Anyone played with Ifttt.com? It's a really smart way to hook up web apps.
I've found myself using Evernote a lot more since Ifttt.com can send anything from Instagram, Instapaper, Pinboard, Gmail to Evernote. I'm now using Evernote as a backup/archive of everything else... If I can't remember whether I posted an image to Facebook or Instagram then I know, for sure, it'll have been sucked into my Enote archive.
And they've just released an 'Append to note' action for Evernote.
Stumbled upon this post while blog hopping and I all I can say is Evernote is truly a powerful tool. Been using it along Snap-A-Note (free app that allows me to send pictures directly to my email or my friends email), and both of them greatly helped me in keeping all of my work organized. They simplified the way how I take down notes, store and share information. Looking forward to see more of your posts. Keep up the good work!
I appreciate the utility of Evernote. Don't have the problems with it that you do. Moreoever, I'd like to have one file-managment utility not several.
I'd like to have something like dashnote by Resen Co. - very fast and low-latency - that syncs plaintext to Evernote.
Well, I'm pretty sure I "borrowed" one or more of your scripts at some point. ;) Right now, it's an unholy combo of AppleScript and TextMate bundle commands. To edit an Evernote note as Markdown, I have an AppleScript (that I activate using FastScripts or something similar) that looks at the currently selected note in Evernote, runs the body through something similar to your markdown service (although Ruby instead of PHP), and sticks some of the metadata of the note at the top as MultiMarkdown properties—things like note title, notebook, tags, etc.
I tried the other half a few different ways. One is a TextMate bundle and file type (I called it EverMate, I think) that overrides Cmd-S to pull the metadata back out and insert or update the corresponding note in Evernote, again using a combo of Ruby for the Markdown processing via one of the gems, and AppleScript for the Evernote part (although I could probably just use rb-appscript).
The other way, that I couldn't quite get to work the way I liked yet, was to save the note as a random file to /tmp/evermate, and watch it using rb-fsevents or something. This let me edit it using whatever I wanted (macvim or something else), and/or get the cool TextMate "save on focus change" and so on.
Question (and something I may or may not have talked to Brett about in the past): would anyone else find use in a tool that would let you edit Evernote notes as markdown documents in your favorite text editor? It wouldn't solve the mobile editor problem, but I half-built a set of scripts that let me keep notes in Evernote as HTML but edit them in TextMate or whatever as Markdown notes. I'm thinking about reviving it...
Evernote excels (ha ha, Excel) for archiving and searching. It's like gmail for PDFs and such. I've got my college notes (I'm working on scanning those in) and kids' artwork and school handbooks and such in there.
Where Evernote is great is the sync, that you can pretty much live in the free version, they are really funny on their podcast, and the data is both local and in the cloud. That's the best of both worlds, so that you have a copy but their servers have a copy too. It's free online backup, but unlike gmail, it's local too (in case Evernote were to go out of business).
Great to hear some healthy pragmatism on this, and good to hear I'm not alone with the combination of nvALT, Pinboard & Evernote. For a while but I really wanted to be a plain text purist and felt a little guilty for using something proprietary like Evernote.
I've since realised it doesn't matter one bit.
Evernote is a rolling temporary bucket for me, and a back up for important PDFs, invoices, receipts that I'd be happy to have but hope to never need as they're also stored in Gmail and local backups.
If I do get carried away and end up writing at length in Evernote then exporting to HTML and using TextMate to remove HTML tags is enough to get me into plain text mode and dumping images into iPhoto isn't a chore once the export is done.
Slow startup is the only thing that bugs me about Evernote on the iPhone but I love having trip details in one long merges note on my iPad, perfect for showing at check-in desks and having offline where and when you need it.
Another option is to use Together from Reinvented Software, which is similar to Evernote but does not use a proprietary database. All your notes and files are kept in their original folders and format. For mobile notes simplnote is great, for txt notes NValt is the best, for all other stuff I use Together http://reinventedsoftware.c...
I used to use Evernote, but it becomes slow and cluttered overtime. I really dislike their philosophy of putting everything into Evernote. Evernote is not a file system, it is a notebook, but some people put everything in it.
I think Together is an awesome app (I've been a fan since 2007), but it actually isn't an option for the purposes listed above, primarily because it doesn't have a mobile counterpart. Even if you store your Together folder on Dropbox, the convenience level just isn't there for interfacing with a mobile app.
Glad to hear I'm not alone, living in both camps. :) Evernote is still the undisputed top tool for me for selecting a few lines of a web page and saving a basic-formatted version of that page, WITH images and source URL. Stuff falls off the web so quickly that it's nice to have that around.
For the record, for web clipping I've switched entirely to nvALT and Pinboard. With nvALT, if you set the preferences to "markdownify" urls (and optionally process with Readability), you can get a Markdown version of just about any web page by dragging the url to the notes list. With elastic thread's new nvIt extensions, you can do this straight from Safari and Chrome, too.
I also pay for Pinboard's extra services, which stores full-text archives of pages I bookmark, and with my Pinboard->OpenMeta scripts, I can add a tag "pdfit" to a bookmark and it ends up on my drive (using Paparazzi!) as a searchable PDF automatically. With these options, I've stopped clipping to Evernote entirely.
When classes started this year I gave Evernote a fair shake and for me its just one extra layer between me and my data. The ability to sync across my devices is the best feature for sure but that is negated by its slow launch time and the fact that it is yet another place to look for my data. I also scan everything in but find a few Hazel rules works best for my workflow. I wonder if you will still use it when iCloud is polished up and released.
By the way, what home inventory software do you use?
I'm actually still pinning that down. For a long time now I've been playing with a file-based system using folders and tags, but it just feels hackish. Most of my electronics and related items are in Delicious Library, but I'm experimenting with Compartments.
I had even started working on a system for documenting my possessions in Evernote, but found that software that had ready-to-go metadata which was appropriate to inventory made more sense. Delicious and Compartments both have strong suits, so the game is still afoot.
I fiddle in my free time. It's what I do.
Remarkbox