I’ve recently started bringing these two together, and sometimes use Drafts to capture my grocery items and then send them off to iOS’s stock Reminders app. This video shows how I do this, especially for things that are e-mailed into me.
For much of my Mac-using existence, I’ve been a tagger. This means that not only have I arranged my documents into files and folders, but I apply tags to them as well.
On the Mac, this has been accomplished by a rather hacky standard called OpenMeta.
The not-so-nice thing about OpenMeta is that it has never been officially supported by Apple, so knowledgable taggers were always waiting to see if the next version of OS X is the one that finally kills it.
How this will interact with OpenMeta (if at all) and what happens to our existing tags is still unknown, but I will be keenly watching to see what happens.
Either way, it is nice to see tagging going mainstream on the Mac, and the usual warnings about tagging apply: just because you can tag something, doesn’t mean that you should.
Watch this space for more as it becomes available.
Well, it certainly wasn’t my intention to post about Evernote two days in a row,[1] but the company just released an update that I need to give you a heads up about: they’ve significantly beefed up their security by offering Two-factor authentication.
Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, is a combination of something you know (your Evernote username and password) with something you have (in this case, your mobile device).
Premium users can now set it up so that in addition to your credentials, you will need to enter a special code sent via SMS to your phone or generated by Google Authenticator. If you are familiar with Google or Dropbox’s implementation, it works very similarly.
Apparently this will be rolled out to free users soon, but for now it is just for Premium users (they say they are doing it this way to start it off with a smaller audience for such a big change).
Free users are not left behind entirely. There are two more security features that are available to everyone:
A live list of authorized applications so that you can see and revoke access to third-party apps.
An access history screen that shows when your Evernote account was accessed and from where.
Enabling Two-factor authentication for Evernote is entirely optional, but if you store information in there that you wouldn’t want others to see, I recommend you take a look at it.
If there is one feature of Evernote that has been requested over and over, it is the ability to add reminders to notes.
To this point, the concept of time has been missing from Evernote, and people have done backflips trying to come up with systems and methodologies to work around this.
A new feature has just launched on Mac and iOS called Evernote Reminders – you can now add time-based reminders to an Evernote note and be notified when your reminders are due.
This is great for going paperless because you can now have it remind you when your paperless bills are due. No more worrying about “out of site out of mind”.
At the time of writing this feature is only available on the Mac and iOS clients, but it is coming to Android and Windows soon apparently. This video shows how it works.
Aside from possibly the web clipper, e-mailing notes into Evernote is one of the most used ways that I get stuff into Evernote. It is incredibly handy, especially on a mobile device.
Many people don’t realize that Evernote gives you a special e-mail address that you can use to quickly send things to the service. You can even control the notebook and tags that get applied.
Here’s how to find your super secret address, and how it all works.
When people ask me for Windows document management software recommendations, I more often than not point them to Lucion FileCenter. I’m a Mac user myself, but everyone[1] that I have pointed to FileCenter likes it.
It’s very full featured, has nice automation tools, and best of all, it stores your files in the normal Windows filesystem and not in some proprietary database.
The company has recently released FileCenter Version 8, and I’ve been playing with the new features. Stay tuned for some deep dives later, but for now here are some highlights of the new version.
Inbox Tab
You have always been able to define a cabinet as an inbox for incoming documents, but FileCenter 8 has promoted this to a new tab and button on the toolbar. They’ve also added some new functionality.
FileCenter Inbox
You can click the Inbox button to define a Windows folder as your inbox, and then you can even add multiple folders and switch between them. This is handy if you have scans coming from different locations.
FileCenter Choose Inbox
There’s also a new File Item button so that when you have a document (or multiple documents) highlighted, you can click the button and file it away out of your Inbox.
FileCenter File Item
PDF Editing
FileCenter 8 has improved the ability to edit PDFs. When you are viewing a PDF in the application, you can hit the Edit PDF Image button.
When you do this, you are brought into the Image Editor where you can straighten, crop, redact, and generally edit the content of PDFs. It’s not as full featured as Adobe Acrobat, but it does much of what you might need.
FileCenter Edit PDF
File Naming
Naming Options
A great feature of FileCenter has always been its Naming Rules which let you automatically name documents based on criteria you define.
With FileCenter, they’ve added some new tokens such as Date Created and Date Modified, which can be handy when naming files.
FileCenter Date Tokens
Custom Lists
While, as I’ve said, you have always been able to define tokens for automatically naming files, sometimes it can be helpful to have a list of static names to choose from.
In Version 8, you can define these Custom Lists. For example, I created a list of Utilities:
FileCenter Custom Lists
This gets really powerful when you combine it with the aforementioned tokens. You can built a filename with both dynamic tokens (for example, the date or folder name) and static text from your lists. Handy and consistent.
Upgrading
There are a few more new features, but those are the biggies for me. Apparently if you bought FileCenter 7 in the past 12 months you should be eligible for the FileCenter 8 upgrade (a year seems pretty generous to me).
If you don’t fall into that, you can contact [email protected] or call 801–722–7099 for upgrade pricing.
Or, of course, if you’re happy with FileCenter 7, there is nothing forcing you to upgrade. Keep on going until you’re ready to take the plunge.
The company (wisely) reset everyone’s passwords, which for most people went smoothly.
However, there were a number of people for whom the reset did not go so well, and they lost (yikes) any notes that they had un-synchronized.
This has unsurprisingly caused a lot of distress for some Evernote users, but yesterday on the Evernote Forum, user Dr. Jackie posted a solution that worked.
After sending a couple of e-mails to the EN staff, and getting a response the very next day with the same suggestions, I sent my last e-mail and got a life-saving answer from Martin Schoffler. I have so much to thank him. He gave me two options on retrieving my notes, without reassuring me 100% that they would be there. The steps he gave me to follow made me hopeless because I couldn’t find my notes, but when I kept on looking just about everywhere (in this software I’ll tell you about in a moment) I finally found them.
The forum post has step-by-step instructions, but involves using a program called iExplorer to dig around in your iOS device.
If this works for you, I’d love to hear about it. If you found another way to recover your lost notes, please let us know in the comments as well. Hope this helps.
As most DocumentSnap readers know, I am all about the automation.
What you may not know is that I am an old-school Unix command line geek. I do most stuff in the GUI these days, but one of the reasons I love Mac OS X is it gives you the ability to drop down into its Unix underpinnings and get stuff done on the command line as our forefathers did.
For both of these reasons, I have been intrigued by a new tool by Joe Workman called simply Paperless.
It’s an extremely flexible and geeky command line paperless automation tool. Here’s what the Readme has to say:
Paperless is command-line tool that will help you automate your paperless workflow from your scanner to your e-filing cabinet. That could be the filesystem like Finder or apps like Evernote or DevonThink. Paperless analyzes your scanned documents and processes them through a set of user defined rules. These rules determine how and where to file the document. The entire process is entirely automated so that all you need to do is press the scan button on your scanner!
You can do all sorts of cool stuff like have it (via the tool of your choice) OCR, rename, and move your documents.
I am pretty invested in my Hazel rules, so I haven’t quite wrapped my head around when I will use this for myself, but I really look forward to playing with it. If you are similarly geeky, you might want to give it a look (best of all, it’s free!).
Joe has made a nice 11 minute video taking you through the features. It’s very impressive. You can view it below.
I had a question the other day from awesome DocumentSnap reader Marty. The question essentially was: “How the heck do you tag notes in the Evernote web interface?”
I logged in to take a look, and I found that it isn’t super intuitive. So, I decided to make this video showing two different ways that you can tag your notes in Evernote Web.
I had a question the other day from awesome DocumentSnap reader Marty. The question essentially was: “How the heck do you tag notes in the Evernote web interface?”
