Evernote Clearly: A Distraction Free Reading Tool With A Difference

Reading blogs, news columns or editorials is not so entertaining these days, thanks to all the advertisements, buttons, widgets and other on page clutter on webpages. There are a couple of ways to read articles in a distraction free environment, e.g using Safari Reader, an ad block browser extension or using the famous Readability bookmarklet.

Since I don’t use Safari Reader and neither I am fan of any Ad block extensions (they hog down the browser), my preferred choice has always been Readability for a clean and clutter free reading experience. At the same time, I use Evernote for saving webpages for offline reading and clipping specific portion of text for later reference.

With Evernote’s Clearly feature, looks like I won’t be needing the Readability bookmarklet anymore.

Evernote Clearly is a brilliant Chrome extension which removes clutter from any webpage and allows you to clip the page to your Evernote account. Evernote Clearly also allows easier reading of lengthy articles that are spanned across multiple pages, so this ensures that you don’t have to hit the “Next Page” links at the bottom of every editorial news column.

Evernote clearly will automatically combine all the multi-page articles into one page and insert page breaks whenever applicable. You can save the entire page in your Evernote account using the keyboard shortcut Control + Alt + Up arrow.

The options page of Evernote clearly allows you to define a unique tag for pages that have been clipped from Evernote’s Clearly extension. Clearly comes with three in built themes and you can always create a customized theme that suits your eyes.

Watch the following video to understand how Clearly works:

Now this solves two things.

First, you no longer need those bulky ad blocker extensions anymore. Evernote’s clearly will automatically remove ads, widgets ad other distractions from any webpage you’re currently reading and offer a more subtle version.

Second, you no longer have to use other browser extensions for saving webpages for offline reading. Simply use the clip to Evernote option from Clearly and the page will be clipped. Next, you can run Evernote’s desktop application and the notes will be saved for offline reading. Clever!

There are a couple of downsides though.

You can’t clip specific portions of text and neither you can save videos, images and other media elements to your Evernote account. Clearly will only clip webpages and that too complete ones. The formatted version is only available from your browser and not from your Evernote account, when you have clipped it from Clearly.

Overall, this works as a smart combination of an ad blocker and a web clipper extension, ideal for marking webpages for later reading.