I’ve been experimenting with Notion - the Evernote import worked flawlessly!
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Any commercial app can go away with no warning at any time. Apple Notes is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. When Apple decides to sunset the app they will have a replacement. For those reasons, if I were in Bernt’s position I’d be moving to Notes (or One Note for its PC compatibility).
To cite David, .txt, .pdf, and .jpg are formats that will last, proprietary formats will only last as long as the developer wants it to.
I was highly invested in Evernote and broke away four or so years ago. I was having problems using Evernote and couldn’t quite put my finger on what the issue was. Then I came across this article by Alex Payne and was really persuaded by his argument:
After studying that, I abandoned Evernote and developed a system using the file system, purpose-specific database tools like Zotero for reference material (where the files are still just saved in my file system), Lit Softwares suite of apps for my trial practice; Logos for theological materials, Paprika for recipes and cooking-related howtos and information, and others. I realized in using Evernote that I was not doing anything with information other than collecting it. Now, I actually process the information I obtain and synthesize it into my broader knowledgebase. There have been a lot of really positive effects for me. First, I have an easier time finding things. Second, I get more use from the information I have (e.g., as a trivial example, building out my Paprika database has paid great dividends when it comes to ease in planning, shopping, and cooking). Third, I don’t have to re-process the information I have collected every time I need to use it. I processed it at the beginning, so the next time I need to do something with it, I can build on top of what I have rather than rebuild.
So, my thought is that if you are going away from Evernote, don’t replace it with another Evernote. Build a system based around tools that maximize your ability to quickly access and extract useful insights from the information you are keeping.
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Hi @bowline (my bad for the slow reply)…good comments, thanks. Not sure I agree that its truly “apples and oranges”. I comprehend and agree that Evernote has higher expenses as you state. At onetime even evernote was an indie/start-up that grew to where they are now. I wonder that as Notebooks (or any other competing notes app) grows will their expenses also increase putting pressure on their business plan.
Love this. Are you OCR’ing your documents that go into the file system? Considering getting out of Devonthink, but still want to be able to search the documents that I have on hand.
Yes. I have a copy of PDFPenPro around just for the batch OCR tool. If I could figure out a way to make an AppleScript or Hazel rule to automatically ocr every PDF I save, that would be perfect. But I do it once a week and it’s not a time consuming chore. (Although, most PDFs I get these days are already OCR’d.)
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I’m not sure how much Alfons Schmidts’ expenses would increase with more sales? He’s not maintaining a service for storing people’s documents.
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Abbyy has a scriptable AppleScript interface. I’m doing exactly what you’re describing with hazel - auto ocr new documents that got added to iCloud
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I have Abbyy, but only through ScanSnap. Do I have to have a stand alone copy to make this work?
Hmm I’m not sure. Try top open the script editor app, then click “open dictionary” from the menu. Select Scansnap or the app you’re using and check if there are any functions exposed for scanning / ocr-ing a file.
I’m using the standalone abbyy
I’ve got an AppleScript for using PDFPenPro for OCR’ing my PDFs automatically straight from Hazel. Got it from Automators forum and tweaked a little bit:
Hope it helps you!
tell application "PDFpenPro"
open theFile as alias
-- does the document need to be OCR'd?
get the needs ocr of document 1
if result is true then
tell document 1
ocr
repeat while performing ocr
delay 1
end repeat
delay 1
close with saving
end tell
--In PDFpen, when no documents are open, window 1 is "Preferences"
--If other documents are open, do not close the App.
if name of window 1 is "Preferences" then
tell application "PDFpenPro"
quit
end tell
end if
else
-- Scan Doc was previously OCR'd or is already a text type PDF.
tell document 1
close without saving
end tell
--In PDFpen, when no documents are open, window 1 is "Preferences"
--If other documents are open, do not close the App.
if name of window 1 is "Preferences" then
tell application "PDFpenPro"
quit
end tell
end if
end if
end tell
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Here’s mine with standalone Abbyy + hazel. It’s on my github too!
tell application "System Events" to tell disk item (theFile as text) to set {theName, theExtension} to {name, name extension}
if theExtension is not "" then set theName to text 1 thru -((count theExtension) + 2) of theName -- the name part
tell application "Finder" to set hazelPath to (container of alias (theFile as string)) as text
set pdfPath to hazelPath & "(OCR) " & theName & ".pdf"
tell application "FineReader"
repeat while is busy
delay 1
end repeat
export to pdf pdfPath from file theFile image quality high quality ocr languages enum [Japanese, English]
repeat while is busy
delay 1
end repeat
end tell
- The first part is to break down the file into filename and extension (because I use this for OCRing images too and then turn them into PDF files so sometimes the extension isn’t .pdf but .jpg)
- The second part is creating the filepath where the file hazel is using is located, then sets the output name to “(OCR) filename.pdf”
- The
FineReaderpart is the actual call to abby. Therepeat while busymakes sure that the script waits if FineReader is already busy OCRing something else. Theexport to pdfis telling FineReader to OCR the file with Japanese+English language settings, then output it atpdfPathwhich is set above
I have a variant of this to run inside DEVONthink as well for when I want to use standalone abbyy instead of the version that ships with DT here. You have to put that into DEVONthinks script folder
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Thank you for sharing. I will try this today and report back.
Thank you for sharing. I just “starred” your github page for this project. I’m @ Github here. Looking forward to trying it out.
You could take my split approach -
Bear for notes
Email for correspondence
ICloud Drive for documents.
I couldn’t make Apple Notes work for me, but it probably works for some.
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I think this is finally going to be the year I move on from Evernote. It’s really a shame and I am torn about doing it. They have made a lot of progress in updating their apps and back-end support, Unfortunately the one thing they just don’t seem interested in doing is developing a way for exporting standard file types…especially PDF and MS Office files.
I need a system that will support native document export when necessary. I have hesitated about diving in to DEVONThink because of the learning curve, but I think I am going to move in that direction.
It is relatively easy to get going with DEVONthink. The manual is terrific, as is the free e-book “Taking Control of DEVONthink”. Both available on their web site.
Importing from Evernote (I have never done … stopped Evernote use a very long time ago!) is a bit of a trick as Evernote has removed features to make that easy. There is guidance for this available on the DEVONthink forum where people have figured it out.
Like any powerful software tool, it takes time to get to grips with ALL of it and even after a decade of my using DEVONthink I’m still learning. i like that. Sort of like Word was, back in it’s first implementation in DOS and then when they called it “Word for Windows”. Easy to use … time to master. It is NOT necessary to know how to do everything!!
There is a learning curve, of course. But that curve is as steep as you want and thank goodness the curve goes on and on and on.
DEVONthink is an excellent choice if you need a tool that powerful. I don’t, I use EagleFIler. EF keeps your data in standard files & folders.
BTW, Evernote 10 Desktop software, at least as recently as last month, will only allow you to export 50 notes at a time. You will need the EN Legacy desktop software to export everything at one time. Tip: If you want to preserve your folder structure you will want to export those folders one at a time.
EF will import your Evernote .enex files. A free trial is available.
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Update, replace Bear with Joplin. It has folders and tags, attachments, and you can self-host. I host my notes on Nextcloud server that I run in the cloud. It doesn’t OCR / search PDF’s , however.
The Windows version is horrible, you can’t do much with it