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.