Questions from a New User about Possible Pitfalls

I am rapidly coming up to speed on EF, which is very impressive. In reading documentation, however, I was looking for “gotchas” or things to be worried about. Questions or advice on the following?

  1. What is the worst that can happen if one accidentally moves files and folders around in Finder rather than within EagleFiler? Is there a simple Rebuild action? This error strikes me as something I could easily do.

  2. If I create a note for some document, is its usefulness in the future tied to continuing to use EF? I see that it appears in a separate file, but if I were to transfer an entire Library to a machine that didn’t have EF, my impression is that I would not ever see a given note again unless I just happened to read some of the odd rtf files out of curiosity.

  3. The documentation describes how to write scripts for capturing other kinds of applications. However, I assume that does not apply to things like PowerPoint, KeyNote, Excel, and Mellel, or EF would already have the mechanisms in place. To what kind of application, then, does the script option apply?

  4. Is there a problem with (or an argument against) having identical libraries on an iMac and MacBookPro, and then synchronizing them routinely with, e.g., Chronosynch? I have had enough problems using iDisk (slow and erratic synchronizatons) as to be a bit leery of that approach.

You wouldn’t lose any data, but EagleFiler wouldn’t be able to view those items. Shortly after you open a library, EagleFiler scans it to make sure all the files/folders are where it expects to find them. If you’d moved any items, EagleFiler would report “Missing File” errors for them. To fix the problem, you’d need to move the items back to their original locations.

If you expect to see the note when viewing the file, you would need to use EagleFiler or an application that can read the XML metadata file that EagleFiler stores next to the file. The RTFD file for the note does store the title of the record that it refers to, so it might also be possible to find the note using Spotlight.

That’s an incorrect assumption. EagleFiler does not have built-in support for every conceivable application that could be supported.

The bottom line is (as in 1. above) that you don’t want the .eflibrary file to get out of sync with the files/folders in the library. It’s fine to use whatever syncing software you want, provided that you only sync in one direction. On the other hand, if you changed the libraries on both Macs and then used the syncing software to “merge” the changes in both directions, that would cause problems because it doesn’t know how to merge the .eflibrary files.

I asked my question poorly. Since I use PowerPoint, KeyNote, Excel, and Mellel, I want to be sure that EF does as much as it can with them. I could invest some time figuring out the script stuff if there were a payoff, but I’m not sure there is one. As of now, I can move them into EF but have them open in an external viewer with the original app, or I can print them to pdf, which allows them to be viewed within EF. Would building the kind of custom script provide anything further?

Writing a capture script for an application lets you import the current file from that application by pressing F1. You can already import from those applications via drag and drop and other means so the script is more about adding a (potential) convenience than new functionality. Personally, I think the capture key is most useful in applications like Safari or Mail where you want EagleFiler to create a new file based on what you have selected. It’s less useful in applications like PowerPoint where you’ve already created the file and just need to get it into EagleFiler.