This Week's Sponsor:

PowerPhotos

The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac

Posts tagged with "evernote"

Evernote Image Extractor→

Evernote Image Extractor

Nice AppleScript by Chris Sauve:

A recurring knock against Evernote has been its poor exportability. The best option for moving my library would have been to export the Evernote notes as HTML, but any images that were captured using Evernote’s web clipper come out with inscrutable names, each of which would have to be changed manually. So, I did what I have been doing lately: I built an Applescript.

Evernote is often criticized for its exporting options, but the app has been improved from this standpoint in the past major updates. For instance, I like how you can select multiple notes containing attachments and save them to a folder in the Finder. More importantly, I like how Evernote keeps supporting AppleScript and how they’re still introducing more scripting features (it happens rarely these days). Chris’ AppleScript is a great example: it offers a simple interface to pick a notebook containing notes with images, and it’ll export those images using the filename of their respective notes – not the name of the image files.

Go download it here.

Permalink

Dolphin Browser With Evernote Clipper→

Dolphin Browser With Evernote Clipper

Dolphin, an alternative browser for iOS that I covered in 2011, has been updated today to version 6.0. Google Chrome is my go-to browser on iOS, but I had been testing this new version of Dolphin because of one feature: a native Evernote clipper.

Dolphin comes with lots of features and design choices, some of which I don’t like (case in point: the tap & hold popover menus). Given how Chrome keeps my tabs in sync across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, I have no use for Dolphin’s Connect service and extensions. However, the built-in Evernote integration intrigued me as no major iOS browser to date has offered a native clipper for web content: some of them offered a bookmarklet-based clipper, but the experience of clipping URLs and text selection left much to be desired. Dolphin’s clipper is baked into the app, and it’s accessible from an action button in the toolbar.

The Dolphin clipper automatically grabs a webpage’s title and current selection (if any). It uses your default notebook as destination, and it lets you add tags and comments to a clipped item. Like the desktop Evernote clipper, you can save a full page, or just an “article” if the app recognizes you’re trying to clip a blog post. One thing I’ve noticed is that, in spite of my attempt to clip rich text, web clips from selections were sent to Evernote in plain text; when I chose “save full article”, Dolphin saved the page as rich text into Evernote, and quite beautifully as well.

A feature I really like is the possibility to annotate webpages before sharing them. This works with other sharing services in Dolphin, not just Evernote. There’s only a red brush and an eraser to choose from, but it’s enough to draw attention to a portion of a page and save it as a 768x924 .jpeg file in Evernote.

If you’re an Evernote user and have been looking for a better iOS web clipper, check out the latest Dolphin Browser for iPhone and iPad.

Permalink

Personal Search Results In Google with CloudMagic and Evernote→

Personal Search Results In Google with CloudMagic and Evernote

Following my decision to switch back to Google Chrome as my default desktop browser, I have installed two extensions that are making Google search results more useful for me.

Last week, I installed the Evernote web clipper for Chrome, which was capable of displaying my own Evernote notes alongside Google’s search results. This means I can look for, say, “AppleScript iTunes” and likely find something that I had already clipped in Evernote in the past. It is a powerful addition when combined with Evernote’s new Related Notes feature; it also allows me (in the extension’s options) to make the thumbnail results open directly with the Evernote Mac app when clicked. Evernote announced yesterday the possibility to have the same kind of inline results with Safari.

The second addition is CloudMagic’s new extension, which I discovered today thanks to TechCrunch. MacStories readers know why I like CloudMagic:

CloudMagic is fast: it can search across thousands of indexed items in seconds, with results updating in real time. It is astonishingly accurate, even when it has to match a couple of words with, say, hundreds of tweets from last year or an Evernote PDF inside a nested notebook. I use CloudMagic on a daily basis to retrieve old tweets (as reference material), email messages, or notes; in fact, I would say the app has better search than Evernote’s iOS app. Which, by the way, is supported with an URL scheme – so you’ll be able to search notes and open them directly in the Evernote app.

The new CloudMagic extension is exactly what you think it is. Once installed, it’ll find results for your Google query by looking inside the accounts you’ve already configured with CloudMagic. By using both Evernote and CloudMagic, I can get Google results in an instant (the main Google search results load first), then get relevant results from my email inbox, Twitter accounts, Dropbox and Evernote notes, and more Evernote related notes thanks to Evernote’s different algorithm. I would say that 50% of my searches are for items that I have already saved in the past but that I have also likely forgotten about. CloudMagic and Evernote results in the browser allow me to keep using Google but also have my own results show up alongside the normal search I’m used to.

The updated CloudMagic extension is available here.

Permalink

Evernote Launches Food 2.0 With Major Redesign, iPad Version, And More

Last year, Evernote launched Food, an iPhone app to save photos and details of your favorite meals, which would then be synced to your Evernote account. Today, Evernote is launching Food 2.0, a major revamp that includes a native iPad app and a completely rebuilt experience focused on exploration, saving recipes, and browsing restaurants available in a specific area.

I have been able to quickly play around with a final version of Food 2.0, and I came away quite impressed by the effort put into this relaunch. I never got into Evernote Food, mainly because my girlfriend and I tend to save our recipes in dedicated apps, bookmark others we want to check out or simply keep a note with links to them, and because we use other services for restaurant reviews and recommendations. Being able to save a photo of a final meal – either made by us or someone else – didn’t hold much appeal against dedicated solutions. Evernote Food 2.0 wants to address exactly this issue by collecting in a single app, Evernote-style, recipes you can explore and “clip” (i.e. save in your Evernote account), while offering standalone views for restaurants and the meals you have already saved (and will continue saving) in Evernote Food.

The iPad app starts with a gorgeous horizontal wall of photos for Explore, My Cookbook, Restaurants, and My Meals. You can swipe to the right to reveal a napkin with the Evernote logo on the left, and tap on a section to view an “unfolding” animation open a specific section. I noticed that the speed of the animation took an extra second upon the first launch of the app on my iPad 3, but then went back to normal as I kept using the app. On the iPhone, the app uses the same vertical layout for sections seen in Evernote 5.0. Read more

Skitch For Mac Updated with FTP, Custom Styles, More Sharing Options

I like Skitch. However, after the move to Evernote and the release of a new Mac app, Skitch didn’t exactly go through a “smooth” transition. Namely, features were removed, and existing Skitch users weren’t thrilled with the new Evernote-only nature of the software. Last month, Evernote published a blog post detailing how, after receiving lots of feedback from their users, they decided removing functionalities people had become dependent upon was a bad move. For the past few weeks, I have been testing the 2.0.3 update to Skitch for Mac, which brings back many of the features that made the original Skitch one of my favorite Mac apps.

A feature that I’ve been using on a daily basis is FTP support. In Skitch 1.0, you could take a screenshot, quickly annotate it, and send it off to your own server via FTP. I share a lot of screenshots, and I like the combination of an easy-to-use image annotation app with my own server and my own URLs. FTP integration was the right balance between Skitch’s annotations (which I prefer to Apple’s ones in Preview) and the power of putting images on a server that’s only mine. Skitch 2.0.3 adds a new FTP/sFTP option in the Sharing tab of the Preferences, allowing you to configure multiple FTP accounts. The configuration is similar to other FTP clients for Mac (you’ll find the usual Base URL, port, and directory settings) and it took me a minute to set up with my credentials.

Once configured, you’ll be able to send images from Skitch directly to your FTP server. Unfortunately, there’s no option to assign keyboard shortcuts to a specific FTP account, so you’ll have to click on Share > FTP or right-click an image to upload via FTP. Personally, I’ve set up a Keyboard Maestro macro that uses AppleScript GUI scripting to let me share via FTP easily with just a keystroke.

An updated sharing menu is available both from the menu bar and the Skitch image editor. From the latter, an arrow in the upper right corner reveals a dropdown menu with options for email, Messages, Twitter, Facebook, and iPhoto. You can also set a picture as desktop background, or set the kind of link that you want to generate from Skitch. More ways to share Skitch links now include direct image URL, HTML code, HTML thumbnails, and forum code. In addition to more sharing options, the new Skitch comes with an Auto Copy feature as well, allowing you to automatically place a link to a Skitch image (shared publicly) in the clipboard.

Aside from various improvements and bug fixes, other features I like include timed screenshots and custom styles. In the tools palette of the editor, you can now set a custom color for your annotations, choose between preset sizes from the same color swatch, or define your own size by manually adjusting the blue dots of the marquee around text and shapes. For me, this alone is a welcome improvement that is still easy to use and doesn’t add complexity to the editing interface of Skitch. I don’t use this functionality with Skitch, but version 2.0.3 introduces timed screenshots, letting you perfectly time areas to capture with a countdown timer.

I’m looking forward to more updates from the Evernote team on Skitch. After a series of initial missteps – possibly dictated by a need to release the app – it’s good to see features coming back, sometimes in different forms, to Skitch, which remains my favorite app for screenshot annotations on the Mac. Skitch 2.0.3 is available today on Evernote’s website.

From Instapaper and Pythonista To Dropbox and Evernote As PDF

I’ve already expressed my preference for archiving webpages as PDFs rather than simple “bookmarks” on an online service. When I come across a webpage that I know I want to keep for future reference, I like to generate a clean-looking PDF file with selectable text that I can rely on for years to come.

Lately, I have become obsessed with turning longer articles I find on the Internet also into PDFs for long-term archival. For as much as I like Instapaper, I can’t be sure that the service will be around in the next decades, and I don’t want my archive of longform and quality content to be lost in the cloud. So I have come up with a way to combine Instapaper with the benefit of PDFs, Dropbox, and automation to generate documents off any link or webpage, from any device, within seconds.

Yesterday I put together an iOS and OS X workflow to generate PDFs remotely on my Mac, starting from a simple bookmarklet on iOS. On an iPhone or iPad, I can simply hit a button in Safari, and wait for Pythonista to turn a webpage (that’s already been passed through Instapaper’s text bookmarklet) into an .html file in my Dropbox, which is then converted to PDF and added to Evernote. It sounds complex, but in actual practice I can go from a Safari webpage on iOS to a PDF in the Evernote app in around 30 seconds. Hopefully you’ll find this quick solution useful; feel free to modify it and/or send suggestions. Read more

Evernote Business and Related Notes→

Related Notes

Related Notes


Today Evernote officially introduced Evernote Business, its new platform that comes with dedicated features for teams and organizations to get the most out of Evernote. Announced earlier this year, Evernote Business builds on the existing foundation of Evernote for regular customers, but it adds more storage, an admin console, Business Notebooks, and the Business Library, a way for members of a team to get direct access to a collection of notebooks.

The Business Library is a collection of selected Business Notebooks that are accessible to the entire organization. At Evernote, our Business Library includes everything from important HR documents to design assets to product schedules to media mentions. All employees have the ability to publish some of their Business Notebooks into the Business Library. Administrators have full control over the Business Library, and can further elevate notebooks into a Recommended set that they feel are particularly valuable to employees.

With Business, Evernote has updated its platform for the new type of accounts that, however, can still merge Personal Notebooks (which are private) with Business Notebooks, which are shared with members of an organization. There’s an admin FAQ and user FAQ available, and the Evernote native and web apps have been updated for compatibility with Evernote Business. The service starts at $10 per user per month, and for now it is available in seven countries. More details (including a video with CEO Phil Libin) are available on Evernote’s blog post.

As I tweeted this morning, however, a big change for me is the addition of Related Notes for both business and normal Premium accounts. As Evernote explains:

This is where things start getting magical. In the latest version of Evernote for Mac (coming soon to other platforms), as you type a new note or view an existing one, Related Notes will appear at the bottom of the note area. The more you type, the more contextually relevant the notes will become.

Essentially, Related Notes is a section that lives underneath the note panel showing up to three related notes. In my opinion, it is a great way to rediscover notes that you may have forgotten about. That has certainly been a problem with the way I use Evernote, because I tend to clip a lot of material from the web, and it often gets lost unless I access it on a regular basis. From what I’ve seen so far, Related Notes works surprisingly well in capturing existing notes about the same subject; I’d be interested in knowing what kind of algorithm Evernote is using here – whether they simply look at keywords or also consider location, tags, time stamps, and other metadata.

Related Notes are available in Evernote 5.0.2, released today for non-Mac App Store users.

Permalink

FTP Support, Short URLs, And Other Features Coming Back To Skitch→

FTP Support, Short URLs, And Other Features Coming Back To Skitch

In a post published on the Evernote blog, Skitch co-founder Keith Lang has shared a bit of backstory regarding Evernote’s acquisition of the product and confirmed many old features of Skitch will be coming back “soon”.

I am really excited about the newest release of Skitch for Mac, but troubled by some of the negative reaction from some of our oldest and most loyal users. After thinking about this for the past few weeks, I’ve come to the realization that we’ve underestimated how deeply ingrained Skitch had become in many people’s daily workflows and how disruptive changes to the product could be. I’d like you to know that we’re going to fix it.

Skitch, an image annotation tool, was released as version 2.0 with deep Evernote integration earlier this year. The new version included an updated UI, new sync, and many simplified and/or removed options that weren’t met with excitement by the app’s existing userbase. Namely, users weren’t thrilled with Evernote’s decision to build every single Skitch sharing feature into Evernote, thus removing functionalities to upload images via FTP, directly link to them, and share them in multiple ways. The new Skitch also didn’t come with proper keyboard and menubar support, and, generally, it left much to be desired for those that were used to the old feature set and who had become dependent on the app for their workflows.

Evernote quickly went back to the drawing board and re-added a menubar icon and background options. In the blog post published today, Evernote confirms support for FTP/sFTP, image deep linking, and short URLs for shared images will come back to Skitch soon. Options for multiple fonts and custom colors, streamlined cropping and resizing, and automatic type tool selection will also be added to Skitch in future updates.

Of course we’ll be doing a lot more than just putting improved 1.x features back into the new Skitch. We’re working on some really amazing stuff that should appeal to our most loyal users as well as bring in many millions of new fans. Imagine being able to Skitch on top of different document types, communicate complex ideas via email without typing a single line of text, and going on a manned mission to Mars.

Read the Evernote blog post for all the details.

Permalink

Evernote 5.0 for iOS Review

Evernote 5

Evernote 5


I have been using the latest Evernote app for iOS, Evernote 5, for the past week. I am not an “Evernote power user”, but having recently revamped my paperless workflow, I thought I had a good opportunity to properly test the major update. I believe Evernote has a strong foundation to build upon, but the first result of this process – the new Evernote 5 for iOS – is far from solid. Read more