What is tantalizing about “Clip to Evernote” is the potential ability to be on any supported browser, anywhere, and clip into your Evernote account. Visiting your sister and want to clip that Google map on her machine so you can retrieve it from your cell when you’re on the road? The Evernote team could easily create a special page, imho, that could make this use case a no brainer (for example, evernote.com/clipnow would facilitate creating the bookmark on the local machine, after which the user could go back to the map page and clip away).

Evernote 2.x added a “Go to source web page” on every clip. That’s gone in Evernote 3. I finally discovered where the source URL can be seen: on the menu select View/Note List (F10). You can see it, but you can’t copy it. Aaargh! My suggestion to the Evernote team: restore the “Go to source web page” functionality via an icon at the top right of each note. There’s room, and the ’round trip’ capability would be great addition to the integration.

I have two quibbles about the Evernote Web Clipper add-on for Windows. When I select text in FF and hit the Web Clipper button, a dialog box appears in the very lower right of the screen. Quibble 1: This location is at the far end of the screen from where I just hit the Clipper button! Allow the user to relocate this dialog box and store the screen location, so it will come up in the user’s preferred location next time. Or make it a pop out of the Clipper button. Quibble #2: when I use this dialog box to create tags, the focus changes from FF to Evernote. Please bring up a Tags Assignment (or equivalent) box that does not steal the focus!

I’m a huge Evernote fan. Keep up the great work! The OneNote team must be furious. Ha!

jt

Someone already asked this question, which I also have, but there doesn’t seem to be an answer yet. Anyone?

I mean, I know the obvious technical differences, but is there a preferred method?

I am defenitely not saving any personal Information on a small companys webservers.
But thats thae base concept of this app, I guess.

I’d like to have the option to use it for the desktop only tough, without any account at evernote.

“It’s beyond my comprehension what all the complaining is about. Give me a break.”

To my way of thinking, all of the “complaining” is about making Evernote the best app it can be. Perhaps there is a more appropriate forum, like oh I don’t know… the forum http://forum.evernote.com/phpbb/ The only point I was trying to make is that managing expectations is a huge concern, which I do think is relevant to this post.

Some of the issues raised by others are important. For example, Eric’s comment that content of clipped pages isn’t encrypted under premium accounts.

According to this blog post

http://blog.evernote.com/2008/06/24/evernote-public-launch/

> For $5 per month (or only $45/year, because we’re bad at math), you can upgrade to a premium account. Premium users have their upload quota raised to 500 megabytes of new notes per month and get a number of other goodies, including enhanced security through SSL for all data transmission (free users only get SSL for login),

It sounds like web clippings should be encrypted. It would seem that “all data transmission” includes web clippings, which are certainly data being transmitted.

The illusion of security is worse than no security at all.

I imagine someone carelessly clipping the contents of confidential or sensitive information based on the assumption that “all data transmission” is encrypted.

I wonder if it’s true that information clipped from SSL enabled websites is then delivered as clear text to Evernote. If so, that should be made clear.

This issue is probably something that should be taken the the forums.

Best of luck to Evernote!

Can’t seem to find how to access the source URL and click on it to take me back to the original page. End up having to ‘Send Email’ and the URL appears at the top of the mail.

Any advice on the correct way to access the source URL would be much appreciated. Thanks.

best Regards

Harald

I’m a premium user and I really enjoy the freedom of having an encrypted page to work from, but I’ve been using a packet sniffer to test the web clipper application and although I did not see my user name or password, I was able to sniff the exact contents of the data I was trying to clip.

This poses a big problem since I would want to use the web clipper application from work and that doesn’t look like an option now

Not true unfortunately. I certainly don’t expect Evernote to recursively work through an entire site, package it, resolve relative links, deal with external linking and complex dynamically generated sites, and then return the whole thing.

I’m not suggesting that Evernote should attempt to archive the entire Knowledge Base because I decide to clip http://support.microsoft.com/. This seems clearly not relevant to what Evernote is designed to do.

The problem is in the difference between a page and a file. A single page does not necessarily consist of a single static .htm/.html file. Increasingly this the exception rather than the rule.

The simple case is CSS. Stylesheets control both the look and layout of the site. Evernote does not reliably represent/capture stylesheets, so it can’t be said to capture an entire page. The design of a site is important (which is why people spend so much time, effort, and money on site design). It is potentially critically important to the value of a page. This is truer still with layout. If we don’t capture the layout of information on a page then the info may be awkward to work with at best and or even impossible to understand.

We can even lose content if we don’t capture images specified in in stylesheets. These images may be important to the communication of information on the page.

Inconsistent stylesheets are just one example of this problem. The fact is that Evernote does not accurately and reliably capture an entire page. At best we can reliably get the text of the page, and again this can be problematic.

I want to be clear that I’m not complaining about the level of functionality in Evernote. I think that would be inappropriate for a comment like this.

And for all I know it may have been an intentional design decision to have Evernote function the way it does. I’m only arguing that it shouldn’t promoted as if it does something that it doesn’t do, specifically,

“One click and you have the web page forever”

Such claims sound good but lead to disappointment and confusion, not to mention a lot of wasted time and effort on the part of the end user.

It’s an injustice to what is a solid product to promise that it does something it clearly is not designed to do. The risk is having people evaluate the app for what it isn’t rather than what it is, and no product will seem adequate if we focus on all of the things they can’t do, e.g. “This is a terrible WYSIWYG web design app because it doesn’t allow me to edit the photos I want to include on the site the way Photoshop does.”

But it DOES capture the entire web page. It does not capture the entire web SITE, of course, but the page you’re “clipping to evernote”, is saved as it should. One click is all it takes. Sure, will take more clicks if you want to add to a specific notebook or add tags etc.

First the promise of Evernote is clear. But the app falls short in key areas. I’m willing to overlook what the app doesn’t do well and either use something else or restrict myself to those features that work well for me until I read titles like this one, and then I a little upset.

“One click and you have the web page forever”

This is an unrealistically optimistic assessment of Evernote’s functionality. Rarely if ever does it does it faithfully capture a complete web page, which is precisely what the title suggests.

What it does do reliably is allow you to select a portion of text on the page and, and quickly save that text along with a link to the site back to an Evernote notebook. Don’t get me wrong, depending on what I’m trying to accomplish as a user this may be very useful, but is not what is promised.

While I’m at it:

Synchronization of notes

Clearly the synchronization features are the strong point of Evernote.

Text recognition

The text recognition features aren’t reliable, so they’re not particularly useful. Is it enticing to say

“Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We’ll even recognize the text in the image.”

Yes, and if it worked reliably this would be a tremendously useful feature. Unfortunately, text recognition falls short or fails outright the vast majority of the type. It does work as one might hope occasionally. But something that works only occasionally is almost useless in practice.

Audio recordings

Are essentially impractical working under the limits of the free account.

Again, I want to be absolutely clear that I’m not complaining about the Evernote itself. But I am increasingly annoyed that there is an increasing gap between what Evernote does well and what is claimed.

I’d like to see a little more honesty in the marketing of Evernote.

The new web clipper IS much nicer when in a web browser, don’t get me wrong, but it’s disappointing. NetNewsWire and Evernote are so complimentary it’d be nice to have a way to move content from one to the other, either directly through Applescript or via the web by fiddling a URL.

–Ernie

On problem I had was that my previous clipper didn’t update properly and after logging in through the clipper, the evernote.com homepage would load in the frame. Easily fixed by using the clipper code, but thought I’d share.