Evernote 4

Posted by dan7000
Nov 16, 2010 at 07:27 PM

I use EN 4 - it’s the primary software application in my workflow.

I think the issues raised in Daly’s email are mostly questions of taste. What fits with one person’s workflow might not fit with another person’s. For me, EN is the right program and is evolving in the right direction. Obviously, for others, that’s not as true. A few additional comments in-line below:

Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Is anyone using EN 4?
> >I think it is faster in its Windows version.
> >However, given
>that it is an information program, and therefore more than a clipper of steroids which
>can be used on just about any known platform (a good thing for those who need it), I hope
>the developers begin to focus on info management more than they have.

Personally, I use EN for a lot more than just clipping. In fact, that’s why Surfulater—with its clipping focus—cannot replace EN for me. I use EN for 4 things, in this order:
1. fast note taking (meeting notes, ideas, reminders)
2. gathering information related to one topic of research for my work. This information generally comes from snippets of documents in PDF, Word, or Email form. Each snippet needs to be notated with topic information as well as bibliographic information and sometimes context.
3. first drafts of documents—this is often a bullet list or less structured outline of ideas, with reference to the information collected in #2, above.
4. web clipping

For me, nothing does the first 3 of these faster and easier than EN.

For notetaking, most programs like Ultrarecall and Surfulater force me to make lots of decisions about what type (or template) of note I’m taking—and where to store it (what notebook or category) before I can start typing—either that, or after I finish typing, I have to make lots of decisions before moving on. With EN, I click CTRL-ALT-N, start typing, maybe add a tag, and close the window. I never have to decide what folder to keep a note in, I never have to choose a template or fill out lots of complicated fields.

The ability to enter and find notes on my blackberry and my ipod are increasingly important aspects of my use of EN for notetaking. But they are not the main things that attract me to the program.

For collecting research, EN’s simplicity is again its strength. I can put 10 clips in one note, or have 1 clip per note. I basically use it just like notepad, but with rich text. Again, there is no need to figure out lots of complicated extra fields before I start researching and typing in citations.

All of this only works because of EN’s fast searching, which I discuss below.

>
>For example,
>tags and highlighting.
> >The tagging capability is less than it was with version 2.

I hated the UI of EN v.2 so much that I never had a chance to be familiar with the tagging, so I can’t comment on this. I do like EN’s focus on tagging as the primary method of information management. For me, tags and fast searching are the right way to handle exponentially-growing amounts of information.

Fast searching is one of the primary things that makes EN useful. In Windows v 4, search speed has finally gotten back to—or faster than—what it was in v 3.1. Being able to find a note or clipping instantaneously based on any remembered snippet of its contents is something many apps promise, but few deliver. EN does this for text and for images, using its own OCR engine. It’s is so good at this that some folks in the EN forums copy all their emails from Outlook into EN just so they are more searchable.

> >
>And highlighting of text seems to have been yet again bypassed.

This is an example of a difference in taste. I have never cared about highlighting information in electronic documents. Highlights are not useful to me because they are not distinguishable or searchable. I.e., if I highlight 50 phrases in a document, I can’t easily find the one highlighted phrase I care about without navigating through all 50 highlights.

This is a much-requested feature, so apparently it’s useful to some people, though.

> >My hope is that at
>some future point - sooner rather than later - that Neville, developer of Surfulater,
>can give Surfulater a cloud capability.
> >Even if Surfulater does not work on other
>platforms, I suspect there is a significant number of Windows users who would support
>a cloud version - enough to make it worthwhile.
> >Neville has shown more sensitivity
>than EN’s developers to the need for post-clip information management tools, and
>though there is not a column option ( a favorite feature of mine), he has provided a way
>to deal with metadata which is effective. As well, Surfulater has a tagging process
>which allows for searches for items with both tag A and tag B. It is done very
>smartly.

EN can do any searches for any boolean combinations of tags. I’m not sure what “column option” is?
Again, this may be a matter of taste, but I think EN’s developers are probably the most responsive and communicative of any software developers I’ve ever encountered - indeed, that is their strength. If you check out the forums or the EN blog, you’ll find that some employees seem to spend their entire day interacting with users regarding EN feature ideas and plans.

Regarding “the need for post-clip information management tools,” EN has been very responsive to ideas and questions regarding the design and use of the tagging interface, which is “post-clip.” They also have greatly improved intra- and inter- note search, which is also “post-clip.” They have also, after considerable criticism in the forums, started to roll out heirarchical notebooks, a decision that I think detracts from the focus on tags, but that shows responsiveness to user demands. I agree, however, that EN does not focus on how to organize your information - the whole concept is that if search and tagging are fast and easy enough, then you shouldn’t have to spend hours re-organizing your data. That concept is what appeals to me, but obviously there are other applications for those who want more organizational capability.

>
>Daly