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Evernote Privacy Policy Changes
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Posted by WSP
Dec 19, 2016 at 02:34 PM
dan7000 wrote:
>
>What software are people here adopting as an alternative to Evernote for
>cross-platform, muti-client/synced web clipping, PDF tagging, and
>notetaking?
>
Good question—one I often ask myself. The solution for me is to turn to several apps.
I have gradually moved most of my data out of Evernote, but I am still using it for one big project: a literary website that my wife and I maintain (https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com/).
For my archive of older research notes, I throw everything into OneNote; I also fall back on OneNote, incidentally, for family history material, because it is easy and fun to use, and it looks almost like an old-fashioned scrapbook on the screen.
For bibliographical references and links, I have adopted CintaNotes, which is probably too stripped-down to serve as a full-fledged database, but its tagging system works brilliantly for short citations.
Over a period of years I was immersed in MyInfo, for which I still feel a great deal of affection. It was always reliably stable and had probably the most attractive UI of any program I’ve ever encountered. But the pace of development has been sluggish (to put it mildly); I am now trying out a beta version of MyInfo 7, which looks promising, but there is still no indication of when that will be released. The new version will offer the *possibility* of cross-platform apps at some unspecified time in the future.
Lately I’ve also been playing around with RightNote. It’s very similar to MyInfo—probably more powerful but also less visually attractive. I’m afraid I find its menus cluttered and confusing. But it does the job efficiently, though it’s available only on Windows. (While it does offer some integration with EverNote, the syncing seems too slow to be useful.)
Like everyone else on this forum, I fantasize constantly about the perfect app that would combine the strengths of all of the above. I assume it will never materialize.
Posted by Larry Kollar
Dec 19, 2016 at 03:23 PM
dan7000 wrote:
>What software are people here adopting as an alternative to Evernote for
>cross-platform, muti-client/synced web clipping, PDF tagging, and
>notetaking?
I’ve been playing with Google Keep for a while. Its biggest lack is a web clipper for desktop browsers right now, unless you’re using Chrome.
t th
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 19, 2016 at 05:06 PM
As a Mac user, I currently use Bear and Outlinely for general notes of all kinds. I run both on macOS and iOS.
Bear is ideal for storing short extracts from web pages, and for making long lists of tasks. Outlinely is ideal for monitoring and checking off project-related tasks, because you can fold them and take detailed notes. So I tend to use them together - Bear for the broad overview, Outlinely for specific projects. In principle Todoist would also be ideal for this, but I find Todoist (very) frustrating from a note-taking point of view. If only they would adopt full GitHub-style Markdown!
For storing PDFs I usually use Curiota on macOS, saving the files into a dedicated Soonr folder so I can sync them with my iOS devices if I want to (Soonr uses a selective synchronisation approach on iOS).
But I also use Notebooks for stuff I know I want to transfer between platforms. Sometimes I also use Dropbox, because I have a couple of folders in there that sync automatically with the excellent Documents on my iOS devices (formerly ReaddleDocs).
As mentioned, I use Soonr on both platforms, usually for transferring Office documents. I’ve experimented with Together and Keep Everything, but have found that I don’t want to store entire databases of bulky PDFs on my iOS devices. I’ve just started to experiment with DEVONthink Pro on iOS, but haven’t got very far yet.
There’s a very nice summary of various iOS apps used in professional workflows on macstories.net, the website run by Federico Viticci, in his comprehensive summary of the iPad Pro used as a main workstation (he’s almost entirely abandoned his Macs). There are a couple of very interesting apps in there, as well as a lot of useful info on automation. He too is experimenting with DEVONthink Pro. But what he writes on various Markdown apps will probably interest forum members more.
Posted by Paul Korm
Dec 19, 2016 at 05:30 PM
I like Bill’s list, but I would tweak a couple things.
I like Bear (despite being rather critical of it when it first arrived), but it’s whole page clipping doesn’t work well with paywalled sites, even when logged in. It needs to learn that trick. Also, Bear does not capture Safari URLs with its clippings.
To get a clipping + URL I recommend DEVONthink (desktop) with it’s “Take Rich Text Note” service that makes a nice note and grabs the URL for that page at the same time. Curiota (sometimes) does this. But my favorite is the Safari clipping extension for iThoughtsX—it also grabs the text and URL. Using iThoughtsX as a note capturing hub is great because it offers so many ways to move that data on to other apps in other formats.
Isn’t it great how conversations like this start with one theme—Evernote privacy policy—and evolve after a few posts into “my favorite things”. I think Steve Z needs to update the definition of CRIMP to include “never gets bored looking, reading, and commenting on lists of favorite apps”. LOL
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 19, 2016 at 09:16 PM
Yo Paul,
Well, I don’t know about paywalled sites (I don’t visit them, ever), but Bear certainly preserves URLs from captured web pages. You’re right that earlier iterations didn’t, but the last couple of releases save the URL to the bottom of the captured web page. It’s pretty consistent, in my recent experience, and is one reason why I increasingly save web clips to Bear. That, and if you click and hold the Bear button on the Safari toolbar, you can choose one of three different save options. That’s cool! I should add that I tend to save text fragments or even entire web page “articles” to my various databases, rather than just URLs, but I do that as well.
Web pages are best captured to Curiota as PDFs, in which case it’s a good idea to modify your print settings so that headers and footers are automatically inserted; this will preserve the relevant URLs, as well as dates/times etc. Curiota can also save the URL plus a brief description on its own (using the standard Share button, rather than the context-menu Print to Curiota function). The Curiota search function is very good (and fast).
I like DEVONthink, and in fact I use the very powerful search functions for several business databases, but I find it a bit too unwieldy for fast, day-to-day use. But it’s an impressively comprehensive system.
And I suppose another reason we CRIMPers love rehearsing our lists of favourite apps is because we’re constantly learning about new features in apps we thought we already knew. For me, that’s always highly entertaining! Oh, and useful.
Cheers,
Bill