend of hardware and software

\- Involves non-trivial business partnership

\- Serves as a test-bed for bringing the solution to more people by refining
unskewing algorithms

\- etc. etc.

Well executed, Evernote!

~~~
FireBeyond
Do either Evernote or Moleskine really qualify as startups, though? (not that
that necessarily changes things, though I'm not convinced that it's as
revolutionary as being made out to be... certainly evolutionary).

~~~
vtail
I don't think Evernote is a startup anymore, but it's a remarkable product
development story nevertheless. Certainly thinking outside of the box.

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azar1
Not that interested in the Moleskine, but the smart stickers are an amazing
idea. A great mesh of the real world and digital.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I agree, I wish they just sold them separately so you tag random objects in
the world.

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cjoh
As an author, it's depressing to see empty books -- stickers and all --
selling for twice as much as full ones.

~~~
arnarbi
It's not very intuitive. However, a notebook stays with me for a couple of
years, so I prefer it to be nice as well as durable. A novel lasts a few days
usually.

~~~
tripzilch
This is my reasoning as well. If I'd treat a paperback novel the same way as I
treat my notebooks, stuffing them in my bag, taking them everywhere, they'd
fall apart after a week or two. I select a notebook for durability (among a
few other things, like not having squares or lined paper but rather blank, and
having a convenient form factor).

However, while I do agree that Moleskine notebooks are absolutely gorgeous, I
usually buy other types at about 1/3rd of the price.

Their diary/planner, however, is merely on the high price end for such things,
not by a factor of three. And in the years I've used one of those (I use a
much tinier planner now), I kept on being pleasantly surprised by their
attention to detail in the design of tables, grids and bubbles you'd find in a
planner, all of it really well-thought-out. But then, a pre-printed planner is
not the same as an empty notebook.

~~~
arnarbi
> However, while I do agree that Moleskine notebooks are absolutely gorgeous,
> I usually buy other types at about 1/3rd of the price.

I used to do that as well, and felt Moleskines were just too expensive. Then I
splurged on one a couple of years ago, and never had that feeling again. Don't
know if I just feel that I get my money's worth, or that my brain just
simplistically adjusted to the price.

Empty pages is also my thing. In general I have four, pocket sized one, A5
sized main notebook, A4 sized sketchbook for drawing, and a reporter style
watercolor pocket one (I love the panorama-like landscape format for
pictures).

------
andrewcamel
The feature I would really like to see would be a printed title Box in the
moleskin notebook, which would allow me to title my written work and then pass
that title into Evernote when it's scanned. You could obviously also
extrapolate this feature out to tags or other pieces of metadata to be stored
in the digital Evernote document.

Just to clarify: this would really be made for those who have awful
handwriting (like me), so only a small part of your page would need to be
written carefully and eventually digitized to be searchable.

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reaganing
Not really a fan of Moleskine's notebooks, but this is interesting.

But, Evernote's Page Camera feature that was added to the iOS app does seem to
work just fine with other paper (I tested Field Notes w/ graph paper). It's
just 'optimized' for the paper in these notebooks, whatever that means.

~~~
alecdibble
The grids or lines on the notebook are dotted. Their algorithm knows the
geometry of those dots ahead of time, so it can exploit that fact to figure
what the orientation is suppose to be.

~~~
mthoms
But the geometry of all lined notebooks is effectively the same: horizontal
parallel lines inside a rectangular shape. For this type of application I
don't think any more geometry is needed.

Unless scale is important but I can't see how that could be.

~~~
buu700
If I had to guess, I'd say the extra geometry is useful because, 1: the dotted
pattern is less likely to be confused with user writing/drawing, and 2: they
have one specific notebook that they know works seamlessly with their current
algorithms without a lot of extra field testing against different notebooks.

It most likely helped a good amount in bringing this feature to market as
quickly as possible, and it'll be interesting what they do with the dotted
pattern concept in the future (I see it either fading into an edge case of the
software that becomes a technical debt for the remainder of its lifetime as
the algorithms for handling the base case of any arbitrary notebook paper
improve, or evolving into the base of an Evernote certification process for
notebooks).

Personally, for me this feature is the tipping point between "yeah, Evernote
seems kinda cool" and "I'm actually considering using Evernote (assuming the
feature finds its way to Android)". The only improvement I would make that
would really seal the deal would be the ability to fax all my notes to
Evernote instead (seems like much less a pain in the ass for digitising
volumes of notes than meticulously photographing each page), though I suppose
that as long as they support manual uploading of images through their desktop
site this would be fairly trivial to script myself.

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ckrailo
Sigh. Looks like Big Commerce (the store Evernote is using) stores passwords
in plain-text or at least a reversible hash. They emailed me my password. :\

------
yock
Yes, but how far is this from just using standard/college/quad ruled paper in
the first place? Requiring special paper automatically limits the feature's
utility. Once their "limited edition" notebooks sell out this feature
immediately begins the countdown to uselessness.

~~~
jasonlotito
> Yes, but how far is this from just using standard/college/quad ruled paper
> in the first place?

Not far. Most of the features, it seems, do not really require the notebook.
But it also seems that it wouldn't be difficult to eventually add support for
any old notebook to allow for automatic alignment.

So when you say....

> Requiring special paper automatically limits the feature's utility.

...I can't help but think it allows them to get the feature out sooner before
refining it.

> Once their "limited edition" notebooks sell out

they'll be offering normal edition notebooks, as well as providing better
support for other notebooks.

I really don't see the features here as something they are just going to limit
to a limited time physical product.

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fsniper
How is this different from taking notes on any physical paper and take a photo
of it? My Galaxy SII camera takes real good pictures of papers. They are
readable, good focused and sharp.

I just see a marketing partnering stunt here?? Am I missing something?

~~~
timdorr
Automatic color and contrast correction, handwriting recognition, automatic
ordering of pages, and tagging/searching capabilities once they're in the app.

~~~
fsniper
But this is already evernote nothing new??

~~~
tripzilch
This one comes with a pretty Moleskine notebook!

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orjan
"we designed a special dotted paper pattern" - this sounds very much like what
Anoto[1] does. [1] <http://www.anoto.com/the-technology-1.aspx>

~~~
AhtiK
Wacom went the opposite way for obvious reasons - digital pen that works with
any paper. Wacom Inkling, <http://www.wacom.com/en/Products/Inkling>

~~~
Groxx
neat idea, but this kills it for me:

> _How accurate are the sketches?

In general, sketches with Inkling will be accurate to within approximately +/-
0.1 inches (+/- 2.5 mm) in the main drawing area of an A4 page, and within
(approximately +/- 0.2 inches (+/- 5.0 mm) at the edges of the page._

2.5mm is quite a large fuzz factor. Enough to make me think this could be
great for very-rough sketching / outlining of a design, but not enough for
replacing scanning / doing (essentially) OCR.

~~~
timo614
(Not a referral link - just a video review by someone who bought it)
[http://www.amazon.com/review/R2M4YOUB8J3F84/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R2M4YOUB8J3F84/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B005KPUYVA&nodeID=172282&store=electronics)

If you check out that review it shows that the product definitely needs to
mature. I can't see the wacom one being used for professional purposes until
they up the accuracy. I was going to buy one for my finance for her birthday
(she has a cintiq but wanted something for the go) but decided it wasn't worth
it.

On top of that inkling requires that device to help read from the paper which
limits its usefulness some (for me at least).

Hopefully they improve on it because it's definitely an interesting approach
to this problem.

~~~
Groxx
Illuminating video. Thanks! That's pretty condemning, inaccurate enough that I
won't even consider buying it :/ It's too bad, because otherwise Wacom seems
to make good stuff.

------
sourc3
As much as I wanted to use digital notes in meetings, I still take joy in
using the beautifully designed moleskine notebooks with a Cross pen. However,
indexing and search is always a problem. If Evernote can fix this for me I
will be a lifetime paid user of Evernote!

In my opinion this is a good glimpse of digital and analog life working in
harmony instead of dictating you have to live with either one.

Great job! Ordering mine now :)

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jpalomaki
I could see some use in combining the laptop and piece of paper in note
taking. To make this easier I would like a system to help me reconcile the the
notes made on different mediums. Probably I'm writing on laptop and would like
to include stuff drawn on paper in between those notes.

Few things that could make this easier: \- Add machine readable page numbering
to the notebook \- Some kind of annotation scheme, like (1) I could use to
refer to the drawings on the notebook.

On laptop I could refer to the pictures with <page number>:<picture> style
notation.

Would be actually nice to follow similar workflow with laptop and iPad. Write
text on full keyboard, draw diagrams for the same note on iPad at the same
time. Maybe this is already possible, have never tried this.

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ajanuary
I don't know much about unskewing, but presumably the dotted lines mean you
know how each dot should be placed relative to each other dot. With plain
lines you'd have to do some guesswork based on how wavey the line is etc.

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enraged_camel
I don't mean to be a debbie downer, but I find the idea of taking pictures of
moleskine pages really, really clunky. I have done that in the past to take
photos of book/magazine pages, and in my experience the picture almost always
comes out low quality - a combination of blur, contrast, the curvature of the
page and flash reflecting off the paper makes it very difficult to read later.
I can only imagine what types of problems these factors will cause for
Evernote's hand-writing recognition program. After all, software can optimize
image quality only so much.

~~~
WildUtah
The Moleskine is supposed to lie very flat and the paper isn't shiny. Those
both improve the focus, too. The lines are supposed to help remove skew, too.

It should be a lot better than a photo of a book, and much much better than a
magazine.

------
kamaal
Great, except that Moleskine notebooks are very costly here in India.

Generally in ranges of hundreds of rupees.

[http://www.flipkart.com/search/a/all?query=Moleskine&ver...](http://www.flipkart.com/search/a/all?query=Moleskine&vertical=all&dd=0&autosuggest\[as\]=off&autosuggest\[as-
submittype\]=default-search&autosuggest\[as-grouprank\]=0&autosuggest\[as-
overallrank\]=0&Search=%C2%A0&_r=n_2yuAC4xgh0SZTuulvAtw--&_l=Tnndui8JdMVk7CZmDKIfXQ--&ref=5c117020-8e31-4c52-af4a-5252943b6eec&selmitem=)

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darkmethod
I didn't even look through all the functionality before I made my purchase
(#182).

I use Evernote for nearly everything I do. Task lists, projects, ideas, goals.
Evernote saves me one of my most precious resources: time. I've worked
Evernote into my daily workflow for getting things done.

And I have a stack of Moleskines I've used for reminders, sketches, random
thoughts that I scratch down in a hurry throughout my day.

This is the perfect product for my everyday use. Looking forward to when they
arrive (they will ship in October). I just wonder if I bought enough of them.

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shawnjan8
Interesting. And the new app seems great. No more different modes for reading
and editing! Hopefully they release an update for Android as well...

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mumrah
Stickers are a neat idea, but why not just some special drawn symbol? Would be
way cool if you could define your own.

~~~
sbanach
Uh, because with a drawn symbol you wouldn't need their thirty dollar
notebooks?

~~~
icebraining
You'd still need the pages with the "special dotted paper pattern".

~~~
tedunangst
Does evernote not allow you to fix the page manually? (I don't use it.) The
JotNot Pro app I bought for a dollar allows one to slide the corners around
and reskews the image as appropriate, with some amount of auto detection as
well.

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antihero
Is there any reason they can't do this with the Android app, too? Or does it
already have this functionality?

------
k-mcgrady
This is great. I love Evernote and use it daily but I also prefer writing some
things in notebooks (and I use Moleskine ones). I could definitely see myself
using it. It depend on how the $ price works out in GBP compared to regular
Moleskine notebooks which are about £9.

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altxwally
There are a couple of note books (CamiApp, Shotnote) that have appeared in
Japan that are quite similar. I found the design pretty good, though I stopped
using them.. I think mainly because I switched form Evernote to org-mode.

------
iamben
Gutted this isn't on Android. Why are so many people still launching
apps/competitions/products for iOS only? I could understand it a few years
back, but doing it today just cuts your market in half.

~~~
ig1
Because even though iOS has fewer users, those users are more valuable. They
tend to fall into higher income brackets and be higher spenders.

~~~
iamben
I don't doubt that :-)

But I wonder how long this will be the case. Anecdotally I'm seeing more
people _choose_ Android (or at least Samsung Android phones) - with a bigger
user base, how long before the subset of early adopters/higher spenders is as
big or bigger than those with an iPhone?

~~~
a2tech
They don't buy apps though. I know maybe a dozen people with Android phones
and (barring 1 person and 1 app) they have NEVER purchased an app. They don't
pay for subscription services, they don't do in-game upgrades, they don't put
any money into the phone. Its crazy. And the 1 person that did buy an app? It
was an app to aid in pirating things.

------
graeme
I've never gotten into Evernote, but have wanted to for a long time. I've
bought these as a way of forcing myself to finally sit down and learn how to
use it.

Does anyone know of a good intro guide to Evernote?

~~~
dholowiski
Yes, it's even advertised in the Evernote desktop application. "Evernote for
Dummies".

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Mordio
It's awkward that I can't vote and therefore save stories anymore. So I have
to comment even if I don't have anything useful to say. Can't be the goal of
Hacker News, can it?

~~~
prof_hobart
Or alternately, use your browser's bookmark functionality?

~~~
Mordio
Correct. I don't know why voting is disabled. The account seems to be ok
because I can comment. So what's wrong? There is nothing in the FAQ about this
and no apparent contact address. That is all.

------
dholowiski
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. Oh wait, IOS Only? Never mind.

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reubenswartz
Almost enough to make me go back to Moleskine (love the notebooks, but not
being able to easily digitize was a problem.)

------
islon
Very neat. The only concern I have is to remember take a photo of all the
pages and which page I already took a photo.

~~~
izak30
Cut/Tear the corner off once a photo has been taken of both sides. I do that
already to determine quickly the next available page.

~~~
niels_olson
That answer and its question have got to be the most value-added comments in
this thread.

------
samstave
I'm addicted to moleskine notebooks - I have many, I'll certainly be getting
this one as well!

------
marginalboy
Great work, Evernote! That's pretty darn cool :-)

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jfb
I never "got" Evernote, but this is trés cool.

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BallinBige
the shills will eat this up

------
awayand
i hate evernote

------
Keyframe
Only a fool would buy $25+ notebook. I'd rather play lottery.

~~~
shawndumas
quality is fractal; good, smooth acid-free paper that can take a wide variety
of inks without smearing, discoloring, or bleeding through -- well constructed
and durable.

quality is worth paying for...

~~~
nvoorhies
Moleskine notebooks are mediocre in paper quality, though, and not very
consistent. You'll see variations based on which of their Chinese suppliers
manufactured a particular notebook, but bleed through and feathering are
generally sub par for the price.

They're nice and easy to find though, and the form factor's lovely.

~~~
vtail
What would you recommend as a higher-quality notebooks?

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Neputys
Big -1 to Moleskine. Such a brand and partnering with some tech whatever.

~~~
zimpenfish
Because Moleskine haven't already debased their brand with gimmicky tie-ins?

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moleskine-Pac-Man-Limited-Edition-
No...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moleskine-Pac-Man-Limited-Edition-
Notebook/dp/8862935609)

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moleskine-Limited-Brick-Plain-
notebo...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moleskine-Limited-Brick-Plain-
notebook/dp/8866130095)

etc.etc.

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rjv
For the hipster in your life...

~~~
tnorthcutt
Please don't post comments that don't add to the conversation.

