EagleFiler 1.3 Reviewed

Update (2008-03): I’ve added the updated detailed benchmark results at the end of this post.
-

Reading this new version’s change list, which includes some great new features, I thought it’d be interesting to update my recent comparative review to see how EagleFiler now fares with its competitors.  But I’m not going to update the comparative review now, so I decided to simply post the score-changing differences here, along with their impact on EagleFiler’s evaluation.

• EagleFiler’s global score for Collection brings it to become the greatest of all the apps I’ve tested, for collection purposes.  From 50, it raised to 64:
  • It’s now possible to import a selection of a web page as a web archive!  (You need to use Safari, or probably any other webkit-based browser.)  Until now, only Together supported this functionality.  This brings the score for Collection - Support from 26 to 31.
  • The addition of the optional window dialog to file what you collect (tags, comment, etc.) ups the score for Collection - Interaction from 18 to 24 and brings the score for Collection - Consistency from 6 to 9.
  • EagleFiler’s monitoring of To Import folders got better and is anyway something I overlooked in my previous review.  Now that I know of it, it adds 1 to the score for Collection - Interaction.  (To avoid mentioning two different scores for this category, I already included this +1 in the final 24 I wrote in the preceding paragraph.)
• Various small improvements to EagleFiler’s tagging support bring its Organization - Tags integration score from 9 to 10, and its global Organization score from 30 to 31.

These changes bring EagleFiler’s global score from 124 to 140, with an average of 2.1 that now becomes 2.4.  That’s quite an improvement, since EagleFiler is now part of the leading applications of my comparative review!

Now, there’s two more things I’d like to mention:

• EagleFiler now supports some kind of PDF annotation, since it indexes Skim annotations for you to search them.  If Skim would work for you (it does for me), and would like your organizer to understand its annotations, then you may add 2 to the global Organization score and to the Global Evaluation.  The final average doesn’t change.
• I didn’t review how the applications store their data, but I now feel obliged to mention that EagleFiler is at the very least, mostly transparent on that regard - its labels are in fact OS X labels, and etc.  I believe some of the other applications I’ve reviewed are transparent at some level, too.  I didn’t really look into that.  Hat tip to Ian Beck on that aspect that might be important to several people (you might want to read this outdated post that is still useful).

My conclusion regarding this new version of EagleFiler is that it’s stronger than ever.  I’m really interested in seeing how it will develop in the future.  It’s being mentioned more and more on the web, and I suspect it might someday become as much hyped as Yojimbo is, except it’s so much better than Yojimbo if you consider what my comparative review evaluated.  (To be fair to Yojimbo, my review should include some interaction strengths Yojimbo has.  If I someday update the comparative review, I’ll try to incorporate more features in it.)

For people who like more details, grab these:

Tags: EagleFiler, Mac