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Safari Extensions in V5 - Evernote Extension Coming?
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Posted by Tom S.
Aug 7, 2010 at 02:51 PM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Tom, what do you see as the flaws, and what I should be aware of as I get into Devon
>Think?
Before I do that I want to make it clear that this is a good program. The easiest thing to do is sit back and criticize. You guys could probably name any piece of software and I could spend a week ripping it to shreds. Anyone could.
I like this program. There are many, many great things about it. Its strength is the auto-classify feature/“artificial intelligence” and the fact that it handles such large quantities of data very well. These are the things that it is primarily designed to do and it does it well. It does all kinds of other things. OCR’s documents. Allows you to annotate pdfs. There’s a iPad/iPhone version on the way.
Probably most important to me - its scriptable. That means I can write my own scripts to allow it to interact with the Mac environment and, along with other users, share them in the forums. The author dozens of very useful scripts and templates with the program. This is much more important to me than anything mentioned below because it allows a great deal of customization.
Bottom line, its a good program and I use it and recommend it.
Having said that, here are a few things off of the top of my head:
1) Date fields. If you have items you want to associate a date with other than the standard meta data that you get with the file system (data modified, creation date, etc…) you need to associate the item with an appointment or a todo in iCal. This can be a clumsy process especially if you want to copy the event or todo back into the program (which requires another script). Even if you do this, the program doesn’t sync with iCal. A change in one place doesn’t show up in the other.
So the programs not great at tracking dates. I, personally, rely a great deal on iCal.
2) No custom meta data fields. You can’t create your own fields like you would, for instance, in a database or in SQLNotes, Ultrarecall or Ecco. Pretty much strictly hierarchical tagging.
3) Related to 2, no field for annotations. If you want to annotate a file you need to link it to another text file with a hyperlink, usually in the URL field of the document. You can also add Spotlight comments to the file as you would with the Mac’s filesystem but this is strictly limited to plain text.
4) Related to both 2 and 3, there’s only one URL field. This field is usually occupied with the URL of the document if it came from the Internet (e.g. “http://theserver/thedirectory/thedocument.html”). That means, of course, that you can’t easily annotate these documents because there’s no easy way to link the item to another item in the database (as the URL field is already occupied).
5) No good way to exclude data in a search. For instance, you can’t search for “tagged with ‘Tag1’ but not with ‘Tag2’”.
6) Date searches are currently severely limited. “Yesterday”, “Last Week”, and “Last year” are possible but if you want to search for “Any document created between ‘Date1’ and ‘Date2’” you can’t.
7) Currently no really good way to keep a database synchronized on two machines. You can, of course, keep it on a USB thumbdrive but if its a big database, the access speed is pretty slow. Dropbox works only if you are extremely careful to let it completely synchronize before opening the database. I completely hosed one database by not doing this. It causes serious problems and its easy to forget. If you forget to close the database on one machine and open it on another, you completely screw up the database (there is a warning and an option to cancel before the program lets you do it).
Posted by Tom S.
Aug 7, 2010 at 03:12 PM
Tom S. wrote:
>2) No custom meta
>data fields. You can’t create your own fields like you would, for instance, in a
>database or in SQLNotes, Ultrarecall or Ecco.
Sorry, Pierre. I meant InfoQube not SQLNotes.
Tom