EagleFiler Testimonials

I’m really impressed with the concept and design of the program. The open database, built-in support for mail archiving, tagging, and folders puts it well ahead of other information managers. I’ve been waiting for a sensible Email archiving tool for a long time.

This is an absolutely incredible new application. It surpasses Yojimbo, SOHO, even DEVONthink (which has other useful features though which set it apart in many ways from EagleFiler). The rate of development is breathtaking. At this pace, Michael Tsai will have knock-your-socks of v.2 in no time.

Multiple library support, transparent capture, amazing tag flexibility. Ability to archive e-mail (including IMAP)—this is not a one-trick pony. importing Mail messages also transparently imports MailTags data. It’s fast, reliable (no proprietary database) and searching is very powerful (read the Help).

All of this and it comes from a developer we can trust to provide good support and continued development. A winner!

I just thought I’d drop you a line to say how impressed I am with EagleFiler—I’ve tried a few of the rival organisers out there (as well as various Finder-based methods to keep things organised) and this is the first one that I could grasp at a glance, and start using immediately. I’m a journalist, so I have an unweildy number of text files sitting around—interview transcripts, rough drafts, published articles, &c.—and in about five minutes I had all my current and upcoming projects neatly organised, tagged and sortable, instead of sitting in one big folder waiting for me to sort them out (which never happens!).

I haven’t been using it long enough for the Mail integration and Web archiving features to have had an effect on the way I work, but suspect that having mail messages, Web research and related text files in one place, filterable by tag is going to make my life a hell of a lot easier. Honestly, the last time I had this ‘Ooh, this is going to change the way I work’ feeling was with Quicksilver (the only other application where I’ve bothered to write a gushing fan letter to the developer, too).

EagleFiler is fantastic! I’ve wanted something like this for a long time, and the support for multiple file formats and the transparent organization of the internal library make it something I could imagine really committing to.

As with SpamSieve, EagleFiler is working very well, and I’m extremely impressed. To paraphrase John Gruber’s comment regarding SpamSieve, EagleFiler doesn’t try to take a “kitchen sink” approach by loading the program with superfluous features. It does a small amount of things very well: import, file, and search documents. The integration with the OS and other software (including Safari, OmniWeb, a host of e-mailers, and other programs) is beautiful. I’ve paid for several organizers, including Aquaminds’ NoteTaker, Hog Bay Notebook, and Mori, and extensively used and tested trial versions of several others, including Circus Ponies Notebook, DevonThink, VoodooPad, and Yojimbo, but this is the first that has really grabbed me with its elegance and ease of use. It is also the first of these apps that I have paid for on the same day that I started testing it! Whereas previous software has made me feel tentative about storing more than a small amount of clippings, notes, and such, Michael Tsai has presented something that has caused me to import a couple of hundred megabytes worth of documents of various types, from various Applications, all over my hard drive. Thank you very much for this fantastic software.

I have been switching between StickyBrain (SOHONotes) and Yojimbo as my primary file manager for months. Neither of them completely capable of my needs. Yesterday I noticed a mention of EagleFiler on John Gruber’s Web site Daring Fireball. I installed EagleFiler and imported my saved files from SOHO and Yojimbo, spent some time tagging the files and I have to say EagleFiler performs flawlessly. The ability to tag the files with Keywords is necessary for a great File Manager. Both StickyBrain and Yojimbo force the user to use categories for filing which is very limiting. EagleFiler is awesome; give it a try and you won’t be disappointed.

The larger the [mail] app’s database gets, the more of a performance drag it incurs. Offloading either individual emails, or entire mail boxes, helps, and EagleFiler is the first application I’ve felt safe with to do just that.

I’m officially in love with EagleFiler. It’s the application I’ve been looking for forever. A nice lovely metadatacentric frontend onto my Documents folder, just as iTunes is on my Music folder and iPhoto on my Pictures folder.

Great for saving, organizing, and retrieving just about anything.

Select text from a Web page in Safari, drag it onto EagleFiler’s drop pad, and EagleFiler saves the text. Quite a few competing programs do this or similar. But EagleFiler goes one step further. It also appends the source URL to the text you’ve dragged. That way you’ll always be able to refer back to your source.

In addition to unusual touches like this, EagleFiler makes it a snap to tag items. And you can easily add icons of your choice to the tags. The icons are great for spotting items in a long list.

You can take a minimalist approach to organizing. Or you can add structure by putting stuff in folders nested several levels deep if that’s what works for you. Unlike with Yojimbo, which imposes a philosophy, EagleFiler leaves it up to you.

EagleFiler is also a great e-mail archiver. And so much more. The developer is incredibly responsive.

Highly recommended.

I’d just like to say how much I like this application, although I haven’t had time to delve into it in depth. I tend to collect large amounts of textual info, mostly from the Web. I have been a happy user of DEVONthink since its very early days, and would have been lost without it. However, I find EagleFiler is just so convenient for capturing a Web page that I have been using it a lot for that purpose. And its rich text capabilities are perfectly adequate for taking captured text and manipulating/formatting desired portions of text.

Great Stuff. I’ve been using EagleFiler for some months now and must say that it develops to one of the best notetaking, e-mail and data storing apps. I like the fact that all data is stored in native formats, so I can backup and retrieve all data the way I like. It can do nested folders. It has great search capabilities. It imports all my mail and I can search it. And much more.

This relatively new application is updated very often, and most bugs that I ever encountered are gone by now.

Comparing various notetaking apps, this one seems to develop into the creme de la creme of them all, it’s just really really great, and of course I do recommend it to anyone who’s looking for this kind of application!

EagleFiler has become completely indispensable for me. I do have a catch-all Reference library, but I also have specific use libraries. I have a Recipes library that allows me to categorize my recipes, track which ones we liked (and who liked them), which ones we haven’t tried, where they came from, etc. I also start a new library for each project I work on. I can dump all of the e-mail correspondence, random notes, research, requirements documents, etc. into this one library. Since it is searchable, I can easily find that one e-mail about how this drop-down is supposed to look on the page. Light years better than sifting through everything manually.

I’ve also started a Movies library to track my VHS tapes and DVDs. I tag them according to genre and media. This allows me to quickly see which movies I need to get on DVD. When I’m in the mood for a specific type of movie, I can easily find all of the comedies or horror movies. I can also easily track who borrowed one.…

General comment to anyone thinking of switching to EagleFiler: do it. Compared with alternative managers of unstructured files, EF handles more data types, well beyond PDF and Web pages. It stores all files using the native Mac file structure, so other programs can work with them transparently. (That is, you can still access your files without going through EF.) This is also safer with respect to multi-year storage. I don’t know about robustness of other applications, but EF seems very robust, and has never lost a spec of my data. The developer responds to questions/problems within hours, on average.

Here’s a data point: am using EF 1.2 with a 1.2 Gb library collection, of which roughly half are 80K+ e-mails, and most of the rest are several hundred PDF’s and Web archives. I can confirm that EF works impressively well on a modern high-end MacBook Pro. RAM use is in the dozens of MB’s and CPU use is 0% when idling—IOW, perfect. I can definitely see myself using this for many years to come, scaling up easily as more contents get added (and Moore’s law will do the rest).

Kudo’s and many thanks to M.T. for getting everything “just right.”

Having been a long time user of SpamSieve, and now using EagleFiler, it has been added to my list of must have apps. The question I have, unfortunately at work I am forced to use a PC, and I am wondering if anyone knows of a program that is similar that will run on XP? I’m addicted, and I’d like to make my work computer as organized as my Mac.

I just bought EagleFiler after reviewing it and Chronos SOHO Notes 6. Thanks for creating such a great application. It’s just what I was looking for to organize all the bits of information I have scattered across Sticky notes, draft messages in Mail, various TXT/RTF/DOC files and scraps of paper.

I wanted you to know that in my academic and professional work I am always on the lookout for new databases that will solve my problems. I’ve gone though DEVONthink, ChronosNotes, Yojimbo, and a few others. Each of those had some features I wanted, but not all. EagleFiler has them all. (One of the most important features of your program to me is the ability to tag while retaining a database of used tags that can be drawn from in subsequent tagging.) To summarize the purpose of this letter, Thanks! It is a beautiful piece of programming.

I recently moved from DEVONthink (Pro) to EagleFiler. After using DT for several years (and the scanning is a helpful feature) I was concerned about relying on an application that is poorly integrated into other Mac software, uses a proprietary database which can get corrupted and result in data loss, and that has been promising better export capabilities for years but hasn’t delivered. To be fair, after my database got corrupted I was able to recover from a backup, but it made me think very hard about relying on something other than the file system.

EagleFiler uses the filesystem and Apple’s Core Data for storage, and my impression (after importing my DT files) is that it’s faster, my safer (files remain in their original format) and it’s easier to edit files. DT doesn’t store excel files, and although it imports word files in RTF format, you have to retain the original word file somewhere else on your hard drive. So for me I like the fact that I can just keep 1 system of storage in EagleFiler.

I still scan my information using a third party scanner, and have found that I actually get better accuracy. So sometimes integrated is not always better, and it may be worth relying on separate programs (scanner and EagleFiler)

I wanted to write to you with an unqualified positive note of thanks, because I suspect that you, like umpires in baseball or referees in football, rarely hear anything from your clients unless it’s either a question or a complaint.

I became aware of you and your product(s) a few years ago, when several Mac-related Web sites spoke highly, nearly glowingly, of SpamSieve. At the time, I didn’t know what Bayesian spam filtering was, nor why I might want it, but the repeated occurrence of your product’s name in publications which I trusted was enough to convince me to purchase Mailsmith from BBEdit, which came bundled with SpamSieve.

And it was exactly as good as those various reviewers said it was. I was thrilled—especially with the idea that I could switch out of Mailsmith if I so chose, and take SpamSieve with me to another mail client, but also with the performance. My inbox is clean! And, after having (sadly) purchased [a competing product], I discovered EagleFiler. I wish I’d discovered it sooner. While I have been impressed with the attention to detail displayed by the folks at [company], theirs is a system which is proprietary, which is always troubling, at least to me. I will pay for any application I feel is well-designed, but if given a choice between an open-source application and a commercial one with proprietary mechanisms, I will always prefer the former. Perhaps it’s why I’ve never been a big fan of Microsoft, LOL.

And when I found EagleFiler, I knew I’d found the organization software for me. It was obvious from the very start of my “audition” of EagleFiler that you had devoted quite a bit of time to thinking about—and creating—a product which provides the people who use it with the greatest degree of flexibility and compatibility possible: in short, a product that you yourself would be likely to desire, were you interested in purchasing such a thing. And that impressed me a great deal. [Company]’s products—though thorough—require one to learn “The [company] Way™,” while yours opens each file contained within an EagleFiler database in its original application. So there’s no fear that I’ll be unable to get needed data out of a format which I no longer use (should that be the case) at any time in the future.

In short, your products function correctly—not only the way they’re supposed to, but the way a thoughtful user would want them to—and it makes each of them valuable beyond their retail price. Thank you, again, for your commitment to designing superior, best-in-class applications for the Mac platform.

I’m an academic, and I try to keep copies of every paper or article I read. (Given the vagaries of library contracts with publishers, documents that were accessible can disappear.) EF allows this in a very robust way. I used to track documents in EndNote (a bibliography program), but this is much easier—and EndNote is poorly supported on Mac, with lots of crashes etc.

EagleFiler has also became my default method of grabbing material from the Web that I wanted to keep for any reason. It is very flexible—it will import any kind of file, although it does not index everything. A nice feature, for example, is that it can capture either an entire Web page, or just the text. Once captured, the page can even be edited without leaving EF.

Developer response is fantastic.

It keeps all files in their native format, which is important for security and other reasons. For example, Spotlight treats them as normal documents, and when I need a file for another purpose there is no need to do a conversion.

Moving to EagleFiler was one of my largest workflow improvements in recent memory.

I am an academic working on a book project and have been looking for a piece of software to help me organize all of the news articles, academic papers, etc. that I am collecting. Your EagleFiler is just what I was looking for. I have spent a lot of time looking for an app and now spent a few days in the app and I am really happy. I just purchased it.

You’ve hit a home run with this one. I use barely any third party software, and when I do there needs to be a really good reason for it. In this case, the reason is that I’ve been wanting something that does what EagleFiler does for years now (decades?) and finally had to face the fact that Apple isn’t going to do it themselves.…What you’ve created with EagleFiler however is incredibly Mac-like in its usability, simplicity and power.

I just want to let you know how much I appreciate your software program EagleFiler. I recently downloaded the latest version and tried it out. I was so impressed with this program that I purchased it after using it for about two days.…EagleFiler suits my needs perfectly. I store some 17,000 files (mainly PDFs) in an archive that I regularly need to search. The tagging and search system is great.

Kudos to the developer. One of the few Mac programs that unfortunately has little buzz—but is worthy of much praise.

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The way in which the data is saved is very reliable. And, I have had a few catastrophic crashes where I had to restart the computer after another program hanged (I know, not supposed to happen in X—but I found a way!) and the data I had been working on in EagleFiler was saved. Quite unexpected and pleasant—to say the least.

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I should also mention that I have a PowerPC G4 (1 GHz)—a relatively slow & old computer—EagleFiler works well. An added bonus—since I use Tiger—the latest version of EagleFiler is still relevant.