Anyone Using eagle app?

Posted by oliver
Jul 21, 2021 at 11:30 AM

hey,

I agree with everything Jessi wrote.
it seems astonishing: Eagle started as a design-reference resource. but it just evolves in lightning speed. and at some point the developers (I think Chinese, East Asian for sure…) started being responsive to the user-base, following a steeply dynamic and web-transparent feature development-path… and it made ‘boom’.

now, I am astonished to see this electron-app slowly eat into a lot of other use-cases including central ones to my knowledge organisation: organized bookmarking, media reference libraries, ‘meta-‘slide respositories etc. because it is so fast, frictionless in use, well organized handy / intelligent UI, has the splendid webclipper Jessi mentioned and just is a charm to work with it eats its way into some uses that I used to do with higher-grade / specialized tools like DevonThink, TheBrain, KeepIt, Dropmark etc.

some more gem features are localized image annotation (hotspots), organization btw libraries (moving files with a ‘one click’ solution), visual bookmarking, search filters galore + saved intelligent searches etc. but relly, all features of the UX are versatile, intelligently + densely organized… and the sheer speed and combined with a ‘flat’ non-byzanthine UI (think DevonThink here…) is just making everything that is good about it so much better still.

there are some drawbacks though stemming from its original use-case and it seems to me stemming from the fact it´s Electron-based.
there is no (inherent) way for global search of (sub-)libraries, there is no way to open the libraries outside of the app itself, but most importantly to me: the metadata one produces in Eagle is not written back to established, native metadata structures - at least on the Mac. while Eagle by now imports IPTC keywords (and possibly OSX tags), no metadata produced in Eagle are passed on in any appropriate way. so , tags are not to be found via OSX tag system, comments are not in the original file nothing in images is written back to IPTC or XML. Eagle is writing all that to a JSON-sidecar file.
– so, interoperability with other programs – image organizing + DAM, Devon Think etc. is not really there.

so while Eagle excels in ‘frictionless’ experience as long as one is inside it, friction to other tools and info-ecosystems is a HUGE problem, sadly.
I reached out to the dev-team about this, and they registered this concern very responsively. but currently I see no hint of anything being really done about it (while the UI and other features are still improving notably!)

... with this being my greatest headache about Eagle, I was wondering, Jessi:

Jessi Williams wrote:
>I love that it will let you add your tags and keywords to the
>image/audio/video itself to make it a lot easier to find and browse.

– what do you mean by ‘let you add your tags and keywords to the image/audio/video itself’?
do you mean *inside* Eagle? or does Eagle on Windows possibly behave differently and write true metadata?
very interested in this!

best!
oliver