Before diving into the future of Evernote, make sure you know today’s news, by either looking at this announcement, or watching this video:

Evernote is one of those killer apps out there. I won’t spell its main features here. You should know them already. But let’s remember a few things.

Evernote runs on:

• Your PC (under either Apple’s or Microsoft’s charm)
• Your Mobile phone
• Your iPod Touch
• Your Browser

Evernote syncs your notes perfectly between each one of these platforms. And it’s very good at letting you organize your notes the way(s) you want.

I have only scratched the surface, and yet, Evernote is already besting out a lot of those cool Information Collection applications out there, including OneNote, EagleFiler, Together, Yojimbo, et al.

As if all that Evernote already does wasn’t enough, let me now share with you two secret, future features of Evernote, which are being planned by the company:

1. Evernote will let web page clips keep their whole visual identity. Everything – layout, fonts, colors, images – will look exactly the same as it looked in your browser when you clipped it. The guys behind Evernote recognize how important this is to us – they’ve already shown us their commitment to keeping a hi-fi visual identity. It’s great to see they’re continuing in this line.
2. Evernote will let you keep more metadata about your notes. You’re already able to tag your notes. You’ll be able to write notes about some part of another note; so one note could contain many notes about it. And all of these metanotes will be non-destructive. At last, you’ll be able to use a yellow pen to highlight key points in text, for future quick reference, and improved, preferred search results.

There’s many web products out there that have tried the annotation gig. If there’s one product that can at last solve it, it’s Evernote. That said, in this social era, I need to mention they also plan, of course, to put as much social sauce on these features as needed for us to thrive sharing our notes. I’m really glad about their plans.

When these features will start showing up, I will at last be able to stop using delicious/diigo/etc. – Evernote will be much better at keeping my bookmarks, with their visual identity, their full text, and my annotations. In fact, Evernote will kind of become my personal documents’ replicated file system. I will use it every day, and will rely on it for so many things in my life that I will be glad to pay them a subscription. And you will, too.

Oh, one more thing. These news might also come out as news to Evernote, the corporation. I don’t know if they knew they were planning these features; all I know is that if they didn’t yet, they now do.

Update: Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, twitted me: “Your Evernote secrets are surprisingly accurate. No promises on dates, though. Try shift-clicking on the Safari clipper.”

“It takes 15 minutes to boot from the off position and 5-10 minutes to wake up from sleep.” – anonymous, 8th paragraph of this post on MacApper.

Unbelievable. It’s not a computer, it’s a swaputer. I would definitely have to fight hard not to hate my employer if he forced me to use such a sluggishness. Or maybe it’s anonymous‘ fault for not recognizing the limits of hardware, for not ever refusing to install this neat new little, long-running, resident application.

Anyway. Let’s tackle the heart of the matter.

We switched to Mac in late 2007 and never looked back.

We still have a late 2003 Windows XP laptop that we use every day while the other one is lucky enough to use the 24-inch iMac.

I’ve always been wondering why Mac people keep saying Macs wake up from sleep faster than Windows PCs. Even my old Windows laptop wakes up in three seconds. Remember, that’s the benchmark of a 6 years-old model! Heck, our iMac is just two seconds faster at waking up!

Now, were I to have a recent Windows PC whose hardware is on par with my iMac’s, I believe it makes sense it would wake up almost 100% as fast as my iMac, wouldn’t it?

No wonder I keep asking myself if it’s out of good or bad will that people keep saying Macs wake up faster! Even Apple recognizes their OS could wake up from sleep faster. After all, they tout Snow Leopard does it up to twice faster. (I know, this doesn’t support the argument. But still!)

That said, I must confess a couple irregularities.

To keep our old laptop from being too slow, we don’t use any typical Windows security software. No anti-virus and the like. (In fact, I’ve been doing this for 15 years without problems! Looks like we’re very good Internet citizens.)

Also, I don’t allow almost any kind of software to be always running, always present in the notification area unless it’s really always needed.

So these two factors might account for our Windows laptop waking up so fast. And for all typically secured and app’ed Windows computer’s sluggishness at waking up from sleep.

What’s your take on this?

Over the past two years, I have tried many applications to help me with the sheer number of applications I use.

The one that I use the most often is Mac OS X’s own SpotLight.

Sometimes, though, I feel a bit more like launching an app the visual way. That’s when I use Overflow, the only third-party application I have really grown to like:

If it wasn’t of Overflow, I might just end up using the Applications Stack, which, even with the upcoming OS X 10.6′s new scroll bar, wouldn’t cut it at all:

As you can see, I really need something like Overflow; and that’s why I wanted to write this review, as a big thank you to Stunt Software.

Wikis have already had a huge impact, from pet projects to enterprise solutions to Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia.

Wagn could open up even bigger ideas about what online communities can do.

“Wagn is one of the freshest contributions to wiki since I coined the term.”
- Ward Cunningham, who invented wikis 15 years ago.

Wagn’s lead developer, Lewis Hoffman, explains Wagn this way:

“Like Wikipedia, all wikis give you the power to create web pages without speaking HTML. Wagn adds the power to create structure without speaking database, and it increasingly lets you create functionality without speaking programming code.”

The trick is in the cards. Wagn helps you organize all your information into “cards” that can be linked, nested, and formatted to create new structures. “Kind of like online legos,” says Hoffman. A given web page might contain dozens of cards organized into a set structure.

“Wikipedia has loads of community norms and policies, and their pages often have some structure, too. Look at the sidebar of the Wikipedia page for, say, “Wyoming,” and you’ll see structured information common to all the states: a flag, a seal, some nicknames… But the difference is that all of this information has been organized by hand. Someone had to go and manually insert that structure by adding special code to every single state page. So maintaining the pattern can take hours and hours of cut and paste. That strategy might work for Wikipedia, with its millions of contributors, but most wikis have more like five or ten editors who would appreciate a little more power.”
- Ethan McCutchen, Wagn co-creator.

On the intention behind the concept of cards, we can read somewhere else:

So we started with smaller units than web pages, and we decided to call them “cards.”

We’re all familiar with lots of kinds of cards: playing cards, postcards, business cards, library cards…  They’re all different sizes and hold different amounts of information, everything from a picture to a filing record to a complete story.  The same goes for cards on Wagn.

As we started organizing cards of information about companies and products, we quickly saw patterns emerging.  We wanted company cards, for example, to include logo cards, address cards, etc.  This has been one of the driving ideas behind Wagn: cards including other cards in patterned ways.

One innovation of Wagn that’s worth mentioning is what they call Plus cards:

Also known as connections or connection cards, plus cards are one of the core innovations of Wagn.

The basic idea is that any two cards can be plussed together to create a third.  So for example, I might have a card about Dell Computers called “Dell” and another about labor issues called “labor”.  If I connect these two cards together I get a third called “Dell+labor”.  I can then enter into that card anything about the intersection of Dell and labor – Dell’s labor record in general, specific events, direct feedback, etc. Any time you see a + in the name of a card, you know you’re dealing with a plus card.

And something else is worth mentioning too: Form cards.

Wagn lets you create forms (called “cards”), and to apply a form to many cards, so that when you have a set of cards that are about the same kind of thing, you can be sure they will all contain the same information, in the same layout.

An example of a form card is that which every user gets when he signs up on the service: his User card. Each user’s card is made up of the user’s image, the user’s story, the user’s wiki, and finally, the user’s tags. You’ll see some of these in the screenshot below. Also note my highlights, were I have tried the Plus card feature, and the Inclusions feature:

Note that my screenshots don’t show the whole layout of each page. There’s also comment boxes there and the whole site navigation cards.

Through the time I tested it, Wagn 1.0.0 worked well but showed many signs of immaturity: visual inconsistencies that needed me to refresh my web page to correct them (javascript issues), and a layout glitch when I tried the titled view style (which was otherwise very nice).

Wagn is available as a paid hosting plan, or as a free, GPL-licensed open source Ruby code project.

Were I to choose a wiki solution today, Wagn would be high in my list. That said, I believe the future Google Wave solution might eventually be used to kill quite a few wiki solutions out there. Meanwhile, here’s what the project leaders have to say about Wagn’s future:

Oh, it’s far from done — we’ve got literally hundreds of design ideas in our tracking system (which we built using Wagn).

Hat tip to Wagn 1.0+Press Release, The Story Behind Wagn 1.0, and the Documentation for most of the prose.

Here’s my personal list of pros and cons after 6 months of full-time usage of the Mighty Mouse:

Pros

1. I am addicted to its scroll ball, and
2. it looks and feels great (glossy, light).

Cons

1. But it sometimes right-click when I left-clicked, or the reverse, and it’s getting worse over time;
2. I sometimes need to clean the scroll ball, and
3. we cannot simultaneously click both left and right buttons, and
4. right clicks are not 100% accurate, and
5. right clicks cannot be done fast enough for action games, and
6. the optical sensor makes the mouse cursor sometimes jump, while my non-Apple mouse never fails on the same surface, and
7. generally, its optical sensor works much less well than my Logitech’s laser sensor.

I’ve cross-posted this list to the product reviews in Apple Store.

Oh, yeah: kudos to Logitech and Microsoft for their great mice.

Update: My final list of pros & cons of this Rotten Rodent.

My wife and I stopped using Apple’s Mighty Mouse because we are unremeditably annoyed by two frequent problems it has.  First, the mouse cursor often jumps for no good reason.  Second, the mouse started a few months ago to make occasional errors of registering right clicks instead of left clicks.  What a chiefly annoyance!  Bye bye, UnMighty Mouse!  We’ll only miss your scroll ball…

Now, let’s take a look at Together.  If you remember my comparative review of web information collection applications, you know I liked a lot Together.  Now that it’s been significantly upgraded in its new incarnation stamped Version 2.1, let’s see how our landscape of options evolved in the context of the comparative review.

• Overall, with a global average score of 2.8, Together is more than ever a solid competitor to all the other 8 applications I’ve tested. Prior to its version 2.1, it only scored 2.4.  On many aspects, Together is now much more usable and mature.
• Together’s interaction with you when you collect items has been revamped.  From 15, its score for Collection – Interaction bumped to 23, making Together part of the top 3 applications on that aspect.  This improvement was achieved by adding an option to ask you to file and tag each new item as soon as you collect it (using the shelf, with a really great and natural-feeling workflow!), adding much welcome bookmarklets in your browsers, and allowing you to set up a global keyboard shortcut.
• Together also became more consistent in its collected items vital assets.  Its score for Collection – Consistency is now 9, from a previous 7.  That’s because annotating a web page collected now no more makes you loose its link.  Previously, after annotating a web archive, you couldn’t find anymore where it was collected on the web (apart using google)!  Together’s new score also means that it shares the second place with EagleFiler, although both lag behind Evernote (which scored 16).
• Together’s search features also made a big jump forward, leaping from 25 to 40, joining Journler and Evernote in the front line.  That’s the best score yet, although if I updated my benchmark, Evernote (>35) would lead clearly.  In any case, a score of 40 means leading-edge overall search capabilities.
  • Again, I know we could argue on DevonThink’s specific search capabilities which I have probably undervalued, but here I’m speaking of the overall search features.  DevonThink, with its score of 20, was one of the poorest contenders overall and although some specifics of its search features are exceedingly great, you might nonetheless be disappointed by the rest.

While running Together through my benchmark of tests, I felt a few rough edges that made it feel more like a beta version than a gold release.  These rough edges (which I can’t remember because I didn’t write them down) weren’t crashes or anything serious, though; they were more like small glitches with the ways the interface has been updated.  Nothing here serious enough for me to advise you to wait for the patch releases.

Well, that’s it.  Together has now taken its place in the leading pack of web information collection applications.  On top of that, you could add that it makes a great file collection application, and you’d get a really serious competitor on that front to EagleFiler (and some other apps).  All of this having been said, I want to congratulate Reinvented Software for such progress on such a great application.

Until yesterday, it’s been a few times I resisted trying MenuCalendarClock.  Its name is ugly and its web site isn’t much better at selling it.  But it’s almost exactly what I was longing for.  I was tired of bringing up the whole iCal interface, or firing up the Dashboard, just to see my daily appointments.  I wanted something more streamlined into my workflow, more accessible but still capable, yet not distracting.  Thanks to MacUpdate’s Parallels Bundle and Chris Pirillo, I found the answer to my need in MenuCalendarClock.

It’s as slick as it looks in this screenshot and it’s even better.  The search box works wonders to bring up anything that’s been on your calendar but you don’t remember when, and it’s just where it’s needed.  Double-clicking on something either brings up iCal or a window to edit a task’s details.  In short, it rocks.

Of course, it could be even better.  I’d like to be able to specify the date format of the events view.  Repeating the year and month for each one of the three days shown looks silly to me.  I’d much rather see the name of the day completely spelled out, like “vendredi le 18“, “samedi le 19“, and “lundi le 21“.  (Yes, French is my native language.)

MenuCalendarClock comes at the price of 20$, for either iCal or Entourage.  If you’re quick enough, you could also get it like me in the great deal that is the Parallels Bundle.  Finally, if you just want the slick calendar view without the events and tasks view, the basic version of the application will come free to you.

Here’s my story.
If you don’t like its start, don’t miss its end.

I already knew of most of the applications in the Parallels Bundle.

I already own Hazel.
I already own a competitor app to Parallels (Fusion).

I already use freeware or shareware equivalents to:
MenuCalendarClock (stock apple widget, not great),
StoryMill (trying Scrivener),
Typinator (trying TextExpander).

I knew I would someday want to buy Leap and MenuCalendarClock.
I knew I might someday need Art Text and StoryMill.

I think I learned the existence of this bundle on TUAW.
I checked it on MacUpdate, including the screencast.
I read again about it on another blog.
And another time on another blog I’m subscribed to.

And still, with all the knowledge I have of these apps, I wasn’t sure I’d purchase the bundle.  I even closed its tab in my browser – bad sign.

But then, Chris Pirillo published this post that hooked me.
I read it and bought the bundle; hence this post to share it with you.

Update (2008-05): The beta version was updated to 1.1, bringing support for PDF documents and some other minor goodies.  I’ve updated this post accordingly.  It also reflects the updated scores of Together 2.1.

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In March, I was able to snag myself a TechCrunch invitation to try the upcoming Mac version of Evernote.  When I first discovered it in 2004 (for Windows), I soon became an advocate of Evernote for its organizational capabilities.  Evernote wasn’t perfect, but it was already a leader in the market and since then, it’s kept progressing at a steady pace.  Now that it’s starting to breathe on OS X, it’s time for a new testing round.

Today, I took a few hours to run Evernote against my web information collection test benchmark.  I’m now ready to share with you how Evernote, in its actual pre-release form, competes with the pack.

As this is pre-release software, please understand that Evernote will probably fare even better than now when it’ll reach Release Day.  Until then, here’s what I found.

Before jumping in the results, I feel the need to remind you two things:

Now, to the results:

All in all, Evernote for Mac brings incredible competition into the domain of web information collection applications.  I see myself using Evernote over anything else for this purpose soon, although I will probably continue using some of its competitors for other specific needs.  Writing in Scrivener is something Evernote won’t compete with, for example.  Moreover, since the application itself will be free, Evernote will bring quite a new challenge to some of its general-purpose competitors.  Evernote will change the face of the market as we know it today.  I hope it will be both for the best interest of itself and its competitors; if it is, then we’ll also benefit greatly from that as a result.

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.

These changes bring EagleFiler’s global score from 124 to 138, with an average of 2.1 that now becomes 2.4.  That’s quite an improvement!

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

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:

]]> http://danieljomphe.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/eaglefiler-13-reviewed/feed/ 1 danieljomphe http://danieljomphe.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/uninstallers-appzapper-vs-hazel/ http://danieljomphe.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/uninstallers-appzapper-vs-hazel/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:19:47 +0000 Daniel Jomphe http://danieljomphe.wordpress.com/?p=38 ]]>

Update 2 (2008-12): MacApper posted a review of CleanApp 3, which has been released a month ago, and it looks even much more interesting than it did before. I’m yet to try it, though.

Update 1 (2008-04): Someone else compared many uninstallers, reaching similar conclusions.  Hinted at CleanApp possibly being the perfect solution.  Reviews on MacUpdate are fairly positive.  Cleanapp’s rating would be almost perfect if it wasn’t of some performance bugs that might get fixed when version 3 is released.

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In the past few months, Hazel, an application that’s useful to automate your organization of files and folders, started lending a hand when you want to uninstall software from your Mac.

This move from the author is a really wise one, as it widens Hazel’s target market into the uninstaller utilities category of applications.  And indeed, that’s what convinced me to buy it, because first, I needed a good uninstaller, and second, I might someday want to build myself an automated workflow for my files and folders organization.

Now, the main question is:

How good is Hazel at uninstalling applications,
compared to the leader of this category, namely AppZapper?

I started my tests a month ago with the hypothesis that neither one would be really sufficient as a uninstaller, because unless I’m wrong, they both solely rely on Spotlight to find which files should be trashed when you uninstall something.

To verify this hypothesis and find an answer to the main question, each time I needed to uninstall an application, I would both use AppZapper and Hazel to see which one fares better.  It’s easy to do.  First, drag your doomed application to AppZapper.  Then, drag it to the trash.  You will end up with both AppZapper’s and Hazel’s suggestions as to what should be deleted along the application package.

To my surprise, I found out Hazel was often times better than AppZapper at suggesting files that need to be uninstalled.  Hazel often finds more of them, so your system is left a bit cleaner after.  But often, AppZapper finds some files that Hazel didn’t.  And finally, even after running both, you will sometimes step on unwanted remnants.

Let me give you two examples.

When comparing the results, please remember it’s normal that Hazel doesn’t suggest to delete the application package, because it brings you its suggestions as a reaction to your actual trashing of the application package.  I love this way of working better than AppZapper’s ways of working.

In the first example, we see how Hazel is usually better than AppZapper:

In the second example, we see that this time, AppZapper is a bit better, but even after using both, we’re left with incomplete results:

More Concerns

To be fair towards AppZapper, please remember that we sometimes need to uninstall other things than applications.  Regarding this matter, Hazel can’t do anything for you, while AppZapper can uninstall Preference Panes, Dashboard Widgets, some other kinds of Plugins, and finally, custom Screen Savers.  I don’t know how cleanly it performs these uninstallations, though.

Also, if you wonder why I didn’t test any other uninstaller out there, it’s because I believe they wouldn’t perform much better.  Unless I’m wrong, they all rely on Spotlight.

My Final Word

Shame on Apple for not providing in OS X what Microsoft started providing more than 12 years ago in Windows 95: a standard (un)installation framework.  If Apple would provide the fully working equivalent of what Hazel is partly successful doing, I believe we’d be into something really great.

Update (2008-06): I now hate the Mighty Mouse.

Switching from a regular PC to a Mac also means, in most cases, switching keyboards and mice.  When I started using my brand-new iMac, I wasn’t sure if I’d like the Mighty Mouse, but I wanted to give it a chance, so I decided I would use it exclusively for at least two weeks.

My first impression was that I’d miss my back and forward buttons.  And let me tell you I do.  Next, I found it’s hard to use the side buttons, and up to this day, this hasn’t changed.  I was also really surprised to learn that the side buttons are in fact together only one button.

After a few days, I was hooked at its scroll wheel.  Er, sorry, I meant scroll ball.  It’s addictive.  It’s wonderful.  It’s even ergonomic.  Scroll wheels hurt.  Scroll balls don’t.  Scroll wheels wouldn’t if they were designed as small as this ball.  And I say that with some experience with carpal tunnel problems.

What’s funny is that after two weeks, I still hadn’t understood how to succeed at right-clicking every time I tried it.  Most of the time, the mouse would register a left click instead.  It would drive me nuts.  And it’s even funnier that my wife picked it up fine starting on day one.  But we weren’t able to find what it was I wasn’t doing well.

Seeing something was (ironically) wrong with me, I decided I wouldn’t revert to my Logitech mouse until I had solved this problem for myself and tried the mouse in this new glorified way for at least one more week.  And then, a few days later, I found out you have to make sure no finger remains on the left side of the mouse when you push on its right side.  That’s so counter-intuitive.  I mean, why should I need to lift my left finger before right-clicking?  My wife, on the other side of the fence, always did this with any mouse.  How (un)lucky she is!

The most annoying problem of the Mighty Mouse is that its cursor sometimes jumps from one place in the screen to another one when we’re moving the mouse, instead of following our movement.  At first, I thought I was facing some kind of bug in OS X.  Now, I believe it’s because this mouse’s optical system has some problems recognizing the surface of my desk.  When I try my Logitech mouse, I never face this problem.  Let me tell you it’s a really annoying bug, and no, I don’t want to use any kind of mouse pad.  That would ruin the careful looks of my workplace, wouldn’t it?

So, after 4 months using the Mighty Mouse, how do I feel?  Well, I think it’s time to buy a new desk.

Seriously, I hope Apple will make a better device soon.  I would gladly encourage them to continue producing half-crap devices by buying their next mouse instead of switching back to my previous mouse.  Until then, I’m going to rock (argh…) and roll (yay!) with my Mighty Mouse because I’m hooked at the Mighty Scroll Ball.