macolyte.net

I’ve always thought Evernote would make for a workable place to keep something like a daily log, but I could never find a friction free workflow to make it happen. However, I was recently reminded that LaunchBar is more than just an application launcher and can execute actions, which can be AppleScripts. Since I know a little AppleScript, I wrote one that would basically solve this problem:  

Now all I have to do is invoke LaunchBar, hit space the switch to text entry mode, and type my text. A new note is created in the Log notebook with the current date as the title. If a note with that title already exists, the new text is appended to it. Each “entry” is prepended with a timestamp and the pipe character like this: 12:34:56 |. It also pops up a nice friendly message if, for some reason, there are two notes with the same name in the Log notebook.

If you choose to use this, and the format I chose doesn’t appeal to you, or you want to use a different notebook, it should be fairly straightforward to see where those things can be changed in the script. Of course after writing this I found another daily diary script that I’m sure is much better written than mine, so you can check that out as well if this sort of thing interests you.

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, but sadly I can only use it on my Mac (and even then only until Apple kills off AppleScript support). It would be nice if I could use it on my iPhone/iPad and especially useful on the shitty PC they make me use at work. It’s not impossible to do on either platform, just not quite as smooth. If Evernote on iOS supported TextExpander Touch it would be helpful, but it doesn’t. Fastever does support TextExpander and could be used for creating the initial note for a given day, but I don’t think you can append to notes once they’ve been created. At work, I’m experimenting with Breevy and the PC client and it’s working ok so far. But these are still workarounds; no amount of text expansion will change the fact that I still have to launch the application instead of just hitting a quick keyboard shortcut. That friction could make all the difference between actually using it regularly and not.