Well, I’d like to say that it’s because my mother taught me that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.  But that’s not it.  Instead, it’s more out of loyalty to the EverNote 2.2 that I know and love.  Plus, to be honest, I don’t feel like wasting any more of my time constructively criticizing EN3b.  I’ve done a lot of that on their support forum, and mostly to no avail.  Hence, no discussions at all here.

On the forum today, there was a link to a great article: The New Coke Lesson: The Compulsion to Upgrade Can Produce a Marketing Disaster. Consider Vista and (Maybe) Evernote 3 by Gary North. Right away, I was struck by this quote:

But even monopolies tend to dissipate (except for Arm & Hammer Baking Soda). Here’s why: an unwillingness to listen to clients. “What do they know?”

They know how to shop for alternatives.

Gary makes some great points, especially about how hard it is for a new user to find anything out about the stable, fully-functional 2.2 version of EN, and about how bad the user manual is.  (I’ve read it; it’s pretty bad.  Plus, they haven’t even kept the manual up-to-date with the beta changes, which means it’s essentially useless now.)

Gary also suggests that EN’s marketing team is missing the ball, since the only way they’re going to make money is off the tablet PC version of EN, which they’re not advertising.  I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I know from the forum that EN has an even bigger cash cow on its mind.  There’s going to be a free version of the beta, which will limit you to some amount of online storage (the new EN3 paradigm is that all of your information lives in the ‘cloud’ and syncs to whatever machines you have connected).  A premium version of EN will have, well, premium features, such as more storage space, and maybe better security.  Unfortunately, they’re still throwing darts at the wall trying to figure out the best combination of storage space and cost.  And it’s going to be a monthly subscription fee, so you know they’ll be milking this cow for as long as they can.

Another thing that is mentioned in the article is that EN isn’t really giving its current 2.2 users incentive to switch.  This is true.  In fact, some of the more vocal supporters of 2.2 have said that not only will they not switch to this crippled new version of EN, but they’re actively looking for alternatives.

So, what do users know?  Well, we know how to shop ;)

And my recommendation to you?  EverNote 2.2 is still the best software I’ve ever used for organizing miscellaneous snippets, web clippings, research notes, lists. etc. etc.  If you want to check it out, skip the main Evernote page, and go straight to here.  As for the new beta?  Well, I think you can read between the lines.

Anyway, some of us are still using 2.2, and some of us still want to modify templates. Not me, I’m using the ones that I’ve already got and that’s it. But there are some brave souls out there that want to play with templates.

So, I’m uploading the template editor for EverNote 2.2. This is the copy that I downloaded way long ago. Use at your own risk. No support is provided for it, or for templates created by it, either here or over at EverNote. You’ve been warned.

EverNote Template Editor – 2.2 Version

(Note: this is only for Windows – the older 2.2 version of EN only works on Windows.  Hence the template editor also only works on Windows.)

I’ve been moping around lately, thinking that all of my templates were now static, I wouldn’t be able to tweak them at all until they fixed the editor.  But they never seemed to fix the editor.

Today, a little birdie (Thanks ads!) that there was a new version of the editor.  I tracked it down (Thanks Leo!) and am in the process of downloading and installing.  It turns out that there was a forum post about it over a month ago!  I don’t know how I missed it.

So, anybody out there, using EverNote and wanting to play with the template editor, for 2.1, head over here to get the new version!

Now let’s say that you’ve got this HTML file on your computer and you’re just dying to put it onto your Palm in readable format. You could, I guess, convert it to text and then bring it in using DocumentsToGo or some such, but wouldn’t you rather have the file looking like it was meant to?

Enter Plucker, a plucky (haha) little (free) “offline Web and e-book viewer” for PalmOS handheld devices. From their web page, “Plucker comes with Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX tools, scripts, and conduits that let you decide exactly what part of the WWW you’d like to download onto your PDA.”

The reason I have an HTML file that I want to read in my Palm is that EverNote still doesn’t support mobile platforms. The topic came up recently (again) in the forums, and I was reminded of the suggestion that Plucker could be used to create a kludge solution, at least temporarily. Because this is something that many EN users may not be used to doing, I thought I’d write a little walkthrough here.

Get Plucker

Although Plucker offers a plethora of downloadable scripts, through mirrors, torrents, etc., it’s actually pretty easy to get it onto your computer and installed. Check out their downloads page, and look for the Plucker Desktop download for Windows. If you’re comfortable with torrents, choose that; otherwise, you can just download the exe straightaway. The desktop software also created the appropriate prc files for my Palm, so you shouldn’t need anything else from the download page.

Install Plucker. Easy installation. The first time you run it, the Plucker desktop walks you through a setup wizard. I chose all of the default options. When you get to the destinations screen, you can choose two things: (1) where on your Palm you want the Plucker files to live and (2) where on your hard drive you want the files to live. The way Plucker works is that it converts an HTML (or txt) file into a PDB file, which is readable on the Palm. This way, you’ll end up with a directory on your hard drive with all the PDB files, and the same files will be automatically ready for syncing to your Palm. I chose to keep the files on my SD card, since there’s lots of space there.

Get the HTML File

Now, if you’re not an EverNote user, you can skip this section. Otherwise, let’s assume there’s a category or two (or even your entire database if you’re really adventurous) that you want to see on your Palm. For me, there’s a category where I keep lists of books, sorted by author, that I want to get from the library. I’d like to have these notes with me so I can see what I need to read next.

In EN, select the category (or notes) that you want to export. Right-click on one of the note headers, and select Export…

Pick a file name, and the HTML extension. Now you have an HTML file that Plucker can work with.

Creating a Channel in Plucker for a File

Plucker offers a channel wizard which is really easy. You can find it under the File menu:

Follow through the wizard. First, you pick a name for your new channel. Then, you can either pick a URL for an online web page, or select “Start on a Local File” to suck in the HTML file that we’ve just created. You can just select the defaults now and head all the way through wizard. You can then run the Channel configuration afterwards; there you can do things like add in a schedule, which means that this file would be sampled at regular intervals. I think it would be easier to avoid the schedule and just resample the file after updating it. But that’s just me.

Now, if you look at the Plucker main screen, you’ll see the channels that are configured.

Updating the Channel

At this point, the channel has been set up, but Plucker hasn’t done any translation yet. If you just want to update this particular channel, you can right-click on it and choose “Update Selected Channels”. There’s also a button on the toolbar. Either way, get that channel updated.

You get a progress screen, showing you that Plucker is doing its thing. When it’s done, just click OK. Now, in the chosen directory on your hard drive, there will be a new PDB file, containing the information from the HTML page.

Don’t Forget to Sync!

There’s just one more step, and that’s to actually perform a HotSync to your Palm to get the PDB onto it. Plucker takes care of the overhead, i.e., putting the PDB into the queue, but you still have to push the button. Do it now.

On the Palm

Now on the Palm, you’ll have an icon for Plucker – looks like a big soother. If you open the application, you should see a list of the PDBs that are available to read. Open the file you’ve just created.

There are a host of options that you can play with, e.g., full-screen mode, size of font, even orientation of the screen. In the screenshot below, I’ve got the portrait orientation, with the font. It’s not necessarily the most comfortable for long term reading, but it’s great for packing in info when I’m just searching for something.

What’s even better is that there is a great search. If you click on the left lens of the glasses icon (or Find under the Go menu), you get a search box. Enter the item you’re searching for. In this test, I want to find my list of books by Reichs. If you want to repeat the search, i.e., find again, just click on the right lens of the glasses icon (a cute touch, I thought).

The search works well, and even remembers terms that you’ve searched for before. In addition, you can assign bookmarks to your file, to make finding key areas even easier.

What Else?

Plucker is obviously more powerful than just this one use case. For instance, you can also read in text files (say you don’t use DocumentsToGo) and images. It will also work with online web pages.

For inputting a favourite EverNote category into your Palm, it’s priceless. And it’s free (or donation-ware). Once you have the setup done, updating your information in the palm is as easy as:

1. Export notes from EN (keep using the exact same file and location to make it easy.)
2. Run Plucker and update the channel pointing to that file.
3. Sync your Palm.
4. Nope, you’re already done.

Oh, if you’re looking for more information about HTML and PDAs, Plucker has put together a nice comparison between the big three, i.e., Plucker, AvantGo, and iSilo. Check it out.

A common problem that arises with new (and sometimes more experienced) users of EverNote is that they don’t realize how powerful the Category Intersection panel is. By default this panel is not activated when you first start EverNote, and you may never realize what you’re missing.

Let’s say you have a database of notes, organized with categories. Let’s say that you’re using a whiz-bang application like EverNote, that actually lets you have multiple categories per note.

I don’t want to get all math-y on you, but it’s possible to these categories and note with something called a Venn diagram. That’s basically a way of drawing how sets (in our case, categories), relate to each other.

For illustration purposes, I’m going to talk about two categories: “Things to Read” and “Already Read”. I’ve got some notes, some of which are in one category or the other, or in both. Here’s a Venn diagram showing my example.

As you can see, I have a large category called “Things to Read”. It’s got a total of three notes in it (represented by little black stars.) I’ve got a smaller category called “Already Read”, containing one note. The full yellow circle is “Things to Read”. The full blue circle is “Already Read”. The overlapped area between the two circles (shaded green) holds any notes that are in both of the categories. You’ll notice that the one note in “Already Read” is also in “Things to Read”.

Okay, fine for a math lesson. But what does this buy us? I’ve put this diagram in just to help you understand what kind of powerful searches you can achieve with EverNote. In plain terms, you can search (or filter) for the following things:

• all notes that are in one specific category, e.g., either the yellow or blue circles
• all notes that are in either one category, or another (or another or another, etc.), e.g., in both circles together
• all notes that are in two (or three or four, etc.) specific categories, e.g., in the green overlap between the two circles
• all notes that are in a category, but not in another category, e.g., in the yellow circle, not including the green area

Single Category

This is the easiest way of narrowing down your notes. By simply clicking on a category in the left-hand category panel, you are filtering for all notes that are in that category. This one is so easy that you’re most likely doing it without even thinking about it.

You can see an how I’ve done this in the diagram below. Note that this example corresponds to finding all of the starts in the full yellow circle in the Venn diagram above.

Multiple Categories (Note Can be in Any)

In logic, there is something called the OR operator (or disjunction). It is referred to as union when dealing with sets. All that that means is that if I say that something is in Category A or Category B, then the note is in either A or B, or both. (There is something more special called the “exclusive or”, which means A or B, but not both, but we’re not going into that.)

Again, this kind of filtering can also be done from the regular Category panel, and you’re most likely using it without thinking about it. When you Ctrl + Click on more than one category in the panel (thereby highlighting two or more categories), you are performing an OR operation. The tape then holds any notes that are in ANY of the categories that you have selected.

The diagram below shows you how I’ve selected both categories in the category panel. All three notes are being shown. Note that the one note in “Already Read” is in “Things to Read” also.

Intersection of Categories

The third kind of filtering is fancier, and is done using the Category Intersection panel. (You can turn on the panel in the options.) Just like there is an OR operator, there is also an AND operator (or conjunction). It is referred to as intersection when dealing with sets. All it means is that if I say that something is in Category A and Category B, then the note is in both A and B.

If you’ve been using the Category Intersection panel, you’ve been using this kind of filtering. When you click on a category, and then click on another category in the intersection panel, you filter with the AND operator. The tape will hold all notes that are in ALL of the categories that you’re clicking on in the intersection panel.

For example, here’s a snippet of my category intersection panel. I originally clicked on “My Computers”, which contains seven notes. Using the intersection panel, I then clicked on “Tips & Tricks”, followed by “Hardware”, followed by “Images”. This gives me all (two) of my notes that are in all four of these categories.

Going back to our running example, the diagram below shows you the intersection of both the “Things to Read” and “Already Read” categories. You can see that exactly one note is in both categories.

Negation

The trickiest filtering that you can do with the Category Intersection panel involves another operator called the NOT operator (or negation). It is called the complement when dealing with sets. All this means is that when I say that something is in Category A but not in B, then the note is in A, but most definitely not found in B.

The ability of EverNote to handle negation in the intersection panel seems to be a well-hidden secret, if not a downright undocumented feature. I’ve looked through the most recent version’s help, and didn’t find anything. I was searching for information on “category intersection”, “negation” and “not”. No joy.

To invoke the negation is very simple; it just requires a Ctrl+Click when you’re in the intersection panel. For instance, let’s go back to our example listed above. We want to find all notes that are in “Things to Read” but not in “Already Read”. Select “Things to Read” in the Category panel. Then, in the Intersection panel, Ctrl+Click on “Already Read”.

You’ll see a little red tilde (~) beside the “Already Read” category. This means that it has been negated – no notes that are in that category are being shown in the panel. This holds true even if the note belongs in another category also.

For this example, I had a total of three notes in the “Things to Read” category, and one note in the “Already Read” category. This last note was also in the first category. By using the negation in the category intersection panel, I was able to winnow out anything that was already read and just give me those things that I still need to look at.

Summary

I’ve combined some terminology from logic, set theory and common English to try and explain the different ways that you can filter your notes in EverNote. Here’s a little summary table to make it easier for you:

Any questions?

Modifying the To Do List

For this demonstration, I’m going to start with the stand To Do List template. In the EverNote Template Editor, I have opened up my template database. I’ve made a duplicate of the default To Do List template, and, learning from the To Do With Highlight template, I’m going to modify this duplicate.

Missing Resource = Missing Icon

So, here’s what the new template looks like, before I start. You’ll notice that the little checkbox icon is missing from the top left. That’s caused by how the template editor duplicates old templates. It’s a minor inconvenience, and fixable, but you need to go under the hood for that. For this tutorial, we’re going to skip that and simply delete the call to that icon. Delete the highlighted bit, i.e., delete “<IMG src=”todo.png” …>

I’ve highlighted another important part of the template. The red box is the loop that allows you to have as many lines in the body of the template as you like. The inner blue box is the description of the actual row in the code. Remember that <TR></TR> are the tags for a row in a table, and <TD></TD> are the tags for a cell in a row. So this row has two cells, one that holds the To Do item, and one that holds the checkbox, called done.

Disappearing Line Items

First things first. If you play with the To Do List template at all in your database, you’ll notice that when you’ve got some line items checked, and then you lock the note, those done items *disappear*. Actually, they just hide when the note is locked, but come back when you unlock it. This behaviour can be desirable. Or not. Either way, it’s something to think about, since we’ve copied the same code from that template and it’s now in our new template.

If you look at the code snippet below, the pink highlighted parts are the code that controls whether or not a done item is shown in the locked note. If you leave the pink highlighted parts in, checked lines will be hidden in the locked note. If you delete the pink parts, checked notes will be shown in the locked note. Since the whole purpose of this exercise is to highlight done items, as opposed to hiding them, we’re going to delete those lines.

Highlighting Line Items

Okay, now for the good stuff. Look at the code snippet above, the yellow highlighted parts are the stuff that we add to the template in order to highlight the checked lines. Basically, instead of just echoing the to do item, we’re putting in an if statement. All it does is check to see if that item is marked done. If it is, show it, but show it with a lavender background. If it’s not done, show it with a white background.

The final template code, seen in ENTE, looks like this:

The Template in Use

As with most templates, the locked and unlocked versions look different. Here’s what the template looks like after locking/unlocking. (Sometimes locking is necessary to kick the code into working order.) Notice that the background of the done item is lavender, even though there’s a white textbox in the way.

And here’s what it looks like locked. Prettier.

You can download the xml file for the To Do (Highlight) template here.

You should be able to use what I’ve shown you to modify some other template that uses checkboxes. And in honour of Star Wars day, May the 4th be with you ;)

There is another, mostly undocumented, kind of template, which I call “Fully Editable Template”, or “Editable Template” for short. I discovered these mostly by accident; spurred by a comment by Zach H on the EverNote forum. In that comment, Zach discussed the difference between “<% ‘ _editable%>” and “<% _editable%>”.

Editable vs. ‘ Editable

I had seen the “editable” line in templates, but didn’t know exactly what it did. It turns out that the ‘ (apostrophe) indicates the beginning of a comment in EN templates. So, in the standard template, the line <% ‘ _editable %> is basically telling the template that it’s not “editable”.

Listing the Differences

What does this mean for you and me? Here’s a table indicating the differences (that I know of right now) between the two kinds of template:

Basically, this means that a Fully Editable Template is not much different than just pasting in some pretty html from another source into a standard text note. For instance, you can get similar behaviour simply by making yourself a nice table in BlockNote and pasting it into a new note. However, the advantage of putting pretty html into a template is that you can call on the template from the “Note Type” button. In addition, you can create automatic categories, based on template type, including any fully editable templates that you’ve created.

Seeing the Differences

Here’s a look at the visual difference between these two template types. The top template is the standard password template that comes with EN. The second note is one which I created, which performs the same function for me, but which lets me use hyperlinks, checkboxes, bullet lists, pasted images, etc.

Given that there are such advantages to using templates instead of copy/paste all the time, it makes sense to take advantage of the benefits of editable templates. As long as you’re fine with giving up the use of variables, loops and logic, then a fully editable template might be the answer for you. In coming posts, I’ll show you how to create simple editable templates.

Password (Plain) Template

For those of you who can’t possibly wait, here is the xml file for my Password (Plain) template. You’ll notice that I’ve got a #Password# label – that’s for the autocategory of the same name. There’s also a cell for date – that’s simply because I was moving some older passwords over to this template, and the date was for when I started the service requiring the template. Also, the empty label below #Password# can be used for anything you like, e.g., security question. You can type in that field, just like you can type in any other field.

1. When the phone message is added to the tape, it should have the “To Do” and “Phone Message” categories automatically selected.
2. The order of the fields should be: Phone, Name, Message. (The default is Name, Phone, Message.)
3. The cursor should go to the Phone field when a new phone message is added.
4. Tab/Shift-Tab navigable.

The last request on the forum was to have some real logic built into the template so that you could have either clickable buttons or a drop down list with alternative outcomes to the call. Depending on which choice you picked, the status of the note would change from “To Do” to “Done” and a specific time-stamped message would be added to the message. I’ll tell you right now – that one’s too complicated to even think about ;) There was also a request for an auto-hyphenated phone number. Sorry again, I don’t believe that this is possible either. The EN template engine is just not sophisticated enough for that kind of behaviour. As I mentioned on the forum itself; we’re not talking about Microsoft Access here.

The other points I should be able to do something about.

Order of Fields

Let’s do the easy one first. Similar to changing labels, it’s pretty easy to move fields around. You just have to be consistent.

Let’s take a look at the Phone Message template in the template editor. I’ve circled some interesting parts in the figure below:

The name label is the first cell, followed by the name field, followed by the phone label, followed by the phone field. You’ll notice that each cell in the table is represented by a <td…></td> tag. As long as you don’t mess with the contents of the tags, you can just reorder them in the same row.

So, just cut the first two <td…></td> rows (the ones that contain Name: and echo name) and paste them directly below the other two rows.

Before

<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><IMG src=”phone.png” width=”16″ height=”16″ border=”0″> <b>Name: </b></td>
<td width=”40%” align=”left” valign=”top” bgcolor=”white”><%echo name %></td>
<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><b>Phone: </b></td>
<td width=”40%” align=”left” valign=”top” bgcolor=”white”><%echo phone %></td>

After

<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><b>Phone: </b></td>
<td width=”40%” align=”left” valign=”top” bgcolor=”white”><%echo phone %></td>
<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><IMG src=”phone.png” width=”16″ height=”16″ border=”0″> <b>Name: </b></td>
<td width=”40%” align=”left” valign=”top” bgcolor=”white”><%echo name %></td>

Now, hit F5 to refresh the preview panel, and you now have:

Automatic Categories Assigned to Note

This one’s pretty easy. You can make autocategories in EN that are based on the template type. So, all you need is a category that automatically filters on notes whose template is “Phone Message”. Problem half-solved. For the “To Do”/”Done” category, you can do it as well with the automatic To Do/Done categories in EN. All you have to do is turn the phone message template into one that makes use of a checkbox.

Because this is a standard template, i.e., not a fully editable one, you can’t insert a manual checkbox, say by using Ctrl+Alt+C. Instead, we’re going to have to add a checkbox field to the template.

The easiest way to learn how to modify templates is to look at other ones to get ideas. In this case, let’s look at the “To Do List” template, since I know it uses checkbox.

Here’s what the variable declaration part of that template looks like:

The type “checkbox” is what you want to use. You can name it anything you want. In the To Do List, you see done[], which means that the variable name is done, and the [] means that it’s an array (because the To Do List has rows, each one of which has a checkbox). In our case, we don’t need an array, since we only want one checkbox. Let’s call it “done”. So, we need to put this declaration in the Phone Message template’s variable declaration.

Before

<% string name, phone, message; %>

After

<% string name, phone, message; checkbox done%>

Now we need somewhere to put it in the template itself. I think the easiest part will be to simply add another cell to the first row of the table. I’m not going to bother with a field name for it (that would require another cell as well). And I think I’m going to stick it as the first column, so the first thing you see is the checkbox.

Adding a Cell

As I said earlier, a cell in a row is in a <td…></td> tag. To add a cell, figure out in the code where you want it to go, and just add a new <td> line (Blue shows changes).

<tr>

<td width=”5″ bgcolor=”lavender”><%echo done %></td>
<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><b>Phone: </b></td>
<td width=”40%” align=”left” valign=”top” bgcolor=”white”><%echo phone %></td>
<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><IMG src=”phone.png” width=”16″ height=”16″ border=”0″> <b>Name: </b></td>
<td width=”40%” align=”left” valign=”top” bgcolor=”white”><%echo name %></td>
</tr>

After

The first thing you’ll notice is that the template looks hinky, like this:

That’s because we added a cell to the first row, but not the second, so it’s lopsided. I’m going to take care of this by making the “Message” label in the second row span two columns. You do this by adding ‘colspan=”2″‘ to the <td> tag for that field, like this:

<table cellSpacing=”collapse” border=”1″ bordercolor=”#ADB6DE” cellpadding=”2″ width=”100%”>
<tr>
<td width=”5″ bgcolor=”lavender”><%echo done %></td>
<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><b>Phone: </b></td>
<td width=”40%” align=”left” valign=”top” bgcolor=”white”><%echo phone %></td>
<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><IMG src=”phone.png” width=”16″ height=”16″ border=”0″> <b>Name: </b></td>
<td width=”40%” align=”left” valign=”top” bgcolor=”white”><%echo name %></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan=”2″ align=”right” valign=”top” bgcolor=”lavender”><b>Message:</b><p><br></p></td>
<TD width=”*” align=”left” valign=”top” colspan=3 bgcolor=”white”><p><%echo message %></p></TD></tr>
</table>

Now you have this:

Not bad for a first attempt at a serious modification.

Removing the Phone Icon

If you want to move the phone icon, or remove it altogether, that’s also possible. If you look at the line containing the Name label:

<td width=”15″ align=”right” valign=”bottom” bgcolor=”lavender”><IMG src=”phone.png” width=”16″ height=”16″ border=”0″> <b>Name: </b></td>

The phone icon is everything in the <IMG…> tag. to move it, just cut that tag and place it where you want. To remove it, just delete it altogether.

Tab Navigation

Because we’re dealing with a standard template still, it is tab-navigable. Tab moves you through the fields in this order: Phone -> Name -> Message -> Phone. Shift-Tab goes backwards.

Start in Phone Field

Through some bizarre quirk in EverNote, be it in EverNote or in the underlying editor, the cursor starts in the field that was last active, the last time you were in a note of that template type. So, if you’re working in a phone message note, and the last thing you type is in the message field, then the next time you create a new phone message note, your cursor will be in the message field. Nope, I don’t know how to change that. I’m pretty sure that the template engine doesn’t have an auto-focus capability in it.

Final Result

Here’s what the final template looks like. (Note the phone icon is above Name because I made my EN skinny to take this screenshot.)

Download the xml here. Import it under Tools/Templates/Import. Done.

Today, I’m going to show you how to do this with the EverNote Template Editor.

For more information on getting started with the template editor, especially how to protect your main database by using a test database, se this post.

Editing the Template

Open up your database using the template editor. Remember that you can’t have a database open in both EN and ENTE.

Find the database that you want to change. Let’s say that we want to change the contact template again.

As you can see, there’s a label called “Skype”, but we want to change it to “Birthday”. What you have to do, similar to what we did with Notepad, is find the part of the HTML table that holds this label. You’re looking for the word “skype”.

Variables and Labels

You’ll actually find three (four, if you count the hyperlink) places with the word “skype”. The first one, in the top third of the code looks like this:

<% string name, company, email, title, phone, skype, notes; %>

This is a variable declaration, where the code is saying, “I have some fields in this template that will hold values. All of these particular fields are strings, and these are their names. Basically, everything is this list should have a counterpart in the table body. (But not mandatory; you could declare variables without using them.)

Then you see a couple of lines that holds the Skype label and hyperlink, as well as the variable again. They look like this:

<td…><b><a href=”www.skype.com”>Skype:</a> <b></td>

<td…><%echo skype %></td>

The first of these lines is the cell that holds the label. (<td></td> tags wrap a cell in a table. <tr></tr> is the row, and <table></table> is the whole table). There is a label Skype, as well as a hyperlink on it (<a href=…></a> wraps a hyperlink).

The second line is the next cell, but this one is the field that you type in.

Changing the Label

So, to change the label, all you have to do is change the contents of the first cell. Delete the <a></a> tag to get rid of the hyperlink, and change the label into something you like.

Changing the Variable

If you wish, you could also change the name of the variable being used to hold the contents of the editable field. For instance, let’s say you’ve got the label changed to “Birthday”. Should you just leave the variable called skype? Well, that’s up to you. I usually don’t bother, because it’s not important. The program doesn’t care if the label name doesn’t really match the variable name. Good programming practices suggest that it makes it easier to understand the code later on if you use meaningful variable names.

That said, it’s easy to change. You just need to make sure that you change both the variable declaration (up top) and the variable use (in the table). The ENTE has enough error checking that it will notice if you change one, but not the other (or if you make a typo).

Checking your Template

After you make changes to the template code, hit the F5 button to refresh the preview pane. If you see something like this:

that means you made a mistake. In this case, I made a typo when I changed the variable name. So, I got back and fix that. Notice though, while the editor shows you an error, it doesn’t show you where! So, the best thing to do is make one change at a time, then hit F5 to make sure it’s good.

Okay, so I’ve gone back and fixed my mistake. I hit F5 again, and voila:

I have changed the template successfully, and she looks good.

Again, this is very easy – nice simple changes to pre-existing templates. More complicated things will follow :)

Hello, welcome to the first in a series of posts about the new EverNote Template Editor. You can download ENTE from the EverNote download site.

Before getting into the goods stuff, I just want to walk you through starting up the Template Editor, with your templates. Note: the first few posts will be very basic, for the newbies among us. I’m trying to reach all those hard-core EN users that might be afraid of templates and their code.

Your Templates

It is always recommended, especially when you’re first learning how to mess around with templates, that you DON’T mess around with your primary database. In other words, although you could use ENTE to modify templates in the database you use all the time, I don’t recommend it. Instead, let’s copy those templates over to a new, test, database. That way, if things go badly, you know that you still have good templates to go back to.

Creating a Test DB with Default Templates

Let’s say you just want to create a test database that contains the default templates that shipped with EN. To do this, all you have to do is select File/New… and when you get this popup window, you make sure that you just choose Templates.

Now you’ll have a fresh new database with the following templates:

Importing Custom Templates into Test DB

You may have imported custom or modified templates into your favourite database. Let’s get these into the test database as well.

It’s very easy to copy all the templates from your current database into a test one. Open your current database in EverNote. Select File/Export… from the menu.

You’ll have the choice now of what you want to export. We’re only interested in Templates here, so uncheck every box except that one.

Now, open up the test database that you just created, and import these templates. To do that, you go to Tools/Templates/Import…

Navigate to the export file that you just created. (Note, it’s an XML file, while the first choice that the import box looks for is an enx file. No worries, just look for all file types.)

You’ll see a list of all the templates that are in the export file. Some of them might already be in the test database. Some might be new. Just click the checkbox for all of them and click OK. (And then, OK, again.)

Now, you have a test database, with both the default EN templates, and any templates you have imported. You can safely place with these templates, and not worry about wrecking your primary database.

Opening EverNote Template Editor

The ENTE works on an actual EN database. In the past, when I described modifying templates, we always used an external program, like Notepad, or some other text/HTML editor. But because the ENTE works on an *.enb file, we have to make sure that the file is not in use somewhere else. In other words, you can’t have a database open in EN, and be using the ENTE on it as well.

So, close your test database. Completely. Open the ENTE program. You’ll see something like this, with empty panels all around.

There’s a known issue (as of Apr 07) that if you use the File/New… (or New button) when there is no database open, bad things will happen. So, nothing in the windows means don’t click on new ;) Update [28 Apr 07]: This issue has been fixed. No more bad things.

Now we want to open up our test database. Click Open (or File/Open) and navigate to your test database. Open it. You’ll see something like this – a list of all of the templates in your abase. The other two panes are for the guts of the template, and a preview of what it looks like.

One thing I did find weird was when I tried renaming a template. I tried F2, and right-clicking, and got no joy. What you need to do, is select the template and then very carefully click once on it, to get it into edit mode. Update [28 Apr 07]: This issue has been fixed – you can now use F2.

Bringing a Changed/New Template Back into EN

We’re going to skip editing here for this post. I’ll get into that in the next post. But here, I just want to remind you how to get a new or changed template back into your favourite database.

After you’ve made changes, exit the editor. Then, open up your test database in EN again. You can export as many templates as you want from this database, and then import them into your main one.

To do this, select Tools/Templates. Then, select (ctrl+click) the template(s) that you want to export from the list.

Click on the Export… button. Pick a file name, and remember where it is. Then, in your main database, go to Tools/Templates/Import… Navigate to the file you just created. Select the templates, and then say OK, etc.

Now, you’re back in your main database, with your newly changed templates. The purpose of the test database is so that when you change a template, or make a new one, you can test it out in the other database. Make a few notes with it, see if it works the way you want it to, etc. You want to do this before bringing it into your main database.

As you get more comfortable with templates, you could consider using the template editor on your main database; thereby eliminating all the tedious exporting/importing. This is what I do, unless I’m getting into something particularly tricky. The template does have some error-checking in it, and will let you know if you’ve missed a variable declaration etc., so there is some protection there. But don’t say I didn’t warn you ;)