I have used application launchers on my Mac for quite a few years, going back to the old Quicksilver days[1] , but I have to admit that I have mainly used them to (you guessed it), launch applications.
When Quicksilver went on its hiatus, I decided to look for an alternative, and started using Alfred. It quickly became my go-to application for launching applications and files on my Mac, but when I purchased the Powerpack, I decided I’d better start getting my money’s worth and learn how to do as much as possible with it.
It occurred to me the other day that using Alfred to search Evernote would be really useful, so I started trying to figure out how to do that.
I was not at all surprised to find that Stephen Millard over at Thought Asylum has already done the hard work for us. He has a series of twoblog posts in which he shows how to search Evernote from Alfred.
Since one of his commenters added a much-appreciated tweak to the workflow, I thought I’d do my runthrough for how I set it up using Stephen’s instructions.
Get Alfred
Alfred is a free application, but in order to do what we are going to be going to be doing here, I believe that you will need to purchase the Powerpack. At the time of writing, it is 12 GBP.
The Powerpack does way more than what we’ll be talking about here, and if you want to use Alfred for doing more than just launching files, I highly recommend it.
Pontus’ modification works the same, but the search results appear in the existing Evernote window and do not pop up a new one. I personally prefer having everything in one window, but go whichever way makes the most sense to you.
Download either extension to your computer and remember where you saved it, because you’ll need it in the next step. In my example, I will save it to my desktop.
Add The Extension To Alfred
To add the extension to Alfred, first go into Preferences by clicking on the Alfred icon in your menu bar and choosing Preferences.
Alfred Preferences
From there, click on the Extensions tab.
Alfred Extensions
Drag the extension file that you downloaded previously on to the Alfred window like this.
Drag Alfred Extension
Give the extension a name if you want it to be something other than “Search Evernote”. Then hit Import.
From there, a window will pop up that might look a bit scary, but don’t worry. You don’t need to think about 99% of it, if any at all.
Search Evernote Added
First, on the left hand side, you will now notice that under Applescripts you will have Search Evernote added. That’s great, it means that it imported.
Next, you will see the Keyword field. You can change this if you want. That is what tells Alfred that you want to kick off an Evernote search. We’ll show how this works soon, but in the meantime you can either leave it as just en (Pontus’ default), or change it to something else. Stephen’s default was $en, so do what you want here.
When you are done, you are good to go. It is time to close the Preferences window and try searching!
Search Evernote From Alfred
When I type the Alfred keystroke to start a search[2], the search box will pop up. First, I type the little keyword code that we set in the previous section, which in my case is just en.
You can see that it brings up a few things, but in my case, all I care about is the first entry which is the Search Evernote option that we had created. Yeah! It shows up!
When I hit Space, it will know that I want to use the first option, so after that, anything I type will be sent directly to Evernote for searching.
Let’s try a simple Evernote search for a tag.
Evernote tag search
When I hit Enter, it starts up my Evernote client (I didn’t have it running), and does a search for anything with the tag cocktail in my Evernote account.
Evernote Cocktail Search
Let’s say I wanted to search for the instruction manual for my garage storage shelves, and I remembered I had bought it at Costco.
Alfred Costco Search
Et voila…
Costco Alfred Search Results
As far as I have found, you can type pretty much any Evernote search term into Alfred and it will carry over.
I’ve found integrating Evernote searching into Alfred to be super-helpful. Thanks to Stephen and Pontus for their great extensions and instructions.
Do you have any other great Alfred (or other application launcher) tricks for going paperless? I’d love to hear them in the comments.
I am aware that Quicksilver is apparently back from the dead, but I am pretty happy with Alfred. ↩
This video on Evernote Import Folders is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.
A question I get asked quite a bit is “how do I use Evernote to store my documents and have them stored in my file system?”
On Windows, one great way is to use Evernote’s Import Folders functionality, and that is what this video covers. It is also a great way to automatically have documents or other files added to Evernote.
Back when I was running a Support team for a software company, I found myself in a situation where balls were starting to be dropped and I was letting members of my team down. There were just too many spinning plates, both at work and at home.
While trying to figure out what to do about it, I came across David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it changed my life. I remember walking out of my office after my initial weekend-long GTD-a-thon amazed with the feeling that David Allen talks about in his book: I felt like I had a “mind like water”.
Since leaving that job, I have to admit that my GTD-ness has fallen off the rails a little bit. I “sort of” do it using Remember The Milk, but nowhere near effectively. I’ve been really wanting to get back on track.
As soon as the eBook was released, I rushed out and dropped the $5 ($5!) to check it out.
What It Is
The author is pretty explicit that this eBook is not primarily a how-to guide for using Evernote. It is focused on how to use Evernote with GTD.
What this eBook won’t do though is give you a step–by–step tutorial on how to use specific features in Evernote. The company does a great job of that on their Knowledge Base. While I will do some deep dives into some functionality, the specific focus here will be how to be more productive, efficient, and gain back more control in your life by being able to truly capture everything and get things done.
That being said, I like how he starts off going into why we need a solution like this (whether it be Evernote, GTD, or something else). His points really spoke to me, as it sounds like we are kindred spirits in a lot of ways. Nothing I have tried has “just worked”, and while I consider myself reasonably productive, I know things could be much better.
Buckets O’ Tags
Gold’s observation is similar to mine on the subject of tags. What many people do (myself included) when they start out with Evernote is go crazy making tonnes and tonnes of tags with no thought as to why or what they’ll do with them.
I really liked this quote, which sums things up well:
I was destroying the very beauty within Evernote by over–complicating everything.
There are some good tips on note linking – something I don’t do as much as I know I should, but I can see how it is a powerful feature. That is going to be one of my takeaways from this for sure: start intelligently linking notes.
Implementing GTD In Evernote
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of implementing GTD in Evernote, I like how the author talks about the “vertical focus” of GTD that many people ignore. I’ve certainly been guilty of this. He takes an interesting detour into how fear may play a part in this (again, possibly guilty as charged). I think the universe must be trying to tell me something because I listened to a podcast conversation between Mike Vardy and Chris Guillebeau on exactly this topic an hour after finishing Gold’s eBook.
As far as implenting GTD itself goes, the author has come up with a pretty fascinating tagging structure for GTD. You can tell that a lot of thought and trial and error has gone into it.
In addition to showing the tag structure, he takes the reader through some examples of situations and goes step-by-step through how he would handle and implement it.
He structured the implementation section into the five phases of GTD (Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do), which made a lot of sense to me.
Speaking Of Review And Do
Any time I have ever had problems with GTD, it has been because I was not dilligent about doing my Weekly Review. The more familiar with Getting Things Done that I become, the more I realize that the Review is the key to getting to that “mind like water” state.
I was happy to see that the author specifically addressed this (I get the sense that he has been burned by the lack of reviewing as well).
As far as doing goes, I think this quote from the eBook says it all:
All of this would be for naught if it there weren’t an end to the means here. The whole point naturally is to actually do something with all of your tasks.
Some Extra Tips
It was interesting to see how he uses his ScanSnap S1100 with Evernote to go paperless. He does things very differently than I do in some ways, so I am going to beg politely request that Gold do a guest post on DocumentSnap at some point to elaborate on his going-paperless process.
Should You Get It?
If you are wanting a general guide on how to use Evernote, this eBook is probably not for you. There are some better choices for that.
Last week I travelled down to San Francisco to attend the Evernote Trunk Conference. I wasn’t originally planning to go as it seemed to be mostly a developer-themed event, and the last time I had a developer job was 2002.
However, when I saw the session list and saw that some people I really admire like Brett Kelly and Michael Hyatt were going to be there, I decided to make the trip. I’m really glad that I did.
I am not going to talk about all the sessions and goings-on, but just hit some of the highlights as I saw them.
What It Is
Here is how the Evernote people describe the conference:
The Evernote Trunk Conference (ETC) is a full day of sessions, workshops and discussions designed to help you take advantage of the Evernote platform. You’ll learn how to kick off your API project, hear success stories from fellow entrepreneurs and discover ways to improve your daily use of Evernote.
I’d say that description is pretty accurate. It was pretty clear that the genesis of the event was a developer conference, but I am pretty sure that the majority of the attendees were not developers (more on that later).
These different perspectives did make for interesting conversations, and it was very cool to hear what people are working on.
DocumentSnap Readers Are Cool
I have to admit that these sorts of conference settings are not exactly my forté. Sometimes I think I should buy one of these xkcd shirts.
However, it is awesome meeting DocumentSnap readers. I met a number at ETC including Dan (who I have met before, so clearly I am stalking him from conference to conference) and @loghound who I was thrilled to see as one of the Developer Competition finalists.
It is always fun to meet people at these conferences, so if you are a reader and see me, come say hi!
Opening Keynote
The opening keynote of the conference was by Evernote’s CEO, Phil Libin. I thought his talk was fascinating, both because of Evernote’s growth and because of their company-buiding philosophy.
Crazy Growth
Anyone who has followed the Evernote Podcast for a while knows how crazy their growth is. It’s gotten to the point where they just throw in the fact that they’ve grown another million users as a footnote.
The most amazing stat to me is the paid user number. A year ago they were at 92,819 paid users, and as of the date of the slide, they’re at 568,677. 513% growth in paid users is not bad at all.
100 Year Company
One theme that the company kept coming back to in their presentation is that their overarching goal is to be a place for their users to keep their memories in forever.
Instead of a “build and flip” mentality, they say they are structuring things to be a “100 Year Company”. We’ll see what happens there of course. Their VCs are going to need a payoff for that $50 million investment sooner or later, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I definitely admire the approach.
Skitch Acquisition
One big announcement during Phil’s keynote is that Evernote has acquired Skitch, a photo and screenshot annotation program.
I love Skitch and use it almost every day, so it is great to see two companies I admire joining together. Already they’ve made Skitch free and have released an Android version, so hopefully good things will be coming.
Usually when these guys speak, it is at conferences costing hundreds of dollars, so it was pretty wild to see them at a $50 event.
The panel was mostly focused on raising money (in keeping with the developer theme of the event), so that part wasn’t too applicable to me (though if Sequoia wants to drop a few million on DocumentSnap, we can talk).
The three of them are entertaining and engaging, so it was a fun panel (you don’t usually see those words together).
Time For The Architectural Digest
Next up was the CTO of Evernote, Dave Engberg. Listeners of the Evernote podcast will know him for his so-bad-they’re-good puns, mastery of spices, and disdain for Apple fanboys.
Again, he returned to the importance that the company places on keeping their users’ memories safe, and how that informs the technical decisions that they make.
Dave’s talk (as expected) got very technical very fast, but one area thought I thought might be of interest to DocumentSnap readers is the part on processing priority.
If you can make out the slide, their system prioritizes text recognition for Premium users first, then the time varies by the size of the file. JPGs are done almost right away, but PDFs can of course be longer based on the size and complexity of the file.
All the finalists and special prizes were really cool, and I was torn between voting for NotableMeals, which was developed by a DocumentSnap reader, and Touchanote, because it is so insanely clever and from Canada.
I won’t say who I voted for, but in the end Touchanote won. It is one of those things that a video helps explain better than I ever could:
User Sessions
In the evening, there were the User Sessions.
Unfortunately, I only caught two of them. I missed the one by Carley Knobloch, which I am sad about because I heard it was very good. Hopefully there’ll be a video someday?
The ones I saw by Brett Kelly and Michael Hyatt were excellent. Some tips I picked up:
Plan for your future self. Just because you remember something now doesn’t mean you will later. Make sure you put the words you think will help you find the note later in the note or tag
When searching, instead of coming up with crazy complex search terms to try to find the note you are looking for in one shot, just type a few words and let your eyes scan the list.
Pick a random week from the past and go back and look at your Evernote notes from that week. I just tried it, it is a blast.
Michael Hyatt had a fantastic Kindle/Evernote tip that I am going to try out and post about soon.
Of course, since they are Evernote partners, the ScanSnap people were representing. I talked to them for a bit.
I was mostly asking about the ScanSnap N1800, which was helpful as I wasn’t quite sure where it fit into the product line.
Suggestions For Future Events
I thought the Evernote Trunk Conference was very very well done for a 1.0 event.
From the food to the location to the co-ordination, I thought everything was just great. It is really difficult to put on something like this, especially when it is the first one, so you aren’t really sure how it is going to go.
I do have some suggestions for future events, if the Evernote folks are reading:
I heard a number of times that while this was nominally a developer event, there were a large number of non-developers there. It might be worthwhile to have two simultaneous tracks for developers and users or business-types.
I’m not sure how you would do this for a one day event, but it might be worth having some short breaks in the morning and afternoon. Otherwise people take advantage of the video breaks to get up, and no one sees your cool videos.
I assume you’ve already heard about the chairs.
The setup of the User Sessions seemed cool at first, but it became clear pretty quickly that having the bar, the partner tables, and the speakers going in the same room wasn’t quite working. It was very hard to hear the speakers, and the poor speakers couldn’t hear the audience.
Again these are minor fixable things that you can only find out through experience. I would definitely go back if they hold the event again next year.
One of the most popular posts on DocumentSnap is How To Export Your Data Out Of Evernote. My takeaway from that is that people like to use the service (I certainly do), but they want to make sure that they have a safe and/or convenient way to get their data out when they need to.
In the comments to that post, DocumentSnap reader rachel asks if there is a way to export to Word or RTF or something instead of just HTML and ENEX.
Originally I had thought this was not possible, but for Mac users at least, the always-clever folks at Veritrope have proved me wrong.
Once you set it up (here are instructions for how to set up Veritrope scripts), here is how it works:
First, you highlight the notes that you want to export.
Then, run the script. The script documentation recommends using FastScripts. I personally used Keyboard Maestro, mainly because I already have it installed. Either way, it prompts you where you want to save your RTFs.
When you are done, it produces a helpful Growl notification telling you how many notes were exported.
In the destination directory, you can see that it has exported my selected notes as RTFD files. It has also exported the HTML folders as well, in case you need them as backup.
As for the results, from my limited testing they are pretty perfect representations of the Evernote notes. Here are three examples side-by-side:
What About PDFs?
Yeah, that is a bit of an issue. The Veritrope page says “The RTFD conversion works with most notes, but not with PDFs!”. It is not quite that bad. It does do the export, but the resulting RTF file just contains a link to the PDF, which is exported. Here’s an example of a PDF note:
Once exported, you can see that as before there is the RTF file and then a folder with the HTML version and a Resources folder:
When I open the RTF, it just contains a hyperlink to the PDF file:
When I look at the link, you can see that it links to the PDF which is sitting in the Resources folder. Not as ideal as having the PDF embedded, but at least it does export it.
Setting all this up is a bit technical, but once it is done, it can be a handy way to export your Evernote notes to a readable format on the Mac. If anyone has any ideas for doing something similar on Windows, please leave a note in the comments.
(Thinking aloud here, I wonder if that script can be made into a Droplet to make the exporting even easier. Hmmm…).
You have long been able to share notebooks with Evernote, but the company has added the ability to share individual notes as a link. I have found this surprisingly handy.
Yesterday, a friend told me that he was thinking of going to Barcelona and asked if I had any tips. Now, I’ve never been to Barcelona, but I never let lack of personal knowledge stop me from offering up Cliff Clavin-style information.
I was pretty sure I had scanned a magazine article about Barcelona once, so I typed “barcelona” into Evernote’s search bar and there it was (Evernote really is becoming my external brain).
Getting The Sharing URL
I could have emailed the PDF or turned it into an attachment and extracted it, but it was just faster and easier to send him a URL.
I right-clicked on the note, chose Share, then Copy shared note URL to clipboard. I then pasted the URL to him. I could have used the Sharing menu up in the toolbar too.
(By the way, these screenshots are from the Mac version, but the Windows version works the same).
What He Sees
When he clicks the URL, he’s taken to an Evernote web page where he can download the PDF. He doesn’t have access to any of my other notes, or the other notes in this particular notebook (which is not shared).
If I had shared a note that was not a PDF, it would have just displayed the contents. Here is an example of a very important note that I’ll need to be able to pull up next time I am in Portland, Oregon.
Privacy and Stopping Sharing
It is important to note that these shared URLs are theoretically public. In the unlikely event that someone figures out the incredibly long and ugly URL, anyone on the Internet could see your note (they warn you about this too). Therefore, I recommend not sharing anything with extremely sensitive information.
If you want to stop sharing a note, that is easy. When you are looking at your note, you’ll see that it has a Shared icon with an arrow.
When you click it, you can then stop sharing.
When Evernote first announced individual-note sharing, I have to admit that I didn’t think I’d ever use it, but it has turned out to be surprisingly handy on a number of occasions. If you need to send someone a note or document out of your Evernote account, give it a try.
If you use tags to organize your information in Evernote, it can be handy to periodically go through and find the notes that aren’t tagged. That way, you can make sure that you have tagged everything.
By the way, this tip came from Don McAllister in the Evernote episode of ScreencastsOnline. I definitely recommend checking out his service. I learn something from every single episode.
To find all untagged notes, go to the search box in the top-right corner of the Evernote window and make sure you have selected All Notebooks[1].
Quick tip: if you want to quickly do this from anywhere on your computer, hit Ctrl-Cmd-F on your Mac or Win-Shift-F on Windows. It will automatically jump to the Evernote application, select All Notebooks, and go to the search bar.
To find all untagged notes, type the following in the search bar:
-tag:*
As you can hopefully see here, the search has brought back all my Evernote notes without tags. I can then go through and selectively tag the ones that I want. .
There have been a number of changes in that year, so I thought it would be a good time to check out ScanDrop again.
At the time, my primary gripes were:
It was Windows only
You had to scan to JPG (not really a gripe, but I found it odd)
Both of them have been somewhat addressed, so lets take a closer look.
What Is ScanDrop?
ScanDrop is an application that you install that lets you scan to the cloud. What the heck does that mean exactly?
You scan a document with your scanner, and this application will then take it and upload it to Google Docs, OfficeDrop, Evernote, or you can save it to your hard drive or Dropbox.
Even though services like Google Docs and Evernote are (sort of) competitors to OfficeDrop, it is clever of the company to release a tool that interacts with all of them. As a marketing exercise, better to get the program in as many peoples’ hands as possible and hopefully some of them will convert to OfficeDrop users.
ScanDrop for Windows
ScanDrop started out as a Windows application. You can download it here for free. When you start it up, you are presented with a choice of services to upload your document to.
In the Windows version of ScanDrop you can scan to Evernote, Google Docs, OfficeDrop, or your local disk.
If you are using a TWAIN-compliant scanner (ie, not a ScanSnap), you can hit the scan button in the application, choose your scanner, and then it will scan in your document. Here you can see a scan I have just done in preparation for uploading to Google Docs:
If you have a ScanSnap, they provide an application that should create the appropriate ScanSnap settings for you. It didn’t work for me, but it may be because I am running a ScanSnap S1100 which is not one of the ScanSnaps they list support for.
Not a problem, I just created a ScanSnap Manager profile manually and pointed it to the ScanDrop application on the Applications tab.
Once you have scanned in your document, you can manipulate the pages, crop them, rotate them, and if you have changed your mind, change the cloud storage you want to upload to.
When you’re ready, hit the Upload button and it will be sent. Here is an example of it being uploaded to Evernote. I set the notebook and tags from within ScanDrop.
ScanDrop for Mac
The folks at OfficeDrop have released a version of ScanDrop for the Mac. Unlike its Windows cousin, it is not free. You can get it via the Mac App Store for $1.99 at the time of this writing. Not a bad price if uploading to the cloud is something you will be doing a lot and your scanner’s software does not support it.
Like the Windows version, when you first start up ScanDrop you are asked to choose a cloud location to upload to.
In addition to Evernote, Google Docs, OfficeDrop, and local disk, the Mac version adds an option to scan to Dropbox. From what I can tell, this is exactly like the can to local disk option but just pre-selects your Dropbox folder to scan to.
If you have a TWAIN scanner and hit the scan button, it will bring up an integrated version of Image Capture (as far as I can tell) that Mac users may be familiar with.
From there you can select your scanner, set your scan options, and then scan.
If you have a ScanSnap, you set up a profile in ScanSnap Manager to scan to the ScanDrop application. You can see instructions to do that here. One note about these instructions. In Step 8 they say you need to choose the JPG option on the File Option tab. I was able to select PDF and it worked for me.
Once you’re done, it brings it into ScanDrop where you can manipulate the image and upload it to your cloud provider. You can see here I am preparing to upload to Evernote, and have set my notebook and can set tags.
NOTE: At the time of writing this, ScanDrop for Mac version 1.03 has a bug which prevents uploading to Evernote from working. They do list a workaround, but it didn’t work for me. They say they are working on a fix so as soon as that gets through the Mac App Store hopefully uploading to Evernote will work again.
Once you’ve uploaded, the document will appear as a PDF in the cloud service. Here’s a screenshot of it in Google Docs:
Here is a sample of a ScanDrop-scanned PDF in Google Docs:
What About OCR?
If you are wanting to have your PDF searchable, it is worth noting that ScanDrop itself does not do OCR. It relies on the cloud service to do it. The only exception to this is when you use a ScanSnap to scan to PDF before uploading it. In that case, you can use the ScanSnap’s integrated OCR to OCR the PDF first.
In all other cases, if you are an Evernote Premium or OfficeDrop subscriber, you can upload it to the cloud and they will OCR the PDF for you. If you use Google Docs, you can use their OCR, but it isn’t a very good solution.
If you are using ScanDrop to scan to your local disk, you will need to use some OCR tool afterwards to make the PDF searchable.
Do you scan documents to the cloud? How do you do it? Leave a note in the comments and let us know.
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