Peter's Blog

My Evernote usage is showing no signs of abating and I am dumping everything I can think of in there.

Evernote Notes:

• You can draw handwritten notes using a Wacom Pen Tablet. It made a pretty good job of recognising my scrawly writing which isn't much better with the Tablet than it is with a mouse. Unfortunately it didn't manage to sync my experiments before I switched the pc off so I have no examples. I think I assumed it would sync before it shut down but maybe it doesn't?
• The Evernote Blog mentions an application called ShoZu which is supposed to make uploading pictures from a mobile phone to Flickr, Blogger etc easier. It can theoretically send photos to email and hence Evernote. I say theoretically as I had a bugger of a time getting the application to download to my phone (I had to hack wap/gprs settings) and then when I did install it I couldn't get it to upload anything. I fiddled with the wap/gprs some more but unfortunately it is designed to upload things automatically in the background which means it has no mechanism to show me progress bars or errors. I gave up and deleted it. If it had worked it's one useful looking feature would have been the ability to easily rotate a picture before sending it. When I want to send a photo to my moblog I have to use the built-in photo editing thing to rotate the picture which is a bit slow and fiddly. UPDATE: fixed it
• I had an email from another note-taking application vendor asking me to try it out. This one is an amalgum of twitter and 30 boxes. However for me the big advantage of Evernote is the way it finds text within photos and drawings. A good example would be photoing business cards and putting them in Evernote. The text on the cards would be automatically indexed and you wouldn't have to visit Staples for a business card album. You can then read them anywhere you have internet access. I'm not a big meetings man but wouldn't it be cool to put meeting minutes in Evernote along with photos of business cards of attendees? Almost worth buying a suit for.
• Evernote has an 'Install Evernote Portable' option which installs Evernote on a USB stick. You can then run it from the USB stick, synchronise and you have a portable backup of your data.

Two days with Evernote, so how is it going?

• Well I am taking notes.
• It is very nice for jotting things down. Stuff is saved automatically so there is no need to worry about pressing edit or save buttons, just point and type.
• If I select a file full of code from Netbeans and try to paste it into Evernote, Evernote crashes. I can paste it into notepad, copy it again and then paste it. Evernote didn't lose any data when it crashed.
• A big bugbear for me is that if have some code that has been converted to html and syntax highlighted open in a browser, if I copy it to Evernote the colouring disappears. Then only way I have found to keep the colouring intact is to email the highlighted code to the evernote website from outlook.
• It has those problems that many wysiwyg editors have (e.g. outlook) whereby you try to add some text and it picks up some existing weird font style/size from adjascent text and you have to fiddle around adding spaces and carriage returns and deleting them again to try to get it back to the default style.
• appears to be broken under wine/linux

Apart from the syntax highlighting thing I am still liking evernote.

I was watching the very interesting 'Click' tech program on BBC News (you can also see it on their website) and it had a feature on 'cloud' storage i.e. storing everything over the internet.

Something they mentioned was something I have tried before, Evernote. There is a new version of Evernote that looks like exactly the kind of notetaking tool that I have wanted for years (it was this notetaking desire that led me to start this blog five years ago).

Here are some features:

• Install client application on windows, mac or windows moble (java/phone is in the works). The main reason I want to use a client application rather than a pure web application is because I want to be able to paste screen clips straight in and web applications cannot do that, I have to dick about uploading files.
• The contents of the client application are synchronised over the internet so the same notes are available on other pc's and also directly from the server using a web browser. There is also a mobile version of the website so I can get my notes from my phone.
• It will do text recognition in images. In theory you can take a photo of something on your phone, email it to evernote, it will index the words it finds in the image and then you can find it later in searches. I tested it by doing a screen clip of something written in a cursive font and it worked! For test 2 I took a photo of the screen with my phone and emailed it. It was on the web within a minute and after synchronising it was on the client. I played with the indexing and it could find most of the words.
  
  

  Evernote Test

  Here it found the word 'great' and highlighted it. Is that cool or what?
• The client has a built in screen capture utility.
• You can export notes to html so I have a mechanism for extracting my data, I am not locked in.
• It has tagging but it also has a very good search tool and 'saved searches'.
• It will work in linux under wine (although drag/drop is broken and I have't tried the built in screen capture tool).
• I can make some notebooks public and I can put a widget on this blog to display them:
  You can go through here and play with the text recognition. However, I feel the presentation leaves something to be desired. I could use this for the stuff that doesn't warrant a blog entry but I can't see anyone wanting to read it (even less so than the blog).

I had to register for the Evernote beta but it only took 2 days for my invite to arrive.

You get 40M of storage a month on a free acount and they don't specify a maximum limit so this could mean 480M/year free storage. For $5 a month you get 500M.

I think this is it, if this version of Evernote does not get me fastidiously notetaking, lifehacking, brain dumping etc then nothing will.

What's the single most tedious thing about blogging: having to press the 'Add Blog Item ' button. I think I've hit on why taking notes with EverNote is fast: there is a blank note at the bottom of the screen that you can just start typing in.

I've realised that this could be done in a web app, simply by having a box on every page ready to start typing in. Google mail does something like this already: there is a little text box at the bottom of each message that you can select and start typing a reply: when selected it resizes itself and formatting toolbars and stuff appear. It's all very AJAXy and slick. Most of the time you can ignore it because it's not too big, once you explicitly start using it all the associated tools appear.

Compare to posting in drupal where there's all kinds of stuff filling the page: Input format, date edit boxes, categories, tags, I have to scroll down two pages to find the 'preview' and 'submit' buttons.

Here's a rough outline of the quick blogging features:

• Regular blog page appears with a textarea box ready for typing in
• Title is first line (if preceeded with a - or something), then a list of tags line, each tag preceeded with a dot or something similarly lightweight.
• Rest of post is in wilki format.
• Big button that uses AJAX to generate a preview which appears under the text box
• After preview a post button appears.

Everything goes in the one textarea box, no need to tab or click between controls. Now I know what I want, how to implement it?

I am growing disillusioned with EverNote, mainly because of the buggy handling of formatting: if you mark something bold, for example, it has an annoying habit of not turning the bold off, you have to fiddle around selecting a big block and turning it all off explicitly (very much like Microsoft Word). I'm happy to use markup to make things bold, it's simple and understandable.

I want all my notes on a server where I can get to them from anywhere.