Readers who have been around for a while might recall that I’m a big EverNote fan (note the capital N).  You may be wondering why I haven’t blogged about the new Evernote (note the little n) 3 beta here…

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.

Can’t find the template editor over at the main EverNote site? That’s because it’s been removed. Why? Probably because they’re focusing so hard on the new Evernote 3 beta, which doesn’t support templates. Please, don’t ask - it’s just too painful to talk about.

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.)

Some time ago, I upgraded my EverNote to version 2.1, which is great, but which has a different format for the database.  That meant that the EverNote Template Editor (ENTE) broke.

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!

I’ve just been turned onto a new way of getting HTML content into my Palm. Let’s assume that you’ve got a non-wireless Palm and you want to get either a web page, or an HTML file from your desktop onto it. I’ve used AvantGo before, and it’s great for setting up “channels”, and pushing a whole of bunch of fresh web content to your Palm during HotSync. However, it only handles actual Web page, i.e., online content only.

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.

Update 2007-05-23 21:29: Making my images a bit smaller to make the post fit…

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?