The biggest knock against Evernote–from myself and others–is that the data isn’t easily portable. Let’s be clear, though, you can export individual notes as HTML files and you can mass export notes in a standard XML format that’s not too difficult to work with. You can drag a PDF or other file right out of Evernote. The fact is that Evernote is made for rich text and images; portability gets more difficult when you’re no longer just dealing with text. The Evernote->Together importer is a great example of making use of these features. Update: I almost forgot to mention the ENML Editor project, a web interface for editing Evernote’s XML output.

Given the above, I don’t use Evernote for “notes” anymore. If I’m typing a note, it’s in a text editor on my phone or nvALT on the desktop. I use Evernote for “temporary” items that make full use of Evernote’s searching, sorting and image recognition capabilities.

I use Evernote the most when I travel. It’s the fastest, easiest way to keep tickets, itineraries, reservations and expenses all neatly organized and at synced between all of my devices. When I park my car, I snap a picture of the nearest parking ramp column (with the color and row number) and stick it in the notebook for the trip. I believe in using the right software for the job, and–while Dropbox¹ can cover a lot of bases–Evernote excels in this area. I don’t need this data to be portable later; when the trip is over, so is the lifespan of the notes.

I also use Evernote for grabbing images of receipts, both on the road and at home. Being able to snap pictures of paper receipts and print web receipts directly to the same bucket is important, and having automatic OCR on those images is priceless. I generally don’t need to reference my receipts after a year, so this data is temporary as well. If a receipt is for a large purchase or needs a longer lifespan, it’s probably going into my home inventory software or elsewhere anyway.

I know some of the guys at Evernote, and our history goes back a ways. I know that they’re passionate about their users, and the safety of their data. I trust Evernote to be there when I’m boarding the plane and–should the need arise–when I’m being audited. I don’t need it for simple notes, Notational Velocity, nvALT and plain text in general are faster, more portable and work across my devices. PDFs and images just make more sense in Evernote, so that’s what I use.

Related posts:

1. Taking the Markdown to Evernote service further
2. Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness
3. Evernote Site Memory tagger for WordPress

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Why a plain-text nerd uses Evernote

The new Service adds way better tag handling, MultiMarkdown-style metadata hooks for Notebook, tags and more, and generally amped up the parser and error handling, as well as the Evernote side of things. Check it out at NSUserView. Thanks Martin, nice work!

Related posts:

1. A better System Service for Evernote clipping — with MultiMarkdown
2. Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness
3. Clippable to Evernote Snow Leopard Service

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Taking the Markdown to Evernote service further

Evernote introduced Site Memory today, providing an easy way to help people clip to Evernote from your site while maintaining control over how your content appears and is attributed. While some instructions are provided for WordPress, some of us will obviously want to customize things a little further.

Brett Kelly posted a quick PHP script on the Evernote WordPress docs to include the first three tags from your post as suggested tags in the clipper. I wanted to weight these, though, so here’s my version…

<a href="javascript:void()" title="Clip to Evernote" class="evernoteclip" 
  onclick="Evernote.doClip({ title: '<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>',
    providerName: 'Brett Terpstra',
    url: '<?php the_permalink(); ?>',
    contentId: 'post-<?php the_ID(); ?>-clip',
    suggestTags: '<?php
    if (get_post_meta($post->ID, 'evernoteTags', true)) {
      echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'evernoteTags', true);
    } else {
      $posttags = get_the_tags();
      $out = array();
      if ($posttags) {
        foreach($posttags as $tag) {
          $out[trim($tag->name)] = intval($tag->count); 
        }
        ksort($out,SORT_NUMERIC);
        echo implode(array_keys(array_slice($out, 0, 3)),',');
      }
    }?>'});return false;">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/evernoteclipper.png" alt="Evernote Clipper Icon"/>
</a>

It first checks for a custom field called “evernoteTags,” so you can override the whole thing by specifying up to three tags in a custom field in the post editor. The tags should be separated by commas, spaces aren’t important: “tag1,tag2,tag3”, no quotes. Moving on…

The rest of the code grabs all of the tags for the post and their use counts on your site, sorts by the use count and outputs the tag names. Pretty simple.

I should also note that the JavaScript library for the clipper weighs in at 33k compressed, so it’s not a lightweight addition to your blog. I grabbed the online source, minified it and am serving it from a CDN, so the hit was minimized, but still there. I’m also loading the clipper image from my CDN, just to avoid the extra offsite hit. I may eventually attempt to lazy load the script only when the link is clicked, but this works for now.

Related posts:

1. Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness
2. A better System Service for Evernote clipping — with MultiMarkdown
3. Taking the Markdown to Evernote service further

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Evernote Site Memory tagger for WordPress

When I decided to fix this, the first issue was that when EverSave creates the Evernote note, it lets Evernote convert the list from HTML to Rich Text. Once it’s stored in Rich Text Format (RTF), manipulating it via any shell language, including AppleScript, becomes quite difficult. It’s not impossible, but I quickly decided it wasn’t a route I wanted to wander down. Here’s what I did do…

Saving tabs to Evernote

What I ended up doing was modifying what EverSave stored, and including the actual URL in the visible text of the note. It’s not the prettiest solution, but it’s the only way that this particular system will work. I did my best to minimize the visual presence of the URL using the rudimentary markup that Evernote actually pays attention to. The final product looks like this:

The actual layout is still fully controlled by the _template property in the first line, which is the only line that’s changed from the original script. I’m posting the whole thing again, with this minor revision, for convenience. With a little bit of HTML (remember to escape your double quotes), you can modify the template to look however you like. Just keep in mind that Evernote strips 90% of markup out when it creates the note from your HTML, so stick with basic tags. See the original EverSave post for a breakdown of the script.

Be sure to continue reading after the script to see how we handle the “restore” functionality.

property _template : "<li><strong><a href="%url">&uArr;</a> %name</strong> < <small>%url</small> >"
 
--search and replace function for template
on snr(tofind, toreplace, TheString)
	set ditd to text item delimiters
	set text item delimiters to tofind
	set textItems to text items of TheString
	set text item delimiters to toreplace
	if (class of TheString is string) then
		set res to textItems as string
	else -- if (class of TheString is Unicode text) then
		set res to textItems as Unicode text
	end if
	set text item delimiters to ditd
	return res
end snr
 
set prettyDate to do shell script "date '+%A, %B %d, %Y at %l:%M %p'"
set theTitle to "Bookmarks " & prettyDate
set urlList to "<ul>"
 
tell application "Safari"
	set tabList to every tab of front window
	repeat with aTab in tabList
		set aLink to _template
		set aLink to my snr("%name", name of aTab, aLink)
		set aLink to my snr("%url", URL of aTab, aLink)
		set urlList to urlList & aLink & return
	end repeat
end tell
set urlList to urlList & "</ul>"
 
tell application "Evernote"
	set theNote to create note with html urlList title theTitle notebook "Bookmarks"
end tell

I have this script saved as “EverSave.scpt” in my ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari folder (create it if you don’t have it), and launch it using FastScripts with a Command-Shift-S shortcut. Safari doesn’t have anything bound to that key-combo, and it’s easy to remember (Save As in most programs).

Restoring tabs

This solution makes a few assumptions, but the script is easily customized to handle any differences in your setup. I went with a System Service (Snow Leopard) for the restore function, primarily because it allows me to act directly on selected text in Evernote. It’s a very simple Ruby script that parses the selected text for urls, and then opens any that it finds in sequential order using your default browser. There’s a commented out line if you want to always target Safari directly when opening them, which may be useful in some situations. I use Choosy, and have a rule that just directs all of these to Safari. If you have Safari set as your default browser, and that’s where you want to open your links, this will just work as is.

To set up the service:

1. Open Automator and select “Service” as the new file type.
2. On the right hand side, tell it that “Service receives selected” text in Evernote.app (choose Other… and select Evernote).
3. Find “Run Shell Script” in the list on the left and drag it into the area on the right.
4. Set the Shell dropdown to /usr/bin/ruby
5. Insert the following code, and feel free to modify
6. Save the result as “EverRestore”
7. Assign a shortcut key, if desired, in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services

Here’s the code for the service:

ARGF.each do |f|
    links = f.scan /< (https?://.*?) >/mi
    # The above scans specifically for the angle brackets in my template. 
    # If you remove those from the output of EverSave, be sure to update
    # the regular expression accordingly.
    if links.empty? then
        exit
    else
        links.each {|link| %x{osascript -e &#x27;open location "#{link[0]}"&#x27;}}
        # links.each {|link| %x{osascript -e &#x27;tell application "Safari" to open location "#{link[0]}"&#x27;} }
    end
end

The simple regular expression in line 2 does scan specifically for the angle brackets I used in the new EverSave template. That just relieves some complexity. If you want a regular expression that doesn’t require the angle brackets, try replacing line 2 with this:

links = f.scan /(https?://([^s",;]+)..{2,4}(/[^s",;!]+))/mi

Once it’s saved in Automator, it should be available when you select text in Evernote. If there are visible URLs in the selected text, running this Service will open them in tabs in Safari (or your default browser). You can selectively open certain urls by only selecting the lines that contain the ones you want to open. Non-contiguous selections will require a little text editing, of course.

Not as hard as it looks… really.

The explanation got a little long, and probably seems unnecessarily complex. The fact is, I can save a Safari browsing session with one key combo, edit, annotate and tag it (if I want to), then restore it later by highlighting and typing a new command combination. It’s actually quite convenient, and fairly bulletproof. I’d love to hear how you use it, or what you’re doing instead!

Related posts:

1. Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness
2. Clippable to Evernote Snow Leopard Service
3. Save Safari tabs to Instapaper

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at EverSave revisited, now with session restore!

Evernote web clipper functionality is now complete in the style, and the button in the HUD will open the floating frame, let you add tags and extra text, then clip just the visible text in Reader to your main Evernote notebook without ever opening a new page. Exactly what I wanted. Now I just have to add the same thing to Instapaper Beyond!

The style is also now available with and without background images, just check the main post for updates.

Related posts:

1. Safari Reader Antique hack
2. Antique 1.5 for Safari Reader
3. Taking the Markdown to Evernote service further

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness

Another post, quickly and with less explanation…

The fact that Evernote processes HTML so much better than it does plain or rich text got me thinking and tinkering. I use Markdown (actually, MultiMarkdown) constantly, and it does a great job of turning plain text into valid markup. With (Multi)Markdown, even plain text becomes HTML that–when imported into Evernote–retains most of its formatting. To answer your question, no, I’m not obsessed with Evernote, I’m obsessed with problems I think I could solve. It’s unhealthy.

Please note, this requires that you have Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown installed in ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown, and that the Perl files (MultiMarkdown.pl and SmartyPants.pl) are located in a ‘bin’ subdirectory (which is the default install). If you don’t have MultiMarkdown, you should get it anyway (all the cool kids have it), so head over to the download page and grab a copy. Now, on with the show.

I set this up originally as a TextMate command, intending just to be able to clip code snippets and free-form text to Evernote without thinking too much about it. That worked well, so I modified it to work as a System Service. Specifically, a Snow Leopard service, but I’m providing the Ruby script here and it can be modified for any Mac setup you want.

While it will work just fine on plain text with no markup, it does have a couple of “special” features. If you start a line with a # and a space (e.g.: # This is my header), which is a Markdown convention for a first-level heading, it will use that as the title for the note and strip it out of the text in processing. It only uses the first one it finds, but it will strip out any first-level headers in the selection. I’ll probably modify that later, or just have it leave them in. Also, a line that begins with “tags:” followed by a space and a comma-separated list of words will be split up and used to tag the new note. This is also stripped before processing. It handles spaces in multi-word tags, and odd marks at the beginning or end of a tag, but only one punctuation character, and only at the beginning or end of a tag. The code follows…

Here’s the Ruby code, messy as it may be:

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby -rjcode -Ku
    # requires that MultiMarkdown be installed in ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown
    # That, or edit the script to point to yours :)

    ARGF.each do |f|
    input = f
    contents = ''
    tags = ''
    title = nil

    def e_as(str)
        str.to_s.gsub(/(?=["\\])/, '\\')
    end
    input.each_line { |line| 
      if line =~ /^# (.*?)/
        title = line[2..-1]
        break
      end
    }
    title = %x{date '+Clipped note: %A, %B %d, %Y at %l:%M %p'|tr -s " "} if title.nil?

    input.each_line { |line| 
      if line =~ /^[Tt]ags: /
        tags = line[5..-1].split(',').map {|tag| tag = tag.strip.gsub(/^(.)?\b|\b(.)?$/,"\\2\"\\1") }
        break
      end
    }

    IO.popen('"$HOME/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/bin/MultiMarkdown.pl"|"$HOME/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/bin/SmartyPants.pl"', "r+") do |io|
     input.each_line { |line| 
        io << line unless line =~ /^# |[Tt]ags\: /
     }; io.close_write
     io.each_line do |line|
       contents << line
     end
    end
    tags = " tags {#{tags.join(",")}}" unless tags.empty?
    %x{osascript -e 'tell application "Evernote" to create note with html "#{e_as contents}" title "#{title}" notebook "Unfiled"#{tags}'}
    end

You can create a System Service in Automator with it, set up a command in TextMate, or do whatever else you can think of. If you just want to download the service and try it out, I’ve made it available here. Unzip and copy it to ~/Library/Services (in your home folder). If you set it up as a System Service, assign a shortcut key in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.

It does choke once in a while, apparently on Markdown-generated code snippets, but I haven’t quite narrowed down why, yet. I’ll update the code if I figure that one out. Overall, though, it makes pretty clippings and allows you to use some Markdown syntax to spice up your text without having to touch the (regrettably abominable) Evernote editor.

Related posts:

1. Taking the Markdown to Evernote service further
2. Evernote Site Memory tagger for WordPress
3. A Service for writing MultiMarkdown footnotes inline

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at A better System Service for Evernote clipping — with MultiMarkdown

As much as I love Evernote, its editor is, well, a hassle. Importing text clippings can strip line breaks and leave you with quite a mess, and cleaning it up is less than pleasant. I’ve found that using AppleScript, HTML and Evernote together allows me to create pretty well-formatted notes from web and text clippings, aside from using Evernote’s PDF features. In most cases—like website clippings—I don’t need or want a full PDF, replete with ads and comments (Clippable was designed with that in mind). The trick when creating a note in Evernote via AppleScript is to use a little HTML to get the basic formatting. Evernote’s AppleScript library provides a command tailored to this purpose.

To demonstrate, I’ll show you how to save your browsing session in Safari as a nicely formatted list in Evernote. For this I set up a new Notebook called “Bookmarks,” and am keeping the markup very simple. Evernote strips most styling from imported HTML, but accepts structural items like headlines, lists, tables, etc., applying its own default formatting to the elements.

To begin, open AppleScript Editor (or Script Editor in Leopard) and create a new document. Save it as “EverSurfSaver.scpt” (or your own, better name) in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari, creating the folders if you need to. This makes the script show up at the top of the list when you’re in Safari, and not clutter your script menu in other applications. Speaking of the Script Menu, if yours isn’t showing up in your menubar, and you want it to, look in the General tab of AppleScript Editor (Snow Leopard) or open the AppleScript Utility (Leopard). I launch most of my scripts with LaunchBar, but I keep the AS menu around.

In my script, the first thing I did was set up a template for the link formatting, and a search-and-replace function to implement it. It’s not terribly advanced, it just gives you %name and %url as placeholders, and you can set up the string however you like. I prefer this method to building long this & that & return & etc. strings in AppleScript (although that still happens pretty often). My template for the links is set up as an unordered list, so it looks like this:

property _template : "<li><a href=\"%url\">%name</a></li>"

This is, fairly obviously, taking a name and a url and creating a hyperlink, wrapped in a list item. Note that any double quotes in the template string need to be escaped with a blackslash. The search-and-replace function is one that I use often, and I can’t remember who to attribute for the original code, for which I apologize…

--search and replace function for template
on snr(tofind, toreplace, TheString)
    set atid to text item delimiters
    set text item delimiters to tofind
    set textItems to text items of TheString
    set text item delimiters to toreplace
    if (class of TheString is string) then
        set res to textItems as string
    else -- (assume Unicode)
        set res to textItems as Unicode text
    end if
    set text item delimiters to atid
    return res
end snr

Now we can update our template with shorter calls to the snr function. We’ll get around to using the template in a moment.

Next, we want to set up some basic variables to format the title of our note and create our list variable (open an unordered list) so that they’re all available outside of other functions and tell statements. I’m using a shell call (do shell script) to create the date strings, just because it’s so much faster than formatting a date in AppleScript.

set prettyDate to do shell script "date '+%A, %B %d, %Y at %l:%M %p'"
set theTitle to "Bookmarks " & prettyDate
set urlList to "<ul>"

The command date '+%A, %B %d, %Y at %l:%M %p' will create a date string that looks like Saturday, March 06, 2010 at  9:04 AM. Note the extra space before the “9:04.” That’s because it’s a single-digit hour and gets padded where the zero would be with other formatting. You can remove this with a little *NIX string handling, but I’m just going to live with it for the purposes of this post.

Next, we gather all of the tabs open in the front window of Safari. It’s entirely possible to cycle through all open windows and get all tabs, but I always surf in “one window” mode, so I’ll leave it up to you to look that one up if you need it. We’ll be appending the information from each tab to the urlList variable we set up at the beginning.

tell application "Safari"
    set tabList to every tab of front window
    repeat with aTab in tabList
        set aLink to _template
        set aLink to my snr("%name", name of aTab, aLink)
        set aLink to my snr("%url", URL of aTab, aLink)
        set urlList to urlList & aLink & return
    end repeat
end tell
set urlList to urlList & "</ul>"

The block ends by appending the closing tag to our urlList. So we have a simple HTML fragment containing an unordered list of all of our links, the titles hyperlinked to their associated url. All that’s left to do now is create our Evernote note from this fragment:

tell application "Evernote"
    set theNote to create note with html urlList title theTitle notebook "Bookmarks"
end tell

That’s it. Now there’s a note in Evernote, in a notebook called “Bookmarks,” titled something like “Bookmarks Saturday, March 06, 2010 at 9:04 AM.” Here’s the code in its entirety:

property _template : "<li><a href=\"%url\">%name</a></li>"

--search and replace function for template
on snr(tofind, toreplace, TheString)
    set ditd to text item delimiters
    set text item delimiters to tofind
    set textItems to text items of TheString
    set text item delimiters to toreplace
    if (class of TheString is string) then
        set res to textItems as string
    else -- if (class of TheString is Unicode text) then
        set res to textItems as Unicode text
    end if
    set text item delimiters to ditd
    return res
end snr

set prettyDate to do shell script "date '+%A, %B %d, %Y at %l:%M %p'"
set theTitle to "Bookmarks " & prettyDate
set urlList to "<ul>"

tell application "Safari"
    set tabList to every tab of front window
    repeat with aTab in tabList
        set aLink to _template
        set aLink to my snr("%name", name of aTab, aLink)
        set aLink to my snr("%url", URL of aTab, aLink)
        set urlList to urlList & aLink & return
    end repeat
end tell
set urlList to urlList & "</ul>"

tell application "Evernote"
    set theNote to create note with html urlList title theTitle notebook "Bookmarks"
end tell

Click here to open this script in your default script editor.

Addendum

One of the great things about using Evernote for this purpose is that you can add todo checkboxes next to important or “read later” links for reference. If there’s a theme to the batch of links (I just saved the results of a long search for decent WordPress e-commerce plugins), you can also add meaningful tags to the note itself. Further, you can add any notes and keywords you want next to or below the link in an indented list item (you never have to deal with markup again after the import, at that point it’s just a rich text list).

Because this script only deals with the frontmost window, you can also drag off a specific group of tabs to a new window, and only bookmark those in the Evernote note. With a little “show dialog” or CocoaDialog action, you could easily have the script request tags or notes in the process and append them to the note. If I ever implement that, I’ll post it, but I like the simplicity and immediacy it has right now.

Also, I forgot to look and see who else was doing something similar (I’m in my own little world a lot). Justin over at Veritrope has a similar script (minus the HTML), amongst a large collection of really useful scripts and services. You should check that out, too!

Related posts:

1. Duplicating Safari browsing sessions between Macs
2. EverSave revisited, now with session restore!
3. Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Saving Safari browsing sessions to Evernote

Since the point of Clippable was to deal better with things like code blocks (especially for saving snippets to Evernote), it now removes the toolbar and line numbers from SyntaxHighlighter blocks. It also looks for another common technique: converting lines in code to an ordered list inside of a pre block. This is just blotted out with CSS now. Those are the only two highlighting methods it targets at the moment, but I’ll tackle more as I run into them.

If you already have the bookmarklet installed, you’re already benefitting from these changes (the bookmarklet calls the source scripts on my server, so it is, in essence, automatically updated). If not, just cruise over to the Clippable page and grab it!

Related posts:

1. Clippable updated, goes mobile
2. Clippable
3. Clippable to Evernote Snow Leopard Service

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Clippable updated to remove source code line numbers

To install in Snow Leopard, just unzip (double-click the zip file) the file and move the resulting .workflow file to [your home directory]/Library/Services. It should now appear in your Safari->Services menu, in Safari only. To add a keyboard shortcut to the Service, go to the Keyboard pane in System Preferences, choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, select Services on the left and find the Clippable… service on the right. Double click on the right side of the listing to enter a hotkey. I currently have mine bound to control-command-E, which works well for me in Safari.

Download here.

Related posts:

1. Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service
2. A (fairly) simple equation evaluation service for Snow Leopard
3. Clippable updated, goes mobile

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Clippable to Evernote Snow Leopard Service

So my modification of the Readability bookmarklet kind of snuck out before it was ready, but it’s my own fault. Now I’m scrambling a little to make it more presentable and less of a straight-up hack of the excellent original. I wanted to make a few things clear about my goals and purpose on this one.

First the entire project was really a subset of my attempt at a better Evernote clipper for Snow Leopard. One which allowed me to preserve code formatting and automatically remove comments and ads from the post, in a smarter fashion than the current Safari clipper does. I built it as a System Service and run it with a hotkey. You can download it and try it out, if you like. I’ll make a more accessible version with instructions shortly.

This is why I removed the formatting options from the bookmarklet… Evernote was going to strip all of that out anyway. Originally, I was just using the code to strip out ads and find the meat. The modifications to preserve code blocks, movies, etc. were simply working toward the “perfect” Evernote clip.

It works for what it is, but wasn’t really intended to be used without the Evernote Service. If I get enough feedback, and no cease and desist orders from the original creators, I’ll continue to modify it. One thing you can certainly do to help is provide me with URL’s to pages it fails on; the more scenarios I can study, the smarter I can make it.

Related posts:

1. Taking the Markdown to Evernote service further
2. Why a plain-text nerd uses Evernote
3. Evernote Site Memory tagger for WordPress

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Readability2 leaks out