Evernote 5 for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Evernote 5 for Mac

blog.evernote.com

40 pointscrisnoble53 comments

I have tried using Evernote for many years (since v1 for Mac), but it never really clicked until this version.

For me, the key feature is shortcuts to notes/notebooks and recent notes. Prior to this, it was too time consuming to sort through a bunch of stuff (like all your Skitch screenshots) to find a recent note.

I also appreciate that you can remove the sidebar buttons for features you don't use -- in my case, tags and the geo stuff are hidden.

I like the look of the UI better now too...the previous version was definitely starting to look dated.

Hopefully with this version of Evernote I can finally get all the random text files /images/PDFs off my Desktop.

Do you pay for the pro features? If I use this to replace my file system (dis) organization I'm thinking I will need more than 60MB per month bandwidth.

Yeah, one of my primary use cases is saving PDFs from my ScanSnap, so the free bandwidth totally doesn't cut it.

$45/year for a pro account is completely offset by the time saved with the full text search alone.

Anyone know of something like Evernote that includes syntax highlighting and other features that would make it useful for storing code snippets and the like?

Would Github Gists [https://gist.github.com/] solve your problem?

Unless you want something web based, why not just an editor and sshfs, or unison?

I'm so pissed at Evernote for acquiring Skitch and breaking it. I do mean break. I paid for my Skitch software and now it's unusable.

That must sting a little.

But, check out this workflow... there's an app called "Slingshot" in the Mac App Store (I have no association with it). Drag from skitch to slingshot uploads to dropbox and pops the uploaded image in your browser.

Also, looks like the old skitch is available for download on this page: http://evernote.com/skitch/

Does it allow you to easily encrypt a notebook yet? (There used to be some support for encrypting individual notes but it wasn't very good.) I don't feel happy about transitioning from storing personal stuff on my disk to storing it in the cloud without encryption.

I would use this, if the same company hadn't bought skitch and then completely failed at keeping it working. RIP skitch.

Yeah, what they did to Skitch is really unforgivable. Hopefully the same team who works on Evernote can put some time in on Skitch and add the features they removed back in.

The old Skitch UI was ugly and non-standard but very functional. I like the direction they're going with the new version of Skitch, but they should have waited to release it until the features were comparable.

Forcing Skitch to sync with Evernote is also awful. Every time you quit Skitch now, it nags you about needing to sync. I understand why they need to do this, but the UX is just bad.

I've not been able to upload and share any images with the last version of Skitch and the support team at Evernote wants me to pay them to resolve the issue.

You sound upset.

It's reasonable to decide to not use free software because you need more support than the vendor can provide.

It's unreasonable to be upset about a free software vendor not providing enough support.

This is like the whole can't-get-a-human-at-Google-when-gmail-breaks issue. If you don't like it, pay $50 a year and you can call someone. Or stop using gmail.

With MapBox maps, based on OpenStreetMap & our geocoder based on a public domain data!

Anyone know's how Evernote develops their multi-platform App? Do they just write from scratch for each platform or do they have some framework in between?

I don't know about the current version, but the past version was definitely not multi-platform. In this[1] blog post they explain how they moved from .NET and WPF (native) to C++ (also native) on Windows, in the transition from version 3.5 to version 4.

[1]: http://blog.evernote.com/2010/10/26/evernote-4-for-windows-i...

I've always thought Evernote looked neat, but never saw a reason to move away from Notational Velocity (http://notational.net/), which is a fantastic little program - maybe the most simple app that I use, and that's a good thing. Still, might try the new version.

Evernote and Notational Velocity are two separate apps with two different purposes. For me, at least, Notational Velocity is for plain text notes, and Evernote is for images and PDFs.

The windows 8 app is half-assed though. Funny they push things so hard for one platform while ignoring the other. And mind you, windows 8 provides a better experience any day and will provide them with better benefits in the long run.

Windows 8 providing a better experience is pretty subjective as I don't think it does.

Maybe. I like how everything is beautifully colored and runs full-screen. Actually, even my laptop "looks" beautiful when the start-screen is on, the tiles add some beauty, definitely. Clean and crisp.

This is all very nice, but they still don't have a linux client.

At least they have a fairly decent web client...

NixNote is fairly good Linux client.

The only thing I don't like in this new version is that to easily access notebooks I now have to create "shortcuts" to them. Otherwise it is freaking awesome

Agreed. It was annoying, but I dragged each back over to the left bar, switched to Snipped view, and I had a better, more refined version of the old UI ;)

In the top menu

View > Sidebar Options > Show Notebook List

Just drag all your notebooks back in the sidebar.

Much better, and that advertisement placement in the previous version was one of the reasons it took me so long to finally start using.

Can someone who uses evernote regularly explain their main use case to me? Like why use this instead of notes or pintrest or instapaper or bookmarks?

I used to use Yojimbo, but I moved to Evernote for better syncing.

I use it for a combination of things, but mostly as a place to put and file things I might want later.

I store articles I find on the net, and download the full-version of them, with the Evernote Web clipper. This replaces Pocket, and other apps, and allows me to have synced versions on my phone.

I store Dungeons and Dragons Gamenotes, and have thema cross whatever laptop I happen to bring to game. I GM, so there is a lot to keep track of.

I keep recipes that I yanked from my Mom and Grandmother, so I can type in "cookies" and quickly find how to make them.

Basically, I use it for any content that I want to save, sync, and search.

Could I use The Filesystem+Spotlight+Dropbox? Probably. But the finder's UI has to do a lot. This has a UI which is dedicated to my use-cases. For me, it makes a lot of sense.

So, Instapaper + Google docs is a suitable replacement?

That's what I use currently.

Also, I could not find any integration with kindles, except for 'open the website in your kindle'.

I'm a college student, so I use it to take notes in all of my classes. Since it all syncs between devices and I can access it from the web, I have access to my notes wherever I am and with any device I have. It makes my life easier because if I'm going to the library to work or meeting with a group to work on a project, I don't need to lug binders or even my computer around. The photos feature makes life easier as I can just take pictures of whatever is on the board.

I use it as a personal wiki, mostly text. Whenever I researched something that took some time, or finished installing a particularly difficult type of open source software on a weird platform, I save all my documentation with links, etc here.

Same here - I use it in combination with markdown file (edited with mac's Mou app) to save notes on install processes, technologies to checkout, etc.

I (try to) use it for storing and organizing stuff that I would otherwise organize with the file system.

Evernote is better than the file system/Dropbox primarily because it does full text search of PDFs (even scans), words in photos, and plain text.

Evernote also lets you look at all file types in the same interface. And there are good mobile apps.

It's sort of like an integrated version of Spotlight, Quick View, and Dropbox but with better search and better mobile apps.

Paperless. I scan and classify in Evernote every single mail I receive. (tax, invoices, gvt mail, etc..)

I'm impressed with the quality of the "scans" using the camera document capture feature in the newest iOS version of Evernote. I don't even bother using a real scanner anymore.

Yeah. On someone's advice here on HN a year or so ago I bought a ScanSnap 1500 and have been scanning everything I get into Evernote. It's awesome.

I don't trust Evernote's security enough to put this kind of info on their infrastructure.

I use it for my weekly to-do list (since it then syncs across all computers and my phone), and it is a convenient way for me to keep track of my different projects. I type up a short summary for myself after meetings and I can also easily take a photo of a blackboard and include it with the notes. It's also a decent way to quickly record addresses or library call numbers, and to draft e-mails to send to my classes. (A proper e-mail client would work for this last purpose, but the only reliable way to e-mail all students in a course is through Blackboard, which is uniformly terrible.)

OCR allows me to search any image I throw at it.

I use it as my virtual printer.

Every online receipt or payment confirmation, flight details, etc gets inserted into evernote via OS X's "Save PDF to Evernote" link in the print dialog.

I hardly ever look at the stuff, but it's nice to have it all indexed and immediately searchable.

Is the Save PDF to Evernote feature built in? I can right something via watched folders, but I don't seem to have this.

Yojimbo did, and it was nice ;)

The mac app store version of evernote lost the ability, but if you have the version downloaded from their site it should be in the PDF dropdown menu of the OS X print dialog (also useful to disable Chrome's print dialog, which adds one more annoying step).

In this case learning 1 feature per day makes an average Evernote user to walk 3 months along the learning curve.

I'd use it if I could just have all files offline, and disable syncing. Is this possible?

Yes, you can create local notebooks. However, there is a bug detailed here http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/31517-v5-create-local-n... that forces you to create a new notebook via menu bar while in "atlas" mode to enable the option of a local notebook.

Yes. When you create a "notebook" (aka, folder) , you decide if it's local or synced. I don't think you can change this afterwords, but you could create a new notebook (with different settings), and move all the notes over.

You can set syncing to manual (and then never do it), but you still need to sign in to use the app.

The Pinterestification of UI continues...

I can't help but feel their thumbnail display predates the popularity of Pintrest. Given that the use-case most people seem to use it for is scanned images/documents, a list of thumbnails really does make sense. It is what document-viewing applications have used since pretty much the dawn of the GUI.

Yeah, I'm really not digging these "big square" grid views. Pocket's web app (http://getpocket.com/) does it too, and I can't stand it - vastly prefer a standard list view (which thankfully is an option).

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