Curious Creature

I’ve been using Evernote for awhile now.  The Windows client is pretty good.  The editor supports ordered/unordered lists, font types, color, etc.   All of the expected things in a rich text editor are there.

At the same time the Mac client is really awful.   The latest update has some new icons, etc. but they haven’t improved the editor functionality.  There is no ability to create lists as in the Windows client.  Given that the Mac development environment, which comes with the OS, has the source code to the TextEdit application I’m not sure why the Evernote folks can’t duplicate that functionality in their client.

To make things worse the Web client now has more editor functionality than the Mac client.   Guys, if you’re not going to at least have parity between the clients why are you bothering with the Mac client at all?

Update:  OK.  So apparently the Mac client does support lists….just not directly.  I found out that creating a note with a list in the web client results in the list being maintained in the Mac client.  When you add more items to the list numbers/bullets (I assume…I didn’t try bullets but numbers do work) increment automatically (and decrement if you remove items).   There just is no way to create these directly in the Mac client as of yet.  Very weird.

Update 2:  Ok.  According to this forum posting the Evernote folks are going to address this in the next Mac client release.  Great to read this as it might mean not having to run Windows in VMWare Fusion to get the better desktop client.

I’ve been mucking around with adding my Remember the Milk lists as iCal event feeds to my Google Calendar account.  The idea of having tasks with due dates show up like “local” GCal events is great but it doesn’t work as I’d hoped.

Apparently I’m not the only one noticing this either based on this post on the GCal Google group.  That post notes that it takes hours for the feed to refresh and that there is no way to manually refresh it (you can in with a  30boxes.com calendar but that one leaves a lot to be desired).  Quite frankly it’s ridiculous that it takes hours.  At that point I can’t be sure that anything I entered actually shows up in GCal.   It would appear this behavior just isn’t an RTM issue as I see the same behavior with a feed from iWantSandy.com.

RTM does have two other options available, one for GCal, and if you’re using Firefox, one for GMail.  The GMail Firefox plugin is quite nice but I don’t want my tasks there…I want them in my calendar.  The option for GCal itself is OK but I’m picky and don’t want to have to click that checkmark to see what I have for the day.

I suppose that GCal is like so many other pieces of software, it gets you most of the way there but then dumps you off about a mile away from your intended destination.  This is a real disappointment. I know GCal is free but adding a manual refresh link for the external feeds can’t be that difficult.  The Google Group link above notes that “they’re looking into it”.  I hope it happens sometime soon.

Not surprisingly this works flawlessly on iCal on the Mac.  I can even see tasks with no due date set in the To-Do list part of iCal.   But I can’t use my Mac at work anymore where I really need to see these lists

Apple promised quite a bit with the 2.1 release of the iPhone and quite frankly, as a very new user of the phone, I was hoping it was going to fix all of the issues I was having with my phone.  I’m still withing the 30 day period of being able to return it to AT&T and I’ve been pretty tempted, as cool as the phone is, to return it because it can be so damn aggravating at the same time.

I’ve had lots of application crashes (Apple-provided applications and stuff from the app store on iTunes).  I’ve had awful 3G reception.  I’ve had really awful backup times for the phone.  I can’t really complain about the battery as it has been what I’ve expected.  Could it be better? Of course but since I can keep the phone plugged in most of the day at work it really isn’t an issue for me.

In walks the 2.1 OS update and I have to say that my world has changed.  Backup times are very quick.  They were brutally slow before.  3G reception has been much improved from what I can tell in the short test I’ve been able to use it where it was an issue before (lots of apparently dead spots on my train ride into work….its always worked well at home though).  I haven’t experienced as many application crashes either.  Hoping that continues
I have to say I’ve gotta give a thumbs-up to this update.  Its been a breath of fresh air in a very troubled, yet short, relationship I’ve had with the iPhone.  Who knows…it may just rescue the phone from being banished at my house

I wanted to follow-up quickly on my other posts about the issues I was experiencing with iTunes 8 and my iPhone on Windows Vista.  The latest download  of iTunes which is still labeled 8.0.0.35, included a rolled-back driver, usbaapl.sys (1.29.0.0) which was from the 7.7 release of iTunes, seems to have fixed the problems I was having (read: couldn’t use the software with my iPhone).

More information about this whole thing from Ed Bott here.

This is ridiculous.   Did Apple not do any testing on this product before releasing it into the wild?  Other websites are also reporting issues with iTunes 8 on Vista but thankfully I haven’t been having blue screens of death on my setup.

Here is the solution Apple is providing at the moment.  Note the requirement to download a new installer.

Hoping this is going to fix the many problems I had again tonight…..

Boy am I regretting installing iTunes 8 on my Vista machine. I also updated it on my MacBook Pro and I really hope that the Mac version isn’t such a mess.

How does it suck? Let me count (briefly) the ways:

1. It appears slower in general than iTunes 7
2. UI updating is just awful. very slow.
3. Connecting my iPhone results in a “never-ending” sync. I say never ending because the sync icon next to the phone on the left side of the UI never goes away but the rest of the UI indicates the sync is complete. If I hit the eject icon for the phone iTunes complains a sync is still in progress.
4. Oh, and it deleted some applications it was supposed to update.

I really, really hope they have a fast update to this because its a complete flop. Doesn’t make me too hot to install OS 2.1 on the iPhone either
Related Posts:

• iTunes 8 on Windows Vista - yes there are problems
• iTunes 8 - Problems Solved With Latest Download
• iPhone OS 2.1 Update Working As I’d Hoped

John Gruber writes that there is a fix for the insanely-slow sync of the iPhone with iTunes.  Unfortunately it only works on the  Mac
I actually tried this today before reading the article because I was getting slow syncs between the iPhone and my MacBook Pro.  I thought maybe the hub I had the phone plugged in to was USB 1.1-only (don’t remember that being the case but stranger things have happened) so I moved the USB cable directly to one of the ports on the MBP and the sync speed was far faster than via the USB hub.  I’m not sure why this would be aside from maybe the hub running at USB 1.1 speeds.

On my Windows machine at home where I have the same problem the same fix didn’t work.  Moving the cable directly to the PC didn’t result in a faster sync (and yes I have to sync with both).  I know for a fact that the USB hub on the PC is 2.0 so maybe thats the reason.