Preview

The buzz around SimpleNote has been amazing. People are developing ways to sync the minimalistic notes app for iPhone with just about everything. I’ve seen work being done with Evernote, DevonThink, Notational Velocity, and most importantly in my eyes, Yojimbo.

Shortly after Dropbox released their iPhone app, this gem of a blog post was written explaining how to sync photos from your iPhone to Yojimbo using Dropbox. Excellent! But I want more than just photos.

Since BareBones Software have decided that they don’t want to give any real information about a Yojimbo iPhone app, we have to resort to hacks and work arounds to keep our data N’Sync in sync.

Solution

Great, so I can sync my photos but I still have some notes on my iPhone that I want to throw at Yojimbo. While poking around on the ‘Yojimbo Talk’ Google group, I stumbled upon this thread. I read the title, “Simplenote and Yojimbo sync app, – alpha testers?” and perked up. This was what I wanted. After reading through the thread I thought, “Well, why not?” I backed up Yojimbo and my SimpleNote notes and installed this little app. Install complete. I ran the alpha software and it popped up asking for my SimpleNote email address and password. Ok, fine, take my password, have access to my grocery list and my school assignments, whatever.

3 seconds later my notes popped up in a new Yojimbo folder called SimpleNote. There they are, perfectly synced with Yojimbo. Now, in order to sync you do have to run the application, this is a bit of a pain. So you can deal with it or you can make it simpler. I chose simpler. I jumped into Quicksilver and set up a trigger to run ‘SimpleNote Yojimbo Sync’ (what a mouth full). The trigger I chose is CTRL + Y. When pushing this shortcut the app runs and pops up asking me if I want to run a script, hit return, and sync.

This is alpha software and I had a few issues with notes so there are little issues with things not working perfectly but I’m confident this will serve as a solution. My main issues are with deleting notes both in Yojimbo and in SimpleNote on iPhone and then having them reappear during the next sync.

A Litte Extra

If you aren’t using Yojimbo but find it annoying to use a web-interface to get to your SimpleNote notes? Have a look at this post that outlines a way to sync notes with a minimal app called Notational Velocity. I would not recommend this technique for just anyone – although, the directions are laid out quite clearly.

A while back I posted a requested feature that I wanted pertaining to voicemail; the ability to set somewhat of an away message so that calls could be fielded with a response that was relevant to the time of day or a current circumstance. Well, I have another little something that would make life much easier on the iPhone.

Problem

First of all, let’s walk through an example. Let’s say you are playing a game, watching a movie, or just browsing the Twitter on you iPhone. Then, you get a text, “How about dinner at 7?” dinner at 7 is perfect for you so you hit reply, are taken to Messages and type your response, “Great, I’ll be there.” Now, in 3.0 after sending the message, the app you were in relaunches which is nice, but let’s say you were in the middle of a race and have to restart or you had been a few hours deep into tweets from the day and now have to find your spot again. Pain!

Maybe this is the fault of the applications? Maybe they should be designed to save your place when you receive a call or text (some do, not enough). Or maybe, this is limited due to push notification and background process. But let’s just look at a potential solution…

Solution

Here’s what I want – When the alert pops up to inform you of a new text message, there should either be another option in addition to ‘Close’ and ‘Reply’ or ‘Reply’ should invoke an expanded/drop down window (from the little blue notification box) with room for a response. Hit send and you are right back to where you were.

This would save me so much trouble and hassle and would make leaving what I am currently in the process of doing, unnecessary. I could simply respond and go on as I was.

Simply go and download an app called “Spell Numbers”(free), enter the number…

91929394.59

Go into Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboard > Japanese. Now you shoold see 3 options; Emoji, QWERTY, and Kana. Enable Emoji and you shoold be able to use Emoji icons throughout your iPhone applications.

Notes:

Initially, the number was 9876543.21. This may have worked under 2.1 and 2.2 versions of the iPhone software but I had no luck on 3.0.

After enabling the Emoji icons you can uninstall “Spell Numbers.”

Need Screenshots?

Yes, this came out a while ago.

Dropbox

I am incredibly impressed with Dropbox, the web interface is beautiful and simple to use; much like things on the desktop. You simple drop the files you would like to backup into the Dropbox folder. I chose just to use the Dropbox folder as my documents folder – I just stored everything there and then it would sync to the web for a recent backup and access wherever I might need it.

Me

Everything was fine and dandy until I noticed that Apple’s Mobile Me was only $56 (now $59) on Amazon. I had been through a trial of Mobile Me upon it being released and like everyone who used the service in the early days, quickly dismissed it as unreliable and an outrageous failure. I felt certain, however, from things I had heard and no recent uproars about the service, that things had been resolved.

Now I was in an interesting position; I would end up paying $120 over a year for 50 GB of online storage. On the other hand, I could pay $56 for 20 GB of online storage, syncing with my iPhone, ‘web-hosting’, ‘Back to my Mac’, a .me address (which comes in handy with GMail issues lately), and all the other extras provided by Mobile Me.

So when compared, I could get more storage space from Dropbox or more features from Mobile Me. Mobile Me seemed to be the right move. I have been up and running now for a couple of weeks and have had no problems. My only complaint would be the initial sync time. It was quite a bit of data but the upload seemed to take ages. Now I have the benefits of having all my data everywhere and up-to-date to the minute.

I am also running the new, pro version of AirSharing which allows you to access your iDisk server on your iPhone.

Summary

With both of these services, I wish it were possible to just select folders and sync them. I want to be able to sync a folder worth of pictures without having to duplicate it and upload it. I want it to stay where it is but still sync. I might be mistaking but I believe this is a feature that Mozy has.

Dropbox is an excellent service and I am very impressed by everything they are doing. Unfortunately, Amazon strikes again with a great deal and Mobile Me’s features were too much.

To view all of my other little tid-bits of work, check out the Projects page.

Stay tuned.

Edit:

So here is what is going to happen – I am going through all my posts and going to do a hard clean-up and eliminate all the ‘crap’ that I wrote at claycarson.net. This way, I start things off with a solid start and some popular posts and things that I find informative.