Evernote

I’ve decided to abandon my plain text note-taking system in favor of Evernote. nvALT and Byword, Elements and PlainText, these are all great applications and I’ve gotten a lot of use out of them over the years, but there was one use case that they weren’t addressing for me: sometimes it’s helpful to have images, or some other kind of non-textual data, accompany a note. The plain text editors just don’t do that (by design and rightfully so). I’ve used Evernote off and on to clip interesting things from the Internet and I think it would be easier for me if everything was in one place instead of scattered across multiple applications.

After deciding to take the plunge I whipped up an AppleScript to import all of my existing text notes into Evernote:  

I saved it as an application, selected all the text files and dropped them onto it. A few minutes later they were all in Evernote, with the note’s creation date set to the original file’s creation date.    It’s also trivially easy to turn the script into an OS X Service, so if you find yourself wanting to import random files from the Finder into Evernote you can. To do that: 

  1. Open Automator and create a new Service. 
  2. Set the Service receives selected dropdowns to files or folders in Finder.app.
  3. Find the Run AppleScript action in the left hand pane and drag it over to the right.
  4. Copy the repeat block above and paste it into the on run block in Automator.
  5. Change the file_list variable to input.
  6. Save it with a sensible name like Import File to Evernote.
  7. There is no step 7.

You could also use an application called ThisService, which takes an AppleScript and turns it into a Service, but I’ve personally never used it and it hasn’t been updated since 2008. I don’t see why it wouldn’t still work though.

I’ve got a few posts about some other useful things I’m doing with Evernote in the pipeline and will share them in the near future. So stay tuned. 

evernote
applescript