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, iPad
• 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!

NOTE: Visitor KimM commented below that http://www.kmoser.com/palm2csv/ is now available as a free online tool to directly convert your Palm Calendar to csv format. Thanks KimM!