Rightnote and Evernote

Posted by Vincek
Apr 16, 2013 at 10:19 PM

I just spent (wasted) several hours trying out RightNote. In fairness to the developer, it gets very good reviews from almost all users, and I can see that it could work well as a standalone or primary program.

But it doesn’t fill the GREAT BIG HOLE in my workflow—items 2 & 3:

1) Capture (Many options. For me, Evernote)
2) Filter
3) Synthesize
4) Produce (Many options. For me, Scrivener)

i.e., the issues previously raised and discussed in the post:
Information conveniently captured in Evernote; now what?
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4813

...or put another way, IMHO and for MY workflow, RightNote is not a suitable front-end program to pull and organize data from Evernote.

As WSP points out, yes there is some interfacing capability between RightNote and Evernote, but it’s not ready for prime time. I’d call it kludgy.

I have 3,100 notes in Evernote. About 2/3 are filed in about two dozen different notebooks; the remaining items are in a category I think of as a junk drawer—it’s where I throw stuff that doesn’t have a natural, discrete place to go.

For those not familiar with Evernote, one of the biggest complaints is that Evernote only allows for 2 levels of structure in Notebooks. Not enough for me. Some argue that tags can make up the differences, but I say “no way” (this is really a separate discussion).

RightNote’s hierarchy capabilities are much more refined. Using their terminology, you can create multiple levels of hierarchy using notebooks, pages, sibling notes, and child notes.

RightNote has the ability to pull from multiple Evernote notebooks, but you can only use one Evernote notebook per each RightNote notebook. This is a deal killer given that 2/3 of my notes in Evernote are already reasonably filed into notebooks.

A possible workaround is to create multiple notebooks in RightNote, but the program requires you to open Notebooks separately. Then you are able to access different Evernote notebooks aligned with a distinct Rightnote notebook, but again this is kludgy and the process of transferring notes is technically possible but time consuming and confusing. I don’t see an easy way to have 2 notebooks open at once, and besides I want to have all my research and notes organized in 1 notebook, not many.

Dr. Andus asked about RightNote analytical capabilities. They are fairly limited—I’d still have to do most of the synthesis in my head.

Very frustrating. With 55M Evernote users, you’d think either Evernote or an outside developer would create a front end that allows for better, more detailed organizing and synthesis of Evernote data. But not yet, so I wait….