By excluding Spotlight, Evernote is making life more difficult for Apple Users

[Ryq G 27]

One Search will rule them all.

Imagine if you will, that each software company had different standards.  To print in one ctrl-p, another F1, a third--wave your hands in the air.  To save: Ctr-S, or Option-Cmd-S, or /fs  What if each home had its own electrical standards?  Imagine going into a restroom and not knowing how to flush the toilet. (You have to sing to this one.)  Or after installing that huge new tv set, you find that the remote is designed to be held only at floor level....behind the tv.   Going into a new parking lot, the directional signs are in Greek.  And why are the lights at this intersections blue, orange, and white? What fresh hell is this?

Standards--it's a good thing.  There are many councils that help us know how to plug a lamp into a wall no matter the manufacturer.  Cars that run on diesel or gas take different sized nozzles.  The light switch to almost any room you enter is next to the door at about four feet above the ground.  I know a chicken is done when I get 165 on the thermometer.  (or  74 celsius--there's still work to be done) They save a lot of time, learning and money by making us productive.

I can find almost anything on my computer or cloud storage or internet with Spotlight.  On Windows, it's Explorer.  Except for Evernote.  I know there are those people who remember anything, or have plenty of time to do multiple searches, or never need to search.   There aren't many of them.   (You will see their responses here.....stating that Evernote shouldn't have any features if they don't need it.  (Carefully note the ruby-throated narcissist's call. 😤 Sometimes it is: "I shouldn't have to pay for public schools--I don't have kids." Another calls back "Why are we sending FEMA to New Orleans--I don't live near hurricanes?"  Sometimes as they get older, you may hear: "I don't care about global warming--I won't be alive.")

Mac users know there is One Search to Rule them All.   You see everything in almost any format on your computer, your network, your cloud drive or the Internet.  But if it is in Evernote....it's lather, rinse and repeat.  Separating my trash is a necessity, but not searching.

Evernote--you are trying to bring order to our information, but a separate search pulls us into the morass of entropy by requiring a separate process.  Order or Chaos? How about you let us use Spotlight and I will send you my diagram showing how to replace a light bulb in a Serbo-Croatian fixture in less than 320 steps?

Pretty please?  😍  Mac Users will love you!

 

 

 

 

Edited September 5, 2021 by Ryq G
missed a word in the title

[agsteele 2,942]

I think you are asking that Evernote does something to enable Spotlight on Mac computers to access note content when it performs a search.

Sadly, I think it an unlikely feature. SInce not all your note content is ever saved locally in a text format, Spotlighht would not be able to search all notes. Even what is saved locally isn't stored in a form that would deliver an individual note in the search results.

So a significant change in the way notes are stored would be needed.

As it happens, Evernote staff aren't in these forums with any regularity - these are user-to-user spaces. If you want to give feedback then you can use the Help | Share feedback link in the desktop apps although holding your breath while waiting for a response would not be advised.🥵

[PinkElephant 8,076]

In fact it is readable when I go to the EN local database. Each note is a finder folder, that contains a HTML file plus several odd „text“ files.

When I right click to open these files with the MacOS build in Preview app, they perfectly show as pdf, jpeg or else.

So I think they should technically be searchable by Spotlight. But the EN folder by its location seems to be excluded from the search range.

[Ryq G 27]

@agsteele Thanks.  I had originally looked for feedback options and ended up here.   I see that option now.  I suffer from male pattern blindness.  There are always good reasons not to do something, or not to do things now.  I am, unfortunately, not always willing to let go unless I become aware of that.  

 

 

@Pinkelephant.  Sounds like you have found a potential workaround that others could find helpful.  Perhaps someone can find a way to fix this,  or create a new search feature to include what Spotlight does today and to include Evernote. I suspect if someone makes it we won't find it on the Appstore.

[PinkElephant 8,076]

No luck on my end. I tried to get the EN folder searchable by adding it to the Alfred helper app - but no luck, even after a few days nothing shows up in the searches if I toggle Alfred instead of Spotlight.

[Brian Handscomb 28]

The "proper app" versions included a Spotlight plugin, proper local copies of your data etc which made this possible. With v10 Evernote just threw this away.

Sadly with Mac OS updates since ENv7 this has gradually become more and more broken, but had EN kept developing proper apps I feel sure they would have solved this and we would've had a better product. IMHO. Other opinions may vary.

[PinkElephant 8,076]

Just as a matter of fact: Spotlight search didn’t work with the last legacy releases either. It was removed if I am not mistaken by the OS upgrade to Catalina.

There are a lot of forum posts about a popup message telling about a spotlight problem with EN. Just need to search in the Forum.

So the switch to v10 did not bring back what has been lost before, but at least it fixed that popup problem.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

6 hours ago, jhonmarton said:

may have alternative search options built into their app

Welcome to the forums, and, umm, I guess to Evernote. Do you use Evernote yourself? Or is this some test of whether an AI bot can draw information from a forum thread and produce a rational-seeming reply? If so, A+ for Artificial, D+ for Intelligence.

[PinkElephant 8,076]

4 years late to the party. And definitely sound like one of these ChatGPT snippets.

[AlbertR 525]

If so, it's a nice try - but helps to wake up the idea 😉
It would be really nice to see EN notes covered by Spotlight on Mac or Explorers search on Windows. I think in both cases EN has to implement some OS-specific callback functionality.
 

[PinkElephant 8,076]

Basically I agree, getting Spotlight back would be a nice move. However I doubt it - EN has created its own format for the local database, making it difficult for OS resources to read it.

About the post above: We get more and more forum posts that read sort of „bloodless“. I think some users have started to post statements here produced by AI-bots like ChatGPT.

This is violating forum rules, and it can’t be in the interest of human forum participants.

[AlbertR 525]

[Botting] OK.
[Spotlight or Win-Browser search]: If I remember correct (*), files are not read and interpreted by the operating system. OS finds the file and asks a foreign service to read it and to return found words back to the OS service who stores it in its own index.

(*) It took me only two questions to GPT to find https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/search/-search-ifilter-about 😉

Filter handlers, which are implementations of the IFilter interface, scan documents for text and properties. Filter handlers extract chunks of text from these items, filtering out embedded formatting and retaining information about the position of the text. They also extract chunks of values, which are document properties. 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

5 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Basically I agree, getting Spotlight back would be a nice move. However I doubt it - EN has created its own format for the local database, making it difficult for OS resources to read it.

About the post above: We get more and more forum posts that read sort of „bloodless“. I think some users have started to post statements here produced by AI-bots like ChatGPT.

This is violating forum rules, and it can’t be in the interest of human forum participants.

I saw at least one other such post just yesterday. Bloodless is a good description, and also pointless. To me, feels more like a proof-of-concept from some actor who is not a participant on the forums. I'm not going to report it, just so it will stay posted and serve as an example to link to when I start a separate thread on the topic.

[PinkElephant 8,076]

@AlbertR Yeah, that’s how an index is build.

Instead of writing „Searchword“ again an again, it is noted once, and then linked to all files where it is encountered.

Else the index would be as big as the underlying files.

[AlbertR 525]

5 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Yeah, that’s how an index is build.

I know 😉 - Hope @EN-Admins forwards it to their developers to add EN-notes to Windows' search index. And I think, Apple offers a similar way to fill Spotlight's database with EN-notes content...

[PinkElephant 8,076]

The problem is: The notes / attachments can’t be opened without opening the app.

Spotlight usually takes me directly to the information.

[AlbertR 525]

That's not the problem: if you implement an IFilter for your documents, you may implement an IPreviewHandler to manage previews to notes without opening the app itself. These methods are to be implemented in DLLs that have to be registered to be used. Only if the notes are to be displayed or edited completely, you have to start the App itself.

⚠But there is indeed one problem: Because EN manages notes within a local SQL(?) database, they are not seen as single files. I don't know whether it is possible to show small but many pieces of such a database as unique objects in Windows search 😞 

 

[PinkElephant 8,076]

When I go to the Evernote folder on my Mac, in the subfolder resource-cache I find a user folder, and in it a ton of little subfolders.

In it are 2 files (or more, but always groups of 2 with the same cryptic name), one with the extension meta. The other (without an extension) can be opened with a pdf reader (if it holds a pdf), and shows the attached file.

I think EN is protecting this content against being opened by other apps. The notes themselves are not in this folders, they are probably in the database.

[AlbertR 525]

Yep - seems to be the same structure on Windows. Notes are in other subfolders that are controlled by the database (conduit-storage\, conduit-fs\ and some other) - but surely not in a 1:1 file:note structure. So it might be hard to implement IFilter- or IPreviewHander-methods to calc back to a specific note (title and URL) to display it in Windows search or Mac Spotlight lists.

From this point on, we'd need to get some support from @EN-developers to figure out further possibilities 🤔