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ScottLougheed

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Posts posted by ScottLougheed

  1. On 2017-05-03 at 0:28 PM, nicolgareth@gmail.com said:

    Office365 with1Tb Onedrive is a dream.....no longer missing Evernote, i loved it, but became too difficult reconnecting between devices, the cost was too much per month for storage.

     

    Glad you found a tool that fits your needs and suits your budget. That's what matters! 

  2. 18 hours ago, Flier said:

    A very simple and useful structure would be a top level folder Travel folder, below which is a folder with the country name and general information, then a subfolder for hotels and a subfolder of that for rejected hotels.  Same thing for driving routes:  "Travel/Norway_2015/Routes/Rejected Routes"  When I am not working on travel I would like to completely collapse the Travel folder and get all of its children out of view.  Once the trip is completed I would like to drag it to the bottom of the trip list so that my one or two upcoming trips are at the top of the list.  I can do none of this with Evernote but I can do all of it even within the simple bookmark structure of Firefox.  As far as I am concerned these are major functional deficiencies.  The fact that I can work around some of them with tagging kludges is irrelevant.

    Can this not be accomplished simply by making a Stack of notebooks named after your destination. Stacks can be collapsed or opened whenever you like. When a trip is complete, add "z" prefix to the name to force it to sort at the bottom of the stack (and upcoming or current trips can be prefixed with a symbol like ! . or @ to force it to the top).

    That said, you'd be unable to do something like, for a given destination, make sub-folders for "routes" and "sights" or whatever. Tags can go along way with that, but you apparently already know about everything tags can do, so I'll spare you an explanation.

     

    What is really sounds like you are saying is that you want hierarchical organization, or else. I'd consider setting up such a hierarchy in your computer's filesystem, and if you need mobile/online/cloud access, put the hierarchy into something like Dropbox. 

    • Like 1
  3. I don't need anything in Evernote encrypted, I'm sure there are lots of users just like me.

     

    I'm guessing the majority or else the product teams at Evernote would be under internal pressure to add encryption - they are clearly not.

     

    There are 2 sides to this argument.

    My use has shifted so that this is also the case for me. I have other tools that are more secure that I keep those important files in. Evernote gets only the things that do not need encryption. 

    • Like 2
  4. Sounds like the feature was publicised by sales but too computationally expensive for development to implement. As it only works in such marginal cases, perhaps it would be better left off the product feature list.

    I don't understand.... I never saw the creation of selectable (and thus, extricable) text from images in any marketing material from Evernote in the last 10 years... I have NEVER seen evernote claim to have this feature. They have always only ever said that they make images of text searchable, which is what they do (success is, of course, determined by the quality of the image and the clarity of the writing).

    • Like 1
  5. Thanks Scott,

     

    Here's what my app does.  Opening screen is roughly like Evernote opening screen except you see only six notes and the title are shown in full.  Now let's say you clipped a sentence from an online article because you think it reinforces something you read the other day.  Tap on that note and it drops to the bottom of your screen.  Tap on the other note you have in mind and now the two notes are connected so that whenever you pull up one note, you'll see the other.  what you just did is you save the reason WHY that note matters to you--because of how it ties in with the first note.  

     

    In my app, you don't save notes you connect them.  And then, whenever you pull up any note you'll see all the notes that are tied to it.

     

    Of course it all comes down to the user interface which is very cool, but I'm just curious--does that sound like something you'd use?

    That sounds like a really compelling idea. I can definitely see a use case for that, though I don't know if it fits my needs... perhaps in large part because my use of Evernote has dropped considerably in the last year, and my current use of it is now very straightforward. The heavy-duty work takes place in another application now.  As such I am less invested in, and have less need for, sophisticated organizational assistance within Evernote. I'd certainly consider a trial of this application you are developing though!

  6. 1400 notes (4 years of use, I have a couple thousand notes exported and stored in an archive that are from years-old projects). 

     

    As few notebooks as possible, good titles, judicious tagging. Search is my usual means of retrieval. I very rarely browse. The exception would be for very tightly related notes. For example, when I travel I might place my various itinerary documents into Evernote and tag them with a locationMMYY tag, (e.g., baltimore0415). I would either search for that tag with tag:baltimore* or tag:baltimore0415. I may browse by clicking on that tag (likely if it is close to my departure that tag will be saved as a shortcut) but unless the tag is in the shortcuts section, that's not as efficient in my opinion. 

     

    Searching for note content (rather than a specific tag) can produce a fair number of false positives, but in general the false positives aren't too hard to sift through. 

     

    So, tightly defined tags and searching. Minimal use of notebooks (my notebook count is slightly inflated due to the need to share some things, which requires its own notebook). 

    • Like 1
  7.  

    I get it that you don't like encrypting Notebooks or encrypting only content but not metadata.

    Whether you like it or not, it would still be very useful to many users, and a great improvement over the current security of Evernote.

     

    I like encrypting notebooks. I agree it would increase security. I don't, and did not, suggest otherwise.  I think encryption is extremely important. I just can't see it fitting easily into Evernote's service without some issues or some compromises that deteriorate the benefit of encryption to at least some degree. I'm sure there are power users and savvy product managers out there with much better ideas than what I possess who will figure out how to implement ZK encryption in a way that doesn't seriously degrade UX. 

    • Like 1
  8.  

    Implementing that feature would negate the majority of the features that Evernote has to offer. This is because a large portion of Evernote's features require server-side access to your note content to do the indexing and OCRing and whatnot. Having users choose between not encrypting their data, or encrypting their data and getting none of the features they pay for is a pretty ugly pair of decisions. 

     

     

    I disagree that implementing encryption "would negate the majority of the features that Evernote has to offer".

    The ONLY feature that encryption negates is Search of the data that is encrypted.

     

    Also, OCR'ing images, generating "related notes"/"Context" suggestions. You'd also be unable to email or clip into encrypted notebooks.

     

    Yes, you could allow users to make some notebooks zero-knowledge encrypted and others not, but this seems like it could be immensely confusing for some users who, for some reason they may not fully understand, find that some images or PDFs or DOCX files aren't indexed and others are, and why the email they sent to an encrypted notebook ended up in their default notebook (which could never likely be ZK encrypted), or why only some of their notebooks show up in their web clipper, and so on. 

     

    Maybe it wouldn't be confusing at all though. Perhaps the users who are inclined to employ zero-knowledge encryption will be savvy enough to fully understand the implications. But at the same time, it isn't just savvy users who need or could benefit from zero-knowledge encryption. 

     

    As JM suggests, you could encrypt the contents and not the metadata to facilitate some retrieval, and indeed this seems much more viable than the new, emergent, potentially expensive, yet-to-be-implimented-anywhere technology that Eric99 mentioned. However, leaving metadata unencrypted is also problematic for several reasons:

    1) metadata could contain sensitive information as well, especially if the note contents are sensitive.

    2) It seems like a bit of a mess trying to explain to users during the course of their use of the app that the contents, but not the metadata, are encrypted, and this is definitely something that Evernote would need to inform users of. 

    3) Still precludes emailing/clipping/any other server side additions to that specific notebook, you'd have to toss it into an unencrypted notebook first, defeating the purpose (though then again, anything you are clipping or email already existed on an unencrypted cloud anyway so perhaps this isn't an issue? the exception would be content clipped from intranets)

     

    Altogether the lack of ZK encryption is an issue for me insofar as I am unable to store large portions of my work in Evernote, however I've since found better options where encryption isn't an issue and that are superior products for my work needs. Even if Evernote implemented zero-knowledge encryption I'd probably still not return my work content to Evernote. 

    • Like 1
  9.  

     

    It would only take one feature to keep me from being discontented with Evernote, despite how invested I've become in it: Something as simple as being able to reorganize notes manually without having to dink around with titles would halt my searching for alternatives in a second. 

     

    I was this close to installing OneNote recently, to see if they were more forward thinking in that area . . . until I got an itch to look at their Privacy Policy. Have you all looked at that thing? 

     

    Where most notetaking apps seem to be saying "we don't nose around in your content unless you're on the wrong side of the law," OneNote's goes on an on about how it will save whatever it damn well pleases for marketing or whatever it wants to do with it, so there. The wording really got my goat (and I don't even have a goat).

     

    I stopped the OneNote installer right there and swore off Microsoft and its band of merry lawyers. Again.

     

    My understanding is that the encryption is zero-knowledge and easily done for OneNote, so you might not find that you have much to worry about after all. I wouldn't put anything sensitive on anyone else's servers unless it was encrypted.

     

    Good point . . . that's something I wasn't aware of. I'm wondering why Evernote skipped over that feature.

     

    My apologies for going a little off-topic, by the way.

     

    Implementing that feature would negate the majority of the features that Evernote has to offer. This is because a large portion of Evernote's features require server-side access to your note content to do the indexing and OCRing and whatnot. Having users choose between not encrypting their data, or encrypting their data and getting none of the features they pay for is a pretty ugly pair of decisions. The solution is local processing of these things, but that comes with other major downsides (and would likely severely handicap the functionality of their mobile applications) and can't replace all of the server-side processes that plus/premium users pay for (as well as those that benefit free users). 

     

    I agree, good, (ideally) zero-knowledge encryption is super important, but I think Evernote is a long way away from doing it (in fact, I don't think they ever will). In the meantime there are other options for storing sensitive data. 

    • Like 2
  10. Is support being deliberately obtuse, why would you want to extract text from an image? Kinda self evident... so you can edit and re-use the text. Who cares if it's searchable? If you can't copy and paste, it's of little utility.

    Where is Evernote Support here? While Evernote Staff do participate in some threads, there are no staff in this one. 

     

    Other than Gazumped asking for the OP for why this is important, the general consensus in this thread seems to be that extracting text is a useful feature that isn't available (and like will never be available) in Evernote. There are alternatives for extracting text from images. 

  11. An alternative would be to create a single archive, and upon archiving, tag the note with whichever notebook it was archived from. 

    so a note in "The Thing" would be tagged with the tag "thething" and moved to an archive. When revisiting your archive, you can just filter your view by tag.

    So you navigate to your archive notebook and you want to see all the archived stuff tome your "the thing" notebook so you select that tag from the little tag dropdown at the top of the note list. Perhaps you want to see them from "Project X". so you select the "project x" tag from the tag dropdown, etc. 

    • Like 2
  12. True OCR would be nice, or a must have, for copying code from Kindle  programming  books.  I tried to get a print screen of the code and paste it into Evernote hoping that Evernote  would OCR it.  I did not know that OneNote would do this.  I would hate to have to install Microsoft Office on my Mac, but I think this use case is important enough for me to make the switch. 

     

    You don't need to install Office to get One Note. One Note is available as a standalone application from the Mac App Store. 

    • Like 1
  13. You might not need to do a backup of your Evernote database on your computer. Log into the web interface of Evernote and confirm that all of your notes are present there. If stye are all there you can uninstall and re-install the evernote application on your windows machine without needing to backup. (That being said, having backups of your computer is generally good practice so if you don't already have a backup system in place, you should consider doing so)

  14. @ Scott

    You really want to get us talking about Wikipedia again, don't you :) "Thread," not link. Specifically, just a post or two down from where JM stopped reading.

    https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/39335-evernote-turns-5-years-old/?p=213209

     

    Ah, yes, that makes sense. In my scanning of the posts to catch up with the discussion I didn't think to follow a link to another discussion thread for this type of info!

    • Like 1
  15.  

    @GM:

    Thanks for your post. All of your links/references seem to confirm my earlier post that Evernote was founded in 2007.

    It is also most interesting that Wikipedia is cited as the first reference a number of times.

    I understand, and accept, that Wikipedia is not an original, authoritative source for academic studies.

    But then, is any encyclopedia? I think not. They are, by definition, a summary of information provided by other sources.

    My main point above is that we should challenge any software developer who claims to provide AI in their product.

    "AI" has now become a marketing term, and is claimed by far more vendors than actually provide it.

    I'm just getting started evaluating DEVONthink. They do claim AI, but I'm not convinced yet.

    I am also not convinced that Evernote's Context is real AI. I've not seen any evidence that EN Context is self-learning, and updates/improves its own algorithms as it is used. Could be, I just have not seen it.

     

    Refreshed my memory:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote

    " the Evernote web service launched into open beta on June 24, 2008"

    http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2008/06/24/evernote-public-launch/

    June 24, 2008

    "Big news today: Evernote is now in Open Beta and we’ve rolled out many changes, including premium accounts.

    Four months ago, we introduced the invitation-only private beta of the new Evernote service. Our goal was to get about 10,000 people to use the system so we could fine-tune our servers and try out new features. We were blown away by the response and watched with equal parts of glee and horror as the closed beta users count passed 10,000, then 25,000, then 50,000… By the end of the four months, over 125,000 people had participated in the closed-beta! Luckily, our hardware, software and team held up with only minor incidents of spontaneous combustion."

    http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2008/02/21/invite-only-beta-launches/

    Feb 21, 2008

    Big news today, we officially launched our invitation-only beta for the all new Evernote Service. Read all about it in TechCrunch. There are only a limited number of beta invites available right now, but we’ll be releasing more in the coming days and weeks.

    So I guess I jumped in 1-2 months into the closed beta.

    Scary how time has flown.

    @JM

    Please read the thread again. The date of 2000 is clearly written there. If you prefer to rely upon Wikipedia, then maybe I can go over there and change the date to 2000 so that everyone will then be in agreement :)

    I hate to perpetuate what has now diverged from the main topic of discussion, but GM, are you referring to the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote ?

    If so, I actually can't find 2000 mentioned anywhere which now has me puzzled. 

  16.  

     

    AI is the current rage, the current buzzword.  Lots of companies may claim they have an AI product, but few, IMO, meet the requirements for AI (see my above post).  It's mostly marketing hype, IMO.

     

    AI is very different from having clever, powerful, easy-to-use search engines.

     

    In general the use of the term AI has been intended to refer to the feature called AI by DEVONThink (and, subsequently, other people's use of "AI" to refer to similar features). While I can't speak for GM, I certainly did not mean to suggest that this truly was some form of AI, as I am not knowledgeable enough to make any accurate claims about what is or is not AI. Just using the noun that the company tosses around. 

  17.  

    @ScottLougheed:
     
    Sorry, I don't buy that "Related Notes" is anything close to Artificial Intelligence (AI).
    That's just search results.
     
    Frankly, I'm not sure I would even classify EN Context as AI -- seems more like marketing hype than anything else.
     
    Real AI would be if the Evernote algorithms (not data, but code) were changing (learning) in response to what you have entered in your Note.
     

    Real artificial intelligence is effectively thinking for itself. It can go beyond the built-in programming. It can evolve. AI can learn for itself

     

     

    Wasn't my claim, just suggesting that might have been the intended meaning. 

  18. @GM:

     

    I don't recall any AI in Evernote prior to 2014 with the introduction of EN Context.  Even then, I'm not sure I would call it an "emphasis".

    Evernote didn't even exist until 2008.

    Are you thinking of something different?

    "Related Notes" existed for a number of years prior to the release of "context" in 2014, which was basically the same as Context minus the media tie-ins. I suppose this could be considered a degree of AI but it isn't nearly as robust, as DT's which I'm sure you've discovered in your DT adventures!

    • Like 1
  19. The Evernote forum seems nice to me. I'd be interested in hearing what exactly is wrong with it.

    DEVONthink is pretty amazing. I've written about it a little on my blog.

    http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=2237

    Is it an Evernote replacement? Maybe. But, only if you work exclusively on Macs and mobile isn't all that important for you. The mobile app is adequate (for my needs), and a new version is on the way (no delivery date yet), but I think it is fair to say that Evernote dominates the multi-platform, mobile space right now. DT does not exist on Windows and is extremely unlikely to ever make its way there.

    Echoing JM, your DT post is great, and definitely helped me get started with DEVONThink. 

     

    In my opinion, DEVONThink is not an outright one-to-one replacement for Evernote in a broad sense. Ultimately it depends on what a user was using Evernote for in the first place. It hasn't "replaced" Evernote for me. There came a point where I was no longer able to continue storing work-related  content in Evernote. Because of that DEVONThink has taken over that role and does it many, many times better than Evernote ever did. Even if I could still use Evernote for work, I'd probably choose not to because of how much better DEVONThink works for me in this context.

     

    However, when it comes to a lot of household management things, my partner and I still use Evernote because of how straightforward capturing and sharing is. This is where Evernote truly shines in my day-to-day, and why it remains indispensable. So, while I now spend about 75% of my time (100% of my work time) in DEVONThink, the 25% of my time spent in Evernote dealing with household stuff and cooking and whatnot, is a long way away from being replaced by DEVONThink or anything else. 

    • Like 4
  20. @Scott:

     

    Thanks for sharing your use of Saferoom.

    How would you compare using Saferoom to using encrypted PDFs in Evernote?

    Vastly different solutions to very different problems. Saferoom is capable of encrypting the entire contents of a note, both the text you write and the attachments you add. This means you could have a reasonably active note that you are modifying fairly regularly that is also zero-knowledge encrypted. Saferoom also works on iOS and Mac and Windows (perhaps Android?). You can access your encrypted content on any of those devices. 

     

    Encrypted PDFs work well for, well, safeguarding PDF content. This content, however, is not easily modifiable, so this solution applies primarily to content you are not actively editing. Encrypted PDFs can also trip up some mobile devices, or some apps on some mobile devices, which makes it potentially a bit unreliable for ensuring you have access on all of your devices. 

     

     

    It really depends on your needs. Encrypted PDFs are pretty easy to create and solve a very specific problem well. Saferoom works well for encrypting totally arbitrary content that you may be actively modifying, but it is a bit clunky. 

    • Like 2
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