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Back in September Brett Kelly wrote a neat little Python/Applescript tool called Evernote Dated Photo:

When you add an image to Evernote using this app, it will set the “created” date on the note to be the same day the photo was taken.

As originally written, it could only handle adding one photo at a time to your default notebook. Brett put the project up on github, so I forked it and added multiple file/folder support as well as the ability to select which notebook to add the photos to. I learned a bit about AppleScript from working on this and I’m flattered that Brett thought my changes were good enough to merge into the project.

I also made a very low production value screencast to demo how it works:

Check out Brett’s Evernote Essentials book too.

I’ve written about my distaste for FOSS zealotry before, but man when Steve died the big guns came out. In their writing about Steve Jobs’ death and how good it is that we are now rid of his influence, Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond have shown once again that they are just as tyrannical, if not more so, as they accuse Steve of being. Steve never suggested that Linux (I refuse to call it GNU/Linux) users are “wrong”. And he didn’t tell Windows users that they were “evil”.

I used to have respect for Eric Raymond. If it wasn’t for his piece on How to be a Hacker I never would have discovered Python. His The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay convinced Netscape to open-source their browser (although I’ve always felt that was an act of desperation because they were getting their lunch eaten by Internet Explorer, not because of some deep-seated sense that it was “right”).

The holier-than-thou attitude is one reason I chose to put myself into this “prison” as they call it. I wasn’t coerced. I didn’t do it because it was cool. I tried it for myself and found the experience to be vastly superior to any of the Linux distros I had ever tried. It was so much better, in fact, that I “converted” most of my family and some of my friends. The diminished support burden on me was worth it. I can still do everything on the Mac that I was doing on Linux. I can still install and run the software of my choosing. Apple has not taken away any of those freedoms. And those are the ones that actually matter to real people.

When will the free software zealots realize that real people have enough to worry about and don’t really care if they can see the source code or open the box and hack away? People are not programmers.

Most people could not compile a program from source code, just like most people could not construct a chair out of a block of wood. The choice of software freedom is inapplicable if people are incapable of exercising their rights. — Thomas Brand

Most people probably woke up this morning and didn’t notice any change. Their world is the same today as it was yesterday. But I am not most people. My world feels different. A little less vibrant. One of my heroes is gone.

I watched the iPhone 4S presentation on Tuesday night, almost as soon as Apple posted it. As I was watching, I couldn’t help but notice that the camera seemed to be deliberately coming back to one particular seat. It was an empty seat, marked Reserved. Eventually I started thinking of it as Steve’s seat. “That’s where Steve would be sitting if he were well enough to be there,” I told myself. We’ve known for a while this day would come. Death is inevitable. Steve talked a great deal about it in his Stanford Commencement Address back in 2005. But even with all of the lead time we had, all of the preparing we may have done, it still came as a shock when the day finally arrived.

I never met Steve Jobs. I’ve never been to Macworld Expo or WWDC to see a Stevenote in person. I’m sure I’ve never even been within a hundred miles of him. But the products he was instrumental in bringing to market have profoundly changed my life. I found out about his death from a text message on my iPhone 4. I’m typing this post on a MacBook Air.

I have enough self-awareness to know I will never be as relentlessly driven and focused as Steve was. But I hope that every once in a while I hear his voice coming from the seat I have reserved for him in my heart and in my mind.