Discovered Evernote and love it!

It is basically a service that allows you to collect information, links, files, etc in one place, all synchronized to the various devices that Evernote supports;

• Windows/Mac OSX
• iPod
• Blackberry
• Palm Pre
• Web Clipper

The windows client is a dream. Uses SQLite under the hood to maintain a local database of your stuff that is sync’d to Evernote’s servers.  The real beauty here is that all this stuff is available to you anywhere, from your Blackberry, your laptop, even any place you can get to a web browser. And because there’s a copy on Evernote’s servers, you have built-in painless backup you can get to easily to recover your data from a local crash.

Getting stuff into Evernote is easy;

• The web clipper let’s you send entire pages or parts of pages direct to Evernote.
• The Blackberry client let’s you send pictures and sound recordings, as well as locally produced notes direct to Evernote.
• The Windows client supports drag and drop direct into Evernote.
• You get a special Evernote email address that you can use to email anything you want added to your Evernote database.

Once the stuff is there, you can easily organize it with tags and search it with Evernote’s powerful search capabilities. I love this app,  I’m not all that organized, so having a place to just dump things and later be able to easily search and locate what I am looking for is a delight.

Highly recommended.

Well, the wife finally got angry enough with her Treo that she took it out on the local Verizon store’s manager. Needless to say, he got an earfull about her unhappiness with the reliability of the Treo. Enough so that he let her switch to the Blackberry Curve, which left me with the onerous task of converting her over.

This is the second time I’ve gone this route, and this time I took some notes since it is frustrating to get it to work.

1. The install disk that comes with the Curve from Verizon has Blackberry Desktop 4.3 on it. This version won’t handle the conversion, so a trip to the Blackberry site for Version 4.5 was in order.
2. The Treo desktop software also won’t work. A downgrade to PalmOne’s Version 4.14e is needed on the Treo side. Interestingly, I had to first install 4.14e, then after the install completed, I had to reinstall it using the repair option (first time thru actually did not leave a palm.exe file installed, no idea why, but that’s a major oversight).
3. Obviously, Outlook is required on the PC involved.
4. Before beginning the conversion, open the Palm desktop software and for each of Calendar, Todos, Address Book, and Memopad, use the Tools -> Options -> Tools -> Check and Repair Corruption options to make sure the Palm datafile is corruption free.
5. Use the Blackberry device switch option to switch from the Treo to the Blackberry. If you have the correct versions as noted above, the option to convert from a Palm Treo will not be greyed out. If it is, re-check your software versions.

Hope this helps some other poor sole from frustration!

A visitor to this site recently asked for advice on importing her Palm Calendar into her Google Calendar. As anyone who has ever owned a Palm knows, the desktop software does not support exporting the calendar in anything except Palm’s native datebook archive file format (dba). The failure of Palm to add a simple CSV export to the calendar is amazing, it has been a longstanding request for years and years now.

The advice I gave the visitor was;

1. Set up a Yahoo account (free, easy to sign up if you don’t already have one), and create a Yahoo Calendar.
2. From the Palm Desktop, File -> Export the calendar using the datebook archive format.
3. In the Yahoo Calendar’s Options, select the Import/Export option listed under Management.
4. Use the “Import from Palm Desktop” section to browse to your saved archive file and import it to the calendar.
5. Once it is imported, use the “Export to Outlook” option to create a CSV file that you can save to your desktop and use in Google Calendar to import the Palm Calendar.

It’s a lot of steps, but it mostly works. You may see problems with recurring events not coming over correctly, but by and large most of your calendar entries will make it.

If other visitors out there have a better solution for this common request, please do share it with us. Many folks will appreciate it!

Well, the Verizon contract was up last month so I went cell phone shopping. The wife has a Palm Treo, as does my daughter, and both are extremely happy with them. I strongly considered the Treo, but couldn’t bring myself to go with it due to the lack of full support for handsfree bluetooth voice dialing. With California’s recent handsfree law, I wanted a solution that was 100% handsfree.

Enter the Blackberry. The Curve is a really nice device. No too big and not too small, great screen, great sound and 100% handsfree bluetooth dialing. The only downside I could find was having to give up the Palm Desktop and eWallet.

I really really dislike Outlook. The simplicity of Palm’s Desktop software along with Thunderbird as a mail client have been working well for me for many years now. Changing would be painful.

I also find eWallet an indispensable tool that I can’t do without. Good news there is that IliumSoft is working on a Blackberry version of eWallet that they promise to release real soon now.

After much introspection and second guessing myself, I finally went ahead with the Blackberry Curve. Spent a weekend of pain jumping through hoops to get the data off the Palm moved to Outlook so it would sync with the new Blackberry (that is a story in itself, not easy but doable).

Now that I’m there, I’m delighted. RIM did a great job on the Curve, the setup was a snap and the Desktop Manager seems to work well. Other than the pain of working with Outlook, I couldn’t be happier.

Now, if IliumSoft would just release eWallet….

The original Not So FAQs for the Palm can be located here. They contain useful information related to the various PDA’s based on the PalmOS.

• Palm Pilot
• Palm
• Handspring Visor
• Tungsten
• Zire
• Treo

The file formats for the Palm Desktop files below can be found here .

• datebook.dat and datebook.dba
• memopad.dat and memopad.mpa
• address.dat and address.aba
• todo.dat and todo.tda
• users.dat

These formats apply to the Windows version of the PalmOS Desktop software, not to the native versions of these files.

Programming information on how to go about reading the Palm Desktop files can be found here. There are several user submitted code examples in various languages, such as Perl, Java, Python and Visual Basic.

Favorite Palm Freeware

Handyshopper is one of our
favorite applications. It’s by Christopher Antos and we consider it a must have tool for your Palm.

Showtimes is an awesome piece of software that uses
Yahoo’s movie listings to update your Palm with a complete list of local movies,
theaters and show times.

BigClock helps keep track of timezones
and alarms for us.

Tipsy helps calculate those
pesky tips at restaurants.

Spade Lovers Spades this little
app has consumed hours and hours of our time. Both Alice and I love
it!

Must Have Palm Utilities

BackupBuddy should be a required
purchase for every Palm owner. It’s worth every penny and more!

dbScan
by Pimlico makers of Datebk3 checks your datebook for data integrity
and cleans up duplicate shortcuts that can be caused by a bug in the
PalmOS.

Z’Catalog gives
you access to the file system on your Palm.

Software We Liked so Much we Registered It

FlashPro get almost 1 meg
additional memory from your Palm III

Action Names was our
final choice for a better view of our calendar and todo’s. We
must admit though, Datebk3 was our second choice and the decision
was very very difficult. You should try both and decide for yourself.

SmartDoc was our final choice
on Doc readers. Cspotrun, which is freeware, would have won but we
really wanted the ability to edit the docs on the Palm.

HanDBase serves all of our
database needs. Very well done and easy to use.

Pilot MiniCalc ended up
being our choice for a spreadsheet program. It works well with Excel
and meets our modest needs.