29/09/08
21Evernote
For the past 2 years, I’ve been a staunch user of Yojimbo to collect all my bits and pieces, from PDF receipts to textpattern plugins and serial numbers. Having gone through a lot of notebook/organiser type apps, it was the one I really gelled with.
The same couldn’t be said of Evernote, which I tried initially but didn’t give a second look. I’m not sure if there are new features in there, but recently I’ve been changing my mind. Part of the reason for this is the iPhone app: it becomes a way of collecting data when I’m out – voice notes, text notes and photos, which can then be synced and searched later.
I also discovered that you can publish a notebook publically, along with a wee widget for embedding this on your site. I love this idea, and my mind is reeling with possibilities:
Then there is of course it’s main selling point – OCR technology, which means it will discover text in images. The uses for this are endless, but two great examples are scanning in business cards, or capturing notes made on a whiteboard.
Finally, from an aesthetic point of view, Evernote have the design licked. The desktop app looks good, and I can even get the widescreen view that I had to hack Yojimbo to get:
There are just a few niggles that stop me from leaving Yojimbo. My biggest bugbear though is that it’s not easy to get my stuff out again. Here’s an example: Every time I buy something, the receipt is printed as a PDF to Yojimbo and tag it with ‘accounts’, the same with any invoices I get in. When it comes to my quarterly send all paperwork to the bookkeeper time, I can easily see and select all the stuff for that quarter and drag and drop from the list in Yojimbo to a mail message – done. Evernote does all this, up until the ‘drag and drop’ point. It lets you drag, but no drop happens. You can’t even export individual items, other than dragging off textclippings or images.
Moving data to Evernote was easy, due to the way Yojimbo stores and exports stuff in it’s original format – .txt, .jpg, .pdf etc. Once in Evernote however, these become part of a note. If I ever wanted to move my data to another app, I can imagine this would cause a big problem.
One of the first things I did when started using the desktop app, was to remove the ‘monthly usage’ thermometer from the toolbar. Its screams ‘RESTRICTION’ at me all the time, but I can feel more relaxed now that it’s gone:
Some other features of Yojimbo that I would miss are encryption of notes, and the way it allows you to store serial numbers and passwords. So, it’s a close run now, but Evernote is definitely a contender, and if the export/format issue could be fixed, I’ll sign up for a premium account in a flash.
Update : Turns out Evernote can export after all, although not by dragging and dropping. Select the items and press the ‘Email’ icon. If you select PDFs. they’re added as attachments to an email in their original state. Images however have an ‘evernote’ branded frame around them.
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Jono said 67 days ago:
For quite a while I didn’t ‘get’ Evernote, but after giving it a try I really like it.
I’m dumping (just about) everything in there now, and loving the fact that images & screenshots are OCRed. Really handy to add screenshots of some app’s preferences where the text in them is searchable.
I also want to see dragging a dropping items out of Evernote to export them, in the same way you can with Yojimbo. I think this is planned in the future so hope it will come soon. As I write this I’m seeing a new version, so downloading it now.
I wasn’t loving the original icon so made some new ones here http://tr.im/2d6
(Shameless self promotion over now :p )
Peter Mahnke said 67 days ago:
Jon,
I am at exactly the same point as you — between Yojimbo and Evernote. I have no real desire to leave Yojimbo, but Bare Bones doesn’t seem to share with their users the direction they are going, or not going with their product. It is hard to ignore how good Evernote is getting when Yojimbo’s feature set appears so static.
Peter
Karim Ardalan said 67 days ago:
Hi Jon,
I had also downloaded Evernote, but never took the time to really learn what it does. After reading your blog post, I decided to give it another try and I think it’s great! I will definitely be switching from Yojimbo.
By the way, there is a way to drag and drop items from Yojimbo into Evernote. All you need to do is to drag the item from Yojimbo onto the Evernote icon on the dock and it will get imported. Check it out!
Thanks,
Karim
David Chartier said 67 days ago:
For what it’s worth, you can encrypt parts of notes in Evernote, just not an entire note like you can in Yojimbo. Select a text portion of a note (I’m not sure if this works for files like photos or PDFs), right-click, and select encrypt.
I’ve been writing about and using both apps for some time now, and I’ve been in touch with Evernote’s CEO about their choice to go this route. They made a good case for encrypting portions of a note, but I’ve still been bugging them for a simple way to just encrypt an entire note to make things easier.
Still, FWIW, you can still encrypt things like serial numbers and passwords in Evernote to protect them. One caveat, though, is that encrypted items aren’t available in Evernote’s web interface. On the upside: you can decrypt on the iPhone.
Ryan Faubion said 67 days ago:
i heart Evernote. excellent resource for storing inspirational items, tips, humor, whatever.
my poor Google Reader no longer is suffering near ‘Starred Items’ bankruptcy.
neil said 66 days ago:
I’ve emailed Evernote a few times about features that I really miss from Yojimbo that I’m hoping make an appearance in Evernote. Specifically, I asked about RTF and Safari web archive support, as I have a TON of web archives in Yojimbo, and I embed software license files into RTFs in Yojimbo so that they’re imported properly.
The good news is that RTF support is coming somewhat soonish, and they’ve also confirmed that Yojimbo database importing is on the roadmap. So I may 100% switch soon…
Manuela said 66 days ago:
Same here. It is so ridiculously easy to get stuff into Evernote but I am not sure how to get it out again. So I’ll keep using Yojimbo just until that export feature is added to Evernote.
Jon Hicks said 66 days ago:
@Karim – the problem is NOT exporting from Yojimbo, that’s the easy bit! It’s exporting from Evernote that doesn’t work very well.
Michael Grinstead said 66 days ago:
Evernote had been sitting redundant in my app’s folder until they release it for the iphone, now its in constant use, especially the voice notes.
Stefan said 66 days ago:
I miss export and semantic markup for text (quote, code …). And tagging of multiple files. Nevertheless this is a really useful program.
neil said 66 days ago:
Jon, did you import your yojimbo data into Evernote? If so, how did you manage Yojimbo’s tags and such?
I just noticed that the new Evernote version that dropped today has applescript support, so that might be a (probably very slow) option for transferring data between the two apps. Investigating…
Jon Hicks said 66 days ago:
I just dragged and dropped! It didn’t bring across tags, but I’m not a particularly diligent tagger!
dway said 66 days ago:
Don’t forget that you can use Evernote together with Skitch!
Lovin’ it!
kristian said 65 days ago:
True, the OCR feature is a killer when compared to Yojimbo. It’s really cool. But at the same time you can’t drag in .doc/.psd/.zip -files, or Pages/Numbers -files (which Yojimbo wont do either) which is pretty limiting. However, I think Evernote with it’s iPhone app, OCR, and free web interface is the way to go, for me. I just hope I can start dumping more types of files in there soon.
Bradley Wright said 64 days ago:
I find the lack of sane export, and the fact that Evernote doesn’t preserve styles when clipping web pages (see Together.app for this being done really well) as a bit of a deal breaker.
For the latter they probably just need to roll in Web Archive functionality, but still.
Sergio Mora said 64 days ago:
Last version of Evernote lets you export notes as XML files. However, I really don’t know how to deal with those XML. They encode in a particular way images and encrypted selections.
What is interesting in Evernote is its ubicuity. The new API let you access your data the way you want. The downside, is that Evernote proprietary formats are still very closed. They don’t interact well with Cocoa Apps. What I love in the Mac platform is the interaction between Cocoa apps (drag’n drop, services, etc.). Evernote works very well but by its own.
As for other applications as Yojimbo, Together or DEVONthink, anyone has offered to support the iPhone. That’s a really shame, because everybody is searching an application to acces notes and clippings from the iPhone and the Mac.
dan said 64 days ago:
now that the Api is out, I’m sure someone will come up with an import/export script. Might even have a go myself if I get some spare time.
jon said 64 days ago:
There isn’t a day where I am not using Evernote. Whether it’s for keeping recipes I find, Mac tips and tricks I was not familiar with, or an article from a favorite columnist, it’s almost always open for me.
I have no real need for exporting any of the data. The best part is that I have it all with me on my iPhone as well. The other apps do not offer that.
Jon Hicks said 63 days ago:
So you’re always going to use Evernote? I worry about the lack of easy in-easy out, it’s MY data after all, not Evernotes.
zx said 62 days ago:
Unfortunately, they told me that they are not going to support web-archives…
Richard Angstmann said 55 days ago:
I hardly used Evernote at all when I first downloaded it, but its starting to get a lot more use, I am finding I turn to it in many more situations as time goes by.
Biggest bugbear for me is the lack of CSS when saving a full web page. Its unstyled, and it really annoys me. What I would love to see is a way to save a full web page with all the CSS styles and with the ability to highlight certain parts of the page and save the whole thing as a note.