(Archived) HUGE flaw in using Evernote as primary document organizer!

[bradleymiller123 0]

I am a huge geek, and I get giddy at the thought of a paperless life. I've made one of my main goals in 2011 to become as close to 100% paperless as possible. I bought a neat scanner, and decided that Evernote would be my central location for storing all of my meticulously organized documents. I'm a big cloud person, using Dropbox, Evernote, 1-PAssword...all the best!

Anyways...today I had to retrieve several documents from Evernote in order to send them to my Financial advisor, and this process was a little scary. I was unable to simply "drop and drag" the PDFs from the Evernote For Mac software. Instead, I had to export the files into HTML format, and then retrieve the PDF files from their folders one by one.

Ok, not that big of a deal now...but think forward to 5 years from now, when I have literally thousands of files in Evernote. What if Evernote gets bought out by another company? What if you go bankrupt? What if they start becoming pricks and decide to charge $300/year instead of $30? There are too many what ifs!

So it dawned on me today...As I've begun this complete digital conversion of my life, I can not rely on Evernote as the sole backup means of my documents. I need to keep all originals, and simultaneously keep a local copy on my hardrive, or on a cloud storage site like DropBox. This completely defeats the point, and makes the process too cumbersome.

So I ask Evernote...what is being done to ensure that users will be able to retrieve all of their files, in bulk, if they choose to do so? I could be wrong, it may be possible to do this now, and I am just not aware?

If someone could please help me out, I LOVE Evernote, and would love to use them as my primary means of cloud document storage. I love the search-ability and ease of "anywhere access." But I need the ability to download my files in bulk to local storage, or something that ensures me that I am not "stuck" in the Evernote world forever (assuming the Evernote world LASTS that long!).

Thanks

[Pitamakan 2]

You can find out a lot more about the broader subject by reading through the forums ... it's been discussed here quite a bit. A couple of more specific points, though:

1. No need to use the export feature to send PDFs -- just right-click on the PDF and choose "Save as ..." and you've got it. Or you could have used Evernote's built-in e-mail feature to send the PDFs directly.

2. You already have a full copy of all your Evernote data on your local computer ... that's how the software works. Think of EN's cloud storage as a backup.

3. Because of that, if EN ever shuts down or you decide to stop using it, you'll still have a full copy of your data locally. And the software would still work locally, even without an internet connection.

4. There are Applescripts out there that would allow you to do a bulk export of your Evernote stuff into RTF files, or into DevonThink ... so you're definitely note without options there.

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the feedback. You can right-click on the PDF to just Save it directly from the client without all of that exporting, but we do intend to add drag-and-drop support for inline PDFs to the Finder in the future.

[JMichaelTest 19]

. . . we do intend to add drag-and-drop support for inline PDFs to the Finder in the future.

That sounds great Dave.

Would it be possible to add drag-and-drop support for the "attachment" mode as well, and make all of this also work on the Windows client?

Thanks.

[engberg 89]

Drag-and-drop already works if the PDF is displayed as an attachment ... e.g. right click on it to switch it to an Attachment, and then drag the file icon and drop on the Desktop. I think the gap is that we don't handle the "left click and move the mouse" gesture in the PDF preview as "start dragging a file", but rather as "select text within this PDF." If we were to change it to allow you to click in a PDF body and start dragging it, then you wouldn't be able to select text any longer.

So it's not a completely straightforward usability problem.

[JMichaelTest 19]

I think the gap is that we don't handle the "left click and move the mouse" gesture in the PDF preview as "start dragging a file", but rather as "select text within this PDF." If we were to change it to allow you to click in a PDF body and start dragging it, then you wouldn't be able to select text any longer.

So it's not a completely straightforward usability problem.

Couldn't this be simply handled in the standard UI manner of changing the behavior of the mouse pointer based on the type of object it is currently hovering over? If it is text, then the insertion point is shown and you select text. If it is not text, then the pointer is shown and you can click and drag.

[engberg 89]

Well, if you left click between paragraphs within in PDF, and then drag your mouse downward, most people expect that to start selecting the bottom paragraph, not to start dragging the PDF file itself. Visually, it can be hard to tell the difference between "in something" and "not in something" in a PDF. I'm pretty sure we'd get more complaints if we implemented it this way than we get with the current behavior.

[JMichaelTest 19]

Seems like you could enable the pointer for drag-n-drop when you are in the margins, particularly the top margin. For me the most intuitive behavior would be to click and drag at the top of the document if I wanted to drag the whole document.

I don't think I would ever click and drag in the middle of the doc, or between paragraphs expecting to drag the whole document.

The visual cue for the user is always the pointer type. It is an arrow when above non-text objects, and and insertion point when it is above selectable text. This is pretty standard UI (although I have seen some apps that don't follow this always, and it is very confusing).

But, to be honest, of all of the enhancements I would like to see, this is close to the bottom. So, I guess this discussion is somewhat academic from my point of view. I'm sure your guys will figure it out when/if it comes time to implement this.