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Quickly Send Webpages To Evernote with EverWebClipper

As I explained in my previous look at my writing workflow, I use a selection of tools to save notes and other bits of text to Dropbox and Evernote. While such array of applications and utilities is ever-changing due to the very nature of the App Store, the core intent of being able to distinctively store text in separate locations stays true regardless of app updates and new releases.

I use Evernote as long-term storage for a variety of text and media that isn’t necessarily an article I need to work on inside a dedicated text editor. I keep images and PDFs that I may want to reference in the future in Evernote; I archive my own tweets and favorite tweets in two separate notebooks using IFTTT (thanks to Evernote’s search, I consider this a DIY alternative to Cue, which I also use); I keep digital scrapbooks with screenshots, design inspiration material, and app documentation stored inside Evernote, and often shared with colleagues. Dropbox is for text; Evernote is for other kinds of text and more.

It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I want to archive webpages or links in Evernote as well. On my Mac, I use a couple of AppleScripts put together by our Don Southard to quickly archive URLs or text-based versions of webpages in my Evernote inbox for later processing. On iOS, I have been using a simple tool called EverWebClipper to instantly beam webpages from Safari to my Evernote account.

EverWebClipper isn’t pretty but it’s functional. Furthermore, it’s one of those tools that you don’t really need to look at, as much as you need to ensure it can work reliably in performing the functionality it was made for.

The app can be used to save webpages as URLs, styled pages, or “simple” ones. The styled option will try to preserve the original design of a webpage while allowing you to still edit text and other elements in Evernote; the “simple” clip style will strip out graphics and other elements from webpages, trying to focus on text and hyperlinks.

In actual testing, I found the styled setting to work reliably for minimalist sites like ShawnBlanc.net and Marco.org, suffering a bit in rendering graphics afterwards with sites like ours, or The Verge. However, it’s very convenient to be able to archive webpages “as they are”, even if some icons may be misaligned or missing. I’m not the biggest fan of Evernote’s “simple” mode for webpages, so I was bummed to see the app has some issues in saving the styled version of Instapaper-mobilized articles, which I prefer (and often convert to PDF on my iPad using Save2PDF).

Overall, I welcome the URL option; I like the possibilities offered by styled clips (though they’re hit or miss depending on the website); but I wish the “simple” setting would use a more capable parser like Instapaper’s.

Where EverWebClipper really wins over Evernote’s standard clipper (not optimized for mobile and terrible to use in Safari) is the actual clipping process. It’s entirely automated: you can install a bookmarklet in Safari and save webpages with one tap. This happens thanks to the app’s Automation settings, which enable you to tap on the bookmarklet, and have Safari automatically return in the foreground while EverWebClipper completes the saving process. You can return to Safari “immediately” or “after clipping” – if you choose immediately, the app will send a local notification when it’s done clipping.

There are other settings available in the app, as well as a manual mode to paste URLs and specify notebooks and tags every time, rather than through the bookmarklet.

At $3.99 for the iPad version and $2.99 on the iPhone, I don’t like EverWebClipper’s pricing scheme, and I think the developer should consider making a single universal version – especially considering the minimal differences in terms of features and design between the two. However, EverWebClipper provides a better experience than Evernote’s own bookmarklet for grabbing entire webpages (not portions of them) on iOS, so you should check it out if you’ve been looking for a solid mobile Evernote clipper.

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