Posts tagged with "evernote"

Evernote for Mac Gets Direct Skitch Integration

Evernote and Skitch

Evernote and Skitch

With a new version released today, Evernote has updated its Mac app to include a brand new communication layer with Skitch, the company’s image/document annotation and sharing tool.

When Evernote acquired Skitch in the summer of 2011, I wondered how they would manage to deeply integrate the two apps in a way that would make storing a note and annotating it a seamless experience. In the past two years, Evernote focused on revamping its desktop and iOS clients and on launching a new version of Skitch with Evernote integration – meaning that Skitch could sync notes to Evernote, and those notes would show up inside an Evernote notebook with inline previews and changes, but Evernote couldn’t direct plug into Skitch for further editing. Here’s what I wrote in 2011:

According to Evernote, the engineers at the two companies will be working closely in the coming months to deeply integrate Skitch and Evernote with each other, as right now the only way to let the apps communicate on a Mac is by annotating an image in Skitch, and manually drag it into Evernote. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the app gained a feature to push annotations to Evernote’s cloud to avoid drag & drop — considering the app is coming to mobile devices, this has been certainly considered by the Evernote team.

Users could drag and drop images between Evernote and Skitch, but that would result in duplicate files and wasted storage space – an issue that was exacerbated by iOS’ inferior sharing capabilities and limited “Open In” menu. In short, it always struck me as unusual that Evernote couldn’t figure out a way to let its apps “talk” to each other, avoiding manual interaction in favor of simple, intuitive inter-app communication that treated Evernote as a storage space and browser, and Skitch as an editor.

Today’s Evernote 5.2 for Mac does exactly this, and quite admirably as well. I have been testing the new version, which has gained a new Skitch button in the note editor that allows you to send any note – either as text, image, or combination of both – directly to Skitch for editing. When you’re done annotating in Skitch, you can send a file back to Evernote – and not just back to Evernote’s cloud, but back to the Evernote app itself, which will automatically come in the foreground again, showing the new version of an image/document already inside a note. Read more

CoolIris for iOS Adds Evernote Integration→

Gabe Weatherhead on CoolIris’ latest update:

There is now support for connecting with Evernote. Importantly, it can be configured to show photos for a specific tag as well, searches or all photos. This is a nice option for using Evernote as a photo locker. I’m loving it for the scans of my daughter’s school art I collect in Evernote.

This is an interesting idea – I imagine I could plug CoolIris into Evernote’s “skitch” tag to view a stream of my Skitch notes, or perhaps the “Paperless” notebook to view the most recent receipts and bills I have scanned. I don’t use Evernote as a photo locker (my photos are all backed up to Dropbox, shared through Instagram and backed up with IFTTT, or uploaded to Droplr), so I guess I would only rely on CoolIris for screenshots or documents archived as images.

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Getting Safari’s Selection on iPad As HTML With A JavaScript Bookmarklet→

I modified this bookmarklet posted by “Tim Down” on StackOverflow to send selected text from Safari to Drafts as HTML. The result is the following code:

javascript:(function(){var%20h="",s,g,c,i;if(window.getSelection){s=window.getSelection();if(s.rangeCount){c=document.createElement("div");for(i=0;i<s.rangeCount;++i){c.appendChild(s.getRangeAt(i).cloneContents());}h=c.innerHTML}}else%20if((s=document.selection)&&s.type=="Text"){h=s.createRange().htmlText;}window.location='drafts://x-callback-url/create?text='+(h);})()

So let’s say you want to grab the first paragraph in this post. Normally, in Safari for iPad you’d end up with the plain text fetched by window.getSelection:

This is a fantastic report with lots of data points for any developer trying to get their apps featured by Apple. Dave Addey’s highly interactive regional graphs and notes are very well done. Be sure to check out Dave Addey’s other works on his main blog.

As you can see, formatting and hyperlinks have been removed. With the bookmarklet above, you’ll receive the HTML version of the selection – which looks like this. But what’s the point?

My idea was that I wanted to be able to automate the process of capturing rich text from iOS’ Safari; I wanted to achieve the same kind of functionality I have on the Mac, where rich text can be dragged from Safari or Chrome and dropped into Evernote, preserving styles, hyperlinks, and images. I thought that combining HTML output with an Evernote Append action (with the “Send as Markdown HTML” option turned on) would let me receive valid HTML content in Evernote starting from an iOS workflow. And, for the most part, I was right, because the workflow does mostly work.

As it turns out, Evernote is extremely cautious with the HTML tags they accept, and the ones that are supported follow the XHTML guidelines as ENML is a superset of XHTML. This means that my bookmarklet will work for something as simple as selecting a single paragraph, but may easily fail with multiple selections, inline images, complex styles, and so forth. When that will happen, Drafts will return an error when trying to append HTML to Evernote; obviously, this will work just fine with Dropbox, which doesn’t care about the kind of text you’re using in your actions. Even better, this should work very well with Textastic’s just-released update that supports x-callback-url.

I guess the solution would be to build a Pythonista-based converter for Evernote-approved XHTML tags and place it between Safari and Drafts, converting HTML tags Evernote won’t like to compatible ones. If you’re interested, my birthday is August 10.

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Quickly Append Browser URLs To Evernote with Keyboard Maestro

I often come across webpages and interesting links that I can’t check out right away, but that I also don’t want to send to Instapaper, Pinboard, or my OmniFocus inbox. They are, put simply, “stuff to check out”; I append these URLs to an Evernote note carrying the same name:

Macro

Macro

As I detailed in my review of Drafts 3.0 for iOS, appending text from an iPhone or iPad is easy with Agile Tortoise’s app and a combination of Evernote actions and browser bookmarklets, but I had to think of an equally straightforward workflow for the Mac. Unfortunately, the lack of a Drafts app for OS X forced me to resort to AppleScript to achieve the same kind of functionality, but the deal was (partially) sweetened by the new features introduced in Keyboard Maestro 6.0, released back in May.

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Byword 2.0 Gets Publishing Services, Improved Sync, And More

Byword 2.0

Byword 2.0

Metaclassy’s Byword is one of the finest Markdown text editors for iOS and OS X. On the Mac, a great selection of keyboard shortcuts and support for native full-screen mode make Byword an experience that’s both powerful and intuitive; on iPhones and iPads, the app’s excellent MultiMarkdown previews allow the Markdown-savvy writer to always keep an eye on the final outcome of a document. With sync (both through iCloud and Dropbox) and solid exporting options (including PDF), Byword has become many’s preferred solution to write down thoughts and longer essays – with a focus on Markdown, rich text, and cross-device availability of documents.

Byword 2.0, released today for iOS and OS X, introduces new publishing options for WordPress, Tumblr, Evernote, Blogger, and Scriptogram, more robust sync with offline support and better conflict resolution, and several other enhancements. I have been testing Byword on all my devices for the past month, pointing the app to my /Apps/ folder in Dropbox where all my text files are stored. Read more

Evernote Launches Reminders

Evernote Reminders

Evernote Reminders

In the years I’ve spent using and recommending Evernote, I’ve always noticed a chasm between people who rely on the service to store reference material and notes, and those who want to also use Evernote as a “getting things done” system to keep track of their todos. The topic has been widely discussed on the Internet, with smart folks such as Sven Fechner and Fraser Speirs delving deeper into the subject of Evernote as a GTD system. Tutorials and eBooks have been published with tips on how to use tags and saved searches to turn Evernote into an app capable of equally handling documents, notes, and todos under a single, searchable archive. Clearly, there was a demand for a task management feature built right into Evernote.

Today, Evernote is releasing updates to its Mac and iOS clients to introduce a major new feature: native reminders. I have been testing the new versions of the app, and I believe reminders are a good addition that fit well with Evernote’s focus on remembering everything through a unified, polished interface. Read more