Impressions

I have been working with EagleFiler for nearly three weeks now so I thought this would be the right time to post some impressions.

What I found brilliant:

“Everything is a file” is a paradigm shift, and a most welcome departure from a proprietary back end database approach found in some of its competitors. I can do all kinds of neat stuff with the entries now. One example - linking to a certain file/entry from within an entry in a different application such as Journler or OmniOutliner. Powerful and disk efficient.

The F1 capture is effortless and together with Growl integration provides good feedback.

Ability to open multiple libraries side by side.

Drag and drop tagging is neat; drop tagging multiple entries at once is even neater.

Multiple tags per entry.

Mail archival should prove to be another key feature but I didn’t get so far yet.

Some sore spots:

Cannot import by drag and drop directly to a certain tag, ie. drop an import on top of a tag.

I was unable to drag and drop between libraries.

Could not rename an entry by slow double click, had to go through the Inspect window. Edit menu offered an “Undo rename” entry though so there may be a bug hiding in here.

Cannot import a picture from a browser window by drag and drop. The Errors window shows a “Could not import URL” error message, the URL listed in the error message is correct.

Drop Pad drop down selection empty when EagleFiler has just started. have to go through Open Recent… or Open… to bring up a library.

Minor typo: Add new Rich Text File dialog - “Title” is misspelled as “Tile”.

Wishlist features:

Recently added smart folder to be sorted by date of addition.

What is the point of everything being tagged ‘unread’? I didn’t get it but maybe someone can explain the advantage, or it could be unset as default through a preference entry.

Drag and drop selected text from Firefox only adds plain text, dropped images don’t import. May be a Firefox limitation.

Drop Pad is hard to access in its current form. Maybe a “stay on top” option or, better, a nice semi-transparent side hiding one. If showing the folders in the pad, a “Do not show in drop pad” context menu entry for folders would help keep the vertical size of the pad manageable.

As others have said, support for any file type would help EagleFiler become a Finder on steroids. Don’t have to be able to display them inside EagleFiler, let the OS handle opening them.

A second capture key (Option + F1 ?) to capture bookmarks; now EagleFiler becomes a bookmark manager too.

Save PDF to EagleFiler with category or tag choice dialog. One scenario: printing web receipts or other file away type material so one does not need to move them out of the way of regular snippets.

Just tested mailbox import from Mail.app using the F1 capture method. The process of importing and the way messages are stored and accessed once archived are nothing short of brilliant. The “Merge mailboxes” feature is super sweet as well.

Here’s a funny thing. Either I am doing something wrong or the Services import functions are reversed. “Import text” seems to be importing rich text with images, links etc. while “Import URL” command imports plain text. This is while importing a selection from Safari.

Am I misunderstanding the commands?

Thanks for the feedback! I plan to address many of the things you mention in the coming releases.

This works for me from Safari. I’ll try to see why it isn’t working from Firefox.

One common way of using EagleFiler is to collect items that you want to read (or otherwise act on). So this enables you to automatically keep track of the items that you’re “done” with.

I think so. With Safari, you’ll get rich text and images.

What advantage do you see in just capturing bookmarks? The current approach gets you the URL as well as the content (which, combined with search, will help you find the “bookmark”).

Import Text is supposed to import the selected text, and it will try to preserve styles and images if possible. Import URL is for if you’ve selected a URL and you want EagleFiler to download the page and import it as a Web archive, rather than creating a record containing the selected text. If you use Import URL and the page can’t be downloaded (for example because the selected text wasn’t a URL or the URL had a typo) EagleFiler will create a plain text record with the selection rather than doing nothing.

Fantastic. I look forward to it.

Actually, it behaves identically with both Safari and Firefox. I narrowed it down some, the error only occurs when dragging and dropping to the application icon an image that is not a link. I am attaching a screenshot of the error message. If the image is clickable and there is a link to be followed through it, EagleFiler captures the webarchive of the link. For example, if I drop the EagleFiler icon from C-Command, a webarchive of the EagleFiler page is created.

I see your point. There is no real advantage to a bookmark, aside from the perhaps insignificant amount of disk space taken by a webarchive compared to a bookmark. I guess it is just my ingrained workflow where I use bookmarks for sites I am tracking vs webarchives for retaining specific information.

Thanks for the prompt response.

OK, sorry for the confusion. It’s working in my current build but not in 1.0.2; I guess this got fixed as a result of another fix I made.

EagleFiler 1.1 addresses these issues.

As of EagleFiler 1.2 this is an option.

EagleFiler 1.4 lets you import as bookmarks instead of Web archives, and there are bookmarklets to temporarily override the format chosen in the preferences.