On Evernote

Some kind soul was kind enough to give me an invite to Evernote. The features seem cool, such as:

• A Note management program for Windows and Mac.
• A somewhat limited Web version
• The Windows client doesn’t require Administrator rights, so I can install it at work!
• You can send photos from your cell phone camera and send it to Evernote.
• Evernote can search text even in the photos!

Despite those cool features, I was not very impressed with it. Here’s why:

• The Mac client is Leopard-only. I’m still on Tiger and have no immediate plans to move to Leopard. Bad, bad Evernote.
• The Windows version couldn’t get through the office firewall.
• I sent a few test pics to Evernote, but they never showed up.

So I left Evernote alone, thinking that it wasn’t up to the hype.

Then, yesterday, I was looking at my Phone Contacts backup on the web (yes, we love you Verizon!) and I noted that the email address I had on file for Evernote was wrong. I had “euernote.com” instead of “evernote.com”. I looked at my phone again, and it seemed to have “evernote.com” as the email address. So I entered it again, and noted that the “u” and the “v” on my cell phone look exactly alike! Yikes! So I make sure that it said “evernote.com” this time. And then I resent a picture that I took once. In seconds, seconds that picture showed up in the Web client.

Now we’re talkin’!

I took some time today to investigate the Windows client. A search on their forums seemed to indicate that others have had this problem too but Evernote Support swore up and down that it used the same proxy settings at IE. I laughed, but thought I should try to install the latest Windows client and see what happened. I got strange errors on the first sync, so I tried it again — and it worked. Like a charm.

So then I had an image with text in it in my “thick” Evernote client, so I could try the text search in the image. And, guess what? It works nicely.

Therefore, in 24 hours I went from a “it’s a little better than hype-ware” to “Wow — it’s really cool!” But it would be cooler with a Tiger client.

Now, as a finish — I have 7 invites to Evernote. The first seven people who email me or leave a comment get them. If you don’t think I have your email address, I’ll need that too. This should be an interesting exercise, since only about three people regularly read this blog.

When “Convention over Configuration” goes wrong

Exhibit A:

Passenger solves this problem by implementing user switching. A Rails application is started as the owner of the file config/environment.rb. So if /home/webapps/foo/config/environment.rb is owned by joe, then Passenger will launch the corresponding Rails application as joe as well.

It took two experienced programmers an hour and a half to figure this out. I mean, what other application runs as the user of a configuration file? It’s normal (and sensible) to run as the owner of the executable or even as the user that executes the startup but not at the user of a configuration file. If you want to do something different, mark it in big, bold letters, not some little section tucked away in your docs.

</rant>

Another Emacs/Textmate Comparison

While Blaine starting to attend the Church of Emacs I’m sorta having a crisis of the faith. I’ve been working on a Rails project lately and have gotten re-acquainted with Textmate again. I remembered why I liked it so much — it’s project mode is perfect for the many, many files of Rails. And it’s HTML mode is really quite spectacular.

But then something happened. I needed to put about 20 records into a page. So I needed to take a list from the db migration that looks like:

       t.string  :name

       t.string  :label

       t.text  :value...

And turn them into:

<%if object.name%><%=object.name%>

<%end%><%if object.label%>

<%=object.label%><%end%>

Ugh. That’s a lot of rote, dumb, error-prone typing. But wait! Emacs has keyboard macros! I quit Textmate, started Emacs and in five minutes I was done.

So which is better? I hope for a combination of them– Emacs with some of Textdrive’s nifty completions/templates. I can do a lot of that in Emacs but it’s error-prone and won’t necessarily work right all the time. Hrmm . . .

GeoToad

I discovered GeoToad this weekend.  I haven’t messed with too much, but I already like it.

It’s written in Ruby, so it will run everywhere natively (i.e without Cygwin or a Unix environment).  I’ve been having problems with the geo-* tools that I have raved about before.  They assume that you are using GNU tools and the  BSD  utils  that come with OSX behave differently  than their GNU counterparts — different command line options, etc.  So  I needed something else.  GeoToad will fit the  bill.

I don’t use the full-screen interface — that’s for wimps. Instead I’ve been using the command-line interface.  Both of them do the same thing.  One of the great things about GeoToad is that it caches it’s results.  This prevents you from hitting Gecaching.com over and over again.  They get picky about that.  GeoToad also exports GPX files with the the groundspeak namespace.  Doing that with the geo tools took a lot of time, but GoeToad does with by default, and with ease.

I’m looking forward to hooking GeoToad up with GPSBabel and having a good ol’  time with hacking with geocaching data.

No Rails “A-Ha” moment yet

I took some time tonight and played with some Rails tutorials and yet have had a “A-Ha!” moment. You know, the moment when you say, “Yeah, this is really cool! I can’t wait to use it!” I mean, parts of it are cool, like writing one line of code and you have a listing of your database. But, for some reason, I’m not totally 100% sold yet. Maybe there is too much hype. Maybe the applications are too simplistic. I learned best by doing, so looking at the screencasts won’t help me any.

So I know that there are some Rails people who read this. What was your “A-Ha” moment? What tutorials do you recommend? In the meantime, I have an idea for my own application. Maybe that will help me get through the fog.