New Evernote API Ripe With Mashup Potential
Evernote, the note-taking app on steroids, is fulfilling a much requested gap in the company’s service with a new public API which will allow developers to tap into the Evernote database.
Evernote is both a web-based service and desktop client for collecting and storing snippets of data — a kind of Delicious.com for your life. Evernote can store clippings from the web, text notes, emails and pictures, and it can even pull the text out of images, making it particularly handy when used in conjunction with a camera phone.
We loved Evernote back when it first launched, but the lack of third party access was a deal breaker for us (see the recent discussion about trapping your data in webapps for some background). However, the new API solves those worries by giving you outside access to all your Evernote clippings.
The API also opens the door for some potentially impressive mashups — Evernote’s killer feature is the cloud-based OCR technology for taking your image input and parsing out actual text. The new API opens the doors to those tools so that just about anyone can tap into that OCR and create all sorts of mashup goodness.
While I haven’t actually tested the API, reading over the newly released documentation reveals a robust collection of methods for accessing just about all aspects of Evernote. Unfortunately, as a side effect of that thoroughness, the API is somewhat complicated.
But the good news is that the API is two-way, meaning you can read and write to your Evernote account. The API is based around the Evernote Data Access and Management (EDAM) protocol, which is what Evernote’s own client applications use.
Also worth noting: the API uses OAuth to authenticate web apps. Kudos to Evernote for embracing standards rather than reinventing the wheel.
To get started with the new API you’ll need to request access to Evernote (which gets you an OAuth Consumer Key and Consumer Secret). In a particularly nice touch, Evernote will give you a set of sandbox URLs to test your application with and then when you’re done you can move to the production environment.
If you’re interested in playing with the new API check out the overview document which lists all the public methods and has a few Java-based example scripts.
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