Geekblok

BOK surprised me with an invitation email about a website I never noticed. The small mail suggested that I should check it out and maybe write a little about it here, due to absence of BOK this weekend.

So I did check it out and had no clue what to expect. The sign up was easy enough and after a few seconds, I was looking at my online “notebook” hosted by Evernote.

I’ve seen such dump sites before and they never really seemed to interest me for more than a minute. I know Joffie has his own wiki at home for dumping notes, and I have CVS and SVN software installed on my home machine(s) so I don’t really need this either. But then I found out it also offers text recognition within images. Now that’s something my `grep` can’t do, so this might be nice! Time to explore the service after all.

Evernote allows you to email stuff to a special email address. The contents of the email will be added to your notebook. So let’s find out how good their text recognition really is.

My first test was to send this image to my notebook. It’s a picture I recently made in a local McDonalds place. It has large bold text which, I think, shouldn’t be too hard to catch for them:
And sure, they are able to capture the text. Searching for ’solliciteert’ gives me the correct image and they even highlight it nicely as shown in this screen capture:
Evernote does claim they can recognize handwritten text too though, so why not test that? I scribbled a little down and took a picture with my Nokia N95.
After mailing the image, I could see it in my notebook (which happens extremely fast by the way), but will I be able to search for all the words? Except for the word ‘Geekblok’, all the words can be found.

Oh well, I’m still fairly impressed with this. Too bad it’ll probably won’t beat my wiki (yeah, just like Joffie, but I barely use it) and my svn repositories. Besides the text recognition, there’s nothing that really stands out here and I’m simply too paranoid to trust all my personal notes to a company (especially if they’re US-based, like Evernote).

If you need an invitation, just drop me a note. I still have 10 left and I’m fairly sure BOK has some catching dust too