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Stefan Timm

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  1. Over the last years I‘ve moved all my personal stuff and all my mobile work stuff from the iMac and MacBook Pro to my iPad Pro. When I bought my 2013 MacBook Pro, I had already decided this would be my last notebook. Given all that, I don‘t think ScanSnap Home would be an option. I also use a sophisticated (but easy to handle) tag system, loosing my tags would be almost as bad as loosing the documents (even though all docs are full text searchable). Keep It also has an intuitive search that combines full text, tag based (and other metadata based) search without having to learn an inhuman search syntax. Given the history of Fujitsu with their scanning software (there were major problems with a macOS Upgrade a couple of years back) I‘d strongly advise against it. But that‘s just my 5 cents.
  2. Sure, I use "Keep It". For work we use DevonThink, so I'm quite familiar with that one as well. There was no way I would have used that for my personal stuff, although with the latest version (iCloud Sync, proactive sync to my iDevices) I might have given it a thought, if I hadn't found Keep It.
  3. I wish you all good luck, talked to a couple of people I know use Evernote and all of them are looking for alternatives. Personally, I found one which serves my needs better than Evernote in every way: uses iCloud storage, which is certainly a much safer option than Evernotes servers (and yes, I never used Android in my life and eliminated Windows almost a decade ago) It uses smart ways to create metadata (e.g. creation date from PDF) It stores single type objects (like PDF, JPG) exactly as they are, can drag and drop them right from the app to the desktop Double clicking an object opens the associated app on macOS, just like in Finder Any object that Quick Look supports will be rendered While one could still argue that trying to be everything for everyone might actually work, trying to solve the problem of multiple platforms by using some framework for me is undoubtful the nail on the coffin. Time will tell, but I can‘t remember one time when I was wrong about such an assessment (Blackberry, Windows Mobile just to name the most prominent ones I predicted to disappear long before their demise)
  4. I don't think Evernote Legacy is even a mid-term solution. If I'm not mistaken, it is a dead product, meaning it does not receive updates. Version 10 (at least on macOS) is so bad right now that (even taking future improvements into account) I have no doubt it will be a total failure. Time will tell if I'm right. If someone is not even able to display a PDF on a current machine without any delay, they should find a different profession. And BTW scrolling through the PDF is usually much more efficient than having to hit the page forward button for every page. If I was an Evernote Ambassador I would not know what to tell the people I convinced using it. Would probably have to find a new profession myself, as nobody would trust me anymore in my field. I hope Evernote Legacy lasts long enough until someone has built a decent replacement, at least for my main use case (PDF archive with tags, robust sync, powerful iOS client and basic note taking capability, maybe supporting markdown).
  5. I now switched to Evernote Legacy. Thank god it exists. Everything is back to normal. As someone who has extensive experience in product management and product ownership, I'm now more than ever convinced that focus is the critical success factor number one. Even trying to build a tool that is a mixture of note taking, text editing, file system, email archive, bookmarking and more is simply a bad idea. Those tasks need to be handled in separate applications, which are there for a reason. Maybe Evernote is still infected with its founder's idea of being the one place where one puts all information. I had really hoped he had taken this vision with him when he left the company. So I will keep using Evernote for the only suitable use case I see, which is a PDF archive. Yes, even I occasionally add a note with a checklist or a picture, sometimes even a table. This makes up less than 1% of my notes.
  6. Not necessarily spot on the topic, but still somewhat related: After Evernote on my iMac was updated to 10.3.7, it became almost unusable. I see a spinning green circle all the time, tables that had shown properly before have now huge areas of white space, amongst other things. On top of that my particular workflow became even worse. Whoever is doing product management or user interface design at Evernote should seriously consider getting into a different profession, best far away from anything with software. This should not be taken as an insult, but as good advice. Just one thing: Why can't I change the Notebook and add tags in the "Note info" window. Sorry, there is no excuse for that. We have a German word for that: "Verschlimmbesserung". Basically that means you made everything worse when trying to improve things.
  7. Thanks again for all the responses. I've been reading everything again today and here is my conclusion: My use case is most likely an important one. Not because it is mine, but because I know other people who use Evernote in the same way. For some reason it seems to be ignored. Looking at a post on the Evernote blog from January, there seems to be so much technical debt that it is probably keeping development busy for some time, so I expect no improvements. About the narrow focus: The worst thing is trying to be everything for everyone. Tables in Evernote where I can't even sort by column or do simple calculations are completely useless, just as an example. And for text editing, styles have been around since the 80s! What I see is the result of a lack of focus.
  8. Thanks for all the valuable responses. And yes, a dedicated document management system might be better. I use Devonthink for work and it is horrible. I doubt there is anything better out there at this time. Getting back to my initial points: I receive almost ALL my documents digitally as PDFs. I hardly create any documents myself (other than maybe some overviews and notes). So I simply don't understand why it should be so hard to recognize an invoice from the some company based on 10 years monthly invoices already in Evernote, and suggest the appropriate tags. It would even help if "similar" documents with their tags could be presented, making it easier to keep a consistent tag system. About the "date created": I think the only useful way to use it is to change it to the date printed on the PDF (if the content is a PDF, at least). This was made unnecessarily harder last year, now it have to click the three dots, select "Note details" and only then I can adjust the date. The file date or scan date are both completely useless and I want to be able to sort by document date, which (again) is the date printed on the PDF. In the past, I could just click on the date field in the note to change it. While I understand it might be difficult to reliably extract this from the PDF, it should be one click to adjust it manually (and not be victim to some mediocre user interface "improvement") A duplicate is the same PDF attachment in 2 notes (at least if there is no other content in the note, headline is considered metadata in this context) I hear you, Evernote is much more than a PDF archive, but going paperless for me is mainly one big, easy to search PDF archive. Like I said, most people do not create any significant content themselves (and, to make it even a bit more controversial, there honestly is more than enough content already 🙂 ). If there was an easy to use, affordable, cloud based PDF archive solution which I can use on all my devices (macOS, iOS) without any syncing, I'd probably move on to that. My hope was certainly that Evernote would cover this use case 99% (at least over time), but I don't see any improvements. Having to click twice before I can change the "create date" is even a move in the opposite direction (luckily a small one). So, back to my original question: Why doesn't Evernote support the paperless life better? In particular for users who do NOT create any documents, but just receive them as email attachments, downloads and on paper.
  9. I understand that, but why would anyone want to put a file into Evernote, when the contents isn't even visible? I think one is way better off keeping word processing and spreadsheets in the file system und maybe dropping a PDF of it into Evernote if needed. Also, unless you use Evernote for work (and I don't see this is a significant percentage of users) I don't think a relevant portion of documents are word processing or spreadsheets if you go paperless.
  10. @PinkElephant thanks for the insights. Regarding "intelligently" assisting with tags and other metadata: I hear a lot about AI nowadays. It doesn't seem to be too hard to apply this to "train" the software to extract metadata from the document (scanned or received electronically). This would, however, be based on all documents in the library and therefore couldn't be done by the scanner software. And this would certainly meet the expectations of the customer who wants to be delighted 🙂 I agree that tagging, creating a good title and adjusting the creation date is not too much work, especially if there are only new documents coming in and you process them regularly (I do it semi-daily). The reason I'm not relying on full text search too much is that I don't believe in folders (>95 % of my Evernote documents are in one folder) and I do sometimes look for stuff where I don't even remember the name. With my tags I can almost always bring it down to a list that is quickly scanned by the eye. I also use full text search in combination with tags quite a bit. The creation date I adjust because I want to be able to have the results ordered by "real date", but maybe I'm overdoing it here.
  11. I've been using Evernote since its beginning and have gone paperless with it. The only documents I still have in paper format are the ones where you are required to keep the original. Everything else goes right into my Fujitsu Scansnap and then straight to the shredder. My library has roughly 6000 documents. I've always been hoping Evernote would understand its destiny (which is a PDF archive for people who go paperless) and subsequently put an emphasis on features, that support this kind of usage. To name a few improvements that anyone using it in a similar way (and I can't think of much else it could be useful for): some sort of suggestion of tags based on the contents of the document and other already tagged documents in the library making the change of "date created" easier and not harder (which they did some time ago, to my dismay) even maybe automatically capture the creation date from the document identify duplicates (during adding a document and also in the library) Maybe I'm mistaken and there are actually relevant use cases beyond a PDF archive, but I strongly doubt it. Although, I must admit, even I occasionally enter a note 🙂 So here is my question: How can Evernote even survive without providing the best thinkable support for people who want to go paperless?
  12. Actually, Safari 13 is available today (not within the next few weeks, as Nick said). This means that even a perfectly working Web Clipper will be removed from any up-to-date macOS machine, no questions asked. Rather than waiting for all the unhappy users to complain, please put a high priority tag on the new Evernote Web Clipper. Thanks!
  13. You don't have to wait for Catalina (or install the beta) for the web clipper to be taken away from you. Today all my macOS running 10.14 (Mojave) auto-installed Safari 13. So currently Evernote has no web clipper for any up-to-date macOS machine. I'd say, please put a rush on getting the extension out to your loyal users, dear Evernote!
  14. You might want to put a rush on that. Today all my macOS running 10.14 (Mojave) auto-installed Safari 13. So currently Evernote has no web clipper for any up-to-date macOS machine!
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