I’ve been using Evernote on my Mac and iPhone for a while, to sync drafts of text documents to my iPhone to read on the go. This is secretly my attempt to solve the problem of syncing from my Macs to my pocket devices, a problem that Apple has so far entirely avoided addressing. No, iTunes is not a sane syncing solution. It’s a music playback app that has been ludicrously overloaded by unrelated tasks. MobileMe should be that syncing genie, but is instead nearly entirely useless to me. And yes, I’ve had a Mac.com/MobileMe account since it was released in 2000.
But back to the problem: I have text documents on my Macbook Air that I want to stick onto an even more portable device so I can ponder them and maybe make small edits to them. Think car ride, train ride, nice long soak in the bath. Until a couple of weeks ago, that portable device was my iPhone. Now, that portable device is the iPad.
I originally tried Evernote to see if it would give me the sync I longed for. And mostly, it does. There are clients for Mac, iPhone, and a bunch of other phones. They have a server that handles over the air syncing for all documents managed by the client. The clients are free; they make their money by displaying ads in the client & by selling subscriptions to a premium more-bits-synced-per-month service free of ads. Since I loathe ads but like supporting software developers, I pay for the premium service.
Evernote has lots of features I don’t care about. I only ever sync text documents, for instance, not images, so I never get anywhere near the bandwidth limitations for even the free version of their service. They have a lot of nifty features that make more sense once you’ve stuck images into your notes or geotagged them. But the syncing does work the way I expect it to, the way I wish it worked for all of Apple’s apps. I make edits on the desktop and they sync. I launch the portable clients, and they sync. My data gets distributed without me having to think about it.
It’s gorgeous on the new iPad client. It’s perfect for reading what I’ve written. I really like the document browser at the top of the document read view. I’m particularly fond of the “all notes” view. The “tags” view with the luggage-tag violator is a little too twee for me. I can imagine take advantage of the geo-tagging feature and the “places” view the next time I go road-tripping.
So for viewing my documents, it’s great.
Editing on the remote clients is a disaster. Okay, I exaggerate. But I’m not happy with it, and it’s the feature of the app I use least. Here’s how I use it: I never edit in the Mac client, save to decorate a document with tags. I always copy and paste from my real editor, BBEdit. Then I’ll read on the pocket client and attempt to make small text edits.
The first problem is with syncing back. I have constant problems with syncing from my iPhone & iPad to the server. My documents often fail to sync back to their service with the message “unknown synchronization error u11”. This error has been present in their iPhone client for months and it’s also there in their iPad client. The problem appears to be with escaping urls in text. (Remember: You have a problem and decide to use XML to solve it. Now you have two problems. Enjoy!) My usual fix is to switch from straight html-formatted urls to Markdown-formatted urls, which I can handle later with Markdown preprocessing. But still, what an embarrassing error to leave in your software for so long.
Next problem: Accidents happen to my line endings/paragraph breaks whenever I get text back from remote clients. As in, they vanish. I cannot copy from Evernote and paste back into BBEdit because everything ends up as a single line of text. (My workaround is to email the document, which is, let me tell you, a stupid thing to have to do.) Maybe I’m an unusual case, in that I am not editing formatted text, but instead Markdown-styled plain ASCII text, but really, I find this mucking with my content unnecessary. If you attempt to be clever, you have to get it absolutely right or it’s worse than doing nothing at all would have been.
Interaction problem: Editing is distinct from viewing a note, for some reason. So, for instance, I will be reading a long stretch of text and find a spot mid-way through where I’d like to make an edit. I can’t edit immediately. Instead I have to press an edit button and be taken to a new view… which is scrolled to the very top. I have to scroll and scroll and scroll down again until I relocate my edit target. My first reaction was, why not stay in edit view all the time? That makes the read-only view useless, except that I like the read view because it also includes the nifty navigation/thumbnail widgets for the rest of my notes. The edit view doesn’t have the navigation. My suggestion for a fix would be to find some way to make editing happen inline. Tap on the view pane to make it live? Sync after some period of inactivity, or if the simplicity of a Save button is needed, make one appear when the document has been changed.
Text editing on the iPad is agony sans keyboard, but that’s hardly Evernote’s fault. Also, it’s not really what the iPad is about. I am at peace with its content-consumer focus.
My final assessment is that my use of Evernote is the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut. What I really want is for Apple to make my MobileMe subscription worthwhile and handle over-the-air syncing to and from my iPad, for documents of all kinds. And then I want some kind of text browser/editor on the iPad side. I love the document browser portions of Evernote. I’d gladly give them some money for that user interface. Even more money if the editor were Markdown-aware. (Yeah, I’ll bet that’s too geeky for most potential users of an app like this.)
