Trouble with Evernote

Posted in Computer Science on June 17th, 2013 by michael

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I love Evernote. It’s the perfect cross-platform organizer. It sucks in everything I’ve given it, allows me to index my data, has great search capability, and works on everything electronic I own. Granted, all I really use it for is note taking, but I’m gradually expanding. For example, I think I’ll add all my business receipts in the near future. That will make them much more easily searchable and allow me to just take photos and upload them; even the text in the photos will be searchable.

But a very dark cloud just loomed over my Evernote-loving horizon.

I still use my trusty old first-gen iPad. It’s gotten a bit clunky and crashy in some instances – especially with the Safari and Chrome web browsers and even more with Feedly’s built-in browser. But it’s still otherwise pretty stable and usable. In fact, I’m using the greatly-improved WordPress app to write this post and everything is working fine.

That’s why I was absolutely dismayed this morning when Evernote for iPad failed in the most spectacular way possible. I was editing a note containing this website’s editorial calendar (time to step up my game) and needed to copy and paste a couple of lines. I did so and the entire note just . . . disappeared. Everything but the first line. Hit the Undo button and . . . nothing changed. My note was gone. The iOS app doesn’t seem to have access to older versions of notes, so I couldn’t restore. In fact, I’m not a premium user, so I can’t restore anyway. Besides, the premium restore feature doesn’t save versions anyway. Just an occasional backup. Granted, that’s better than nothing, which is what I currently have.

Luckily, I was able to quickly solve the problem. The place we’re currently staying has horribly slow wifi, so I quickly closed the app on my iPad before it had a chance to sync, opened the app on my iPhone, copied the entire text of the note, and emailed it to myself. When I reopened the app on the iPad, the note synced and deleted all the text from the server. I copied and pasted it back in from the email and deleted the duplicated first line, and I’m back in business.

In the link quoted above, the original poster was also able to recover his text by digging around on the laptop he was using, but I don’t think that’s possible on my iPad. Well, maybe I could’ve synced the iPad with my computer and then dug around in the copied data. I don’t know if that would work and I’m pretty sure it would be frustrating, so I’m thanking my lucky stars for slow Internet connections.

Have you found a better way to preserve deleted data? More importantly, has your iOS-based version of Evernote disappeared your data? That’s a problem that’s so fundamental – if I can’t trust it not to delete critical data at random – I’m now having serious second thoughts about using it at all. How about you?

This image was originally posted to Flickr by Mister-E at http://flickr.com/photos/45189308@N00/2247141772. It was reviewed on 10 November 2012 by theFlickreviewR robot and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.

Thanks for the suggestions

Posted in Morse Trainer on June 1st, 2013 by michael

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Many thanks to the thousands of people who have downloaded the Morse Trainer app, and especially for the suggestions I’ve received to improve it.  I had planned to release another update by now, but my wife’s extended illness meant that I needed to concentrate on supporting her for a few months.  She’s slowly returning to health now, so I’m back to work.  Watch for an update with many of your suggestions incorporated in the near future.

Photo by Andy Mabbett and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.