Back in July of last year, Evernote announced Canadian Chris O’Neil had taken over as the company’s CEO. O’Neil came to Evernote following stints as the head of Google Canada and later Google X, and he quickly set about helping the one-time Silicon Valley darling regain the momentum it had last over the last couple of years.
In one of its first major updates since O’Neil shut down some of the company’s tertiary products, Evernote has added several major new features to its core Android app.
To start, the company has reworked the app’s document scanning functionality. When taking a picture of a document, the app’s new automatic mode will parse said document, determining how best to accommodate its physical size and layout. It will then automatically crop the resulting image and adjust its contrast as necessary to make it easier to read on a mobile screen.
To access this functionality, launch Evernote, tap the green floating action button and select the camera note option. Evernote’s implementation of this feature is pretty slick. If the app detects a document, it will overlay a green interface element, allowing the user to pick exactly the element they want photographed. Once scanned, documents images are kept in a temporary gallery while the user decides whether to keep the image. Once saved, the file is treated just like any other Evernote note for the purposes of organization.
In the short time I’ve had to test this feature, I’ve found it works reasonably well, though it doesn’t produce as crisp scans as Microsoft’s Office Lens offering does.
Premium Evernote users also get access to a new business card scanning feature. Using the same tech behind its new scanning feature, the app will automatically parse, scrub and transcribe business cards.
The company has also integrated many of the features previously only present in Skitch, the dedicated drawing and annotation app it pulled from app marketplaces back in January, into Evernote proper.
Premium users can use this same functionality to also annotate PDF files.
On the visual side of things, Evernote has added support for strikethrough, subscript, and superscript formatting styles, and last but not least, the app now allows users to use a long press to quickly select multiple notes while in the main app screen.
Download Evernote from the Google Play Store.
[source]Evernote[/source]
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