This morning when I tried adding a new note to Evernote I was surprised to get a warning message saying that Evernote could not synchronise with my online account.   However, due to good application design this didn’t stop me from creating new notes, it simply meant I’d have to wait until later to get text recognition on images.

On checking the Evernote website it appears that some changes to the web application are being rolled out as visitors are greeted with the following message:

Ssshhh. The elephant fell asleep.

Actually, we’re performing some maintenance.

We’ll be back up and running very soon.

Please be patient and check back in a bit. This page will auto-refresh every 60 seconds.

Also the design is a little different.  Does this mean a mobile java version of Evernote is just about to be released?  Who knows but I’ll be watching and waiting with anticipation.

Evernote has just released an Mac OS X version of the interface to the Evernote application.  I haven’t had a chance to test it yet as I work in a Windows only office but I shall be testing it as soon as I get home.

This must be news hot off the press as they haven’t posted any information about it on their blog yet!

I just noticed today on the Evernote blog (I really need to subscribe to their RSS feed) that they have got an IMAP interface into their system.  This makes it easy to access your notes through any email client that has IMAP support, such as Apple Mail, Windows Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird.  Also, any folders that you have set up in Evernote for filing your notes will show up in your email client.

The settings for the IMAP interface aren’t terribly well advertised but can be found in Getting Start and Help section on the IMAP instructions page.

The guys at Evernote have also added an instruction video on how to use the web clipper in Firefox 2 and IE7.  They’ve bumped it up to the top of the page to make it more obvious but forgot the update the reference to the desktop version in the Good, Better, Best bit, as the desktop download is now below the web clipper not above

The other day I saw an article on TechCrunch about and online application called Evernote.  The promise of Evernote is that it will be an online extension to your memory.  You can copy pictures text and audio from anywhere (web, email, documents, etc.) and save them as notes in Evernote.  Then, when you want to recall a note you can use the search functionality.  Where it goes beyond other note applications is that you can search for text within images! 

At the moment they currently have interfaces for the web, windows desktop, mac desktop [ed: sorry, not yet!] and windows mobile devices (phones).  It is also possible to email notes to Evernote, so you can email images from a non-windows mobile device but they are promising a J2ME application soon.

Why is this so good?  Imagine you’re out to dinner and order a bottle of wine.  You really like it and would like to buy some for at home.  Rather than try to remember the name of it and the year, just whip out your mobile, take a picture of the label, tag it and send it to Evernote.  At some point in the future you can then search Evernote to get the label image back.

At the moment they are only running an invitation only preview so I recommend everyone signs up for an invitation now!  My invitation came through today and I’m already making good use of it.  I can’t wait until they release the J2ME version for Java mobiles, and when Apple finally releases a 3G enabled iPhone I will finally be able to do away with the old grey-matter

Whilst reading an article I was curious about the number of commas and full-stops that the author used - when you become an editor of a newsletter you start to think about things like this.  After hunting around the various utilities on my system I discovered that I didn’t have anything that could easily do this.  So, I did what any self-respecting programmer would do and threw together a quick app to do it for me.

I have made both the source code and pre-compiled binary available for download under a BSD license (share, remix, no endorsement).  It is written in C# and requires the .Net 2.0 framework, if you want to compile the source you will probably require MS Visual Studio (Express should be ok), although it may work with SharpDevelop or Mono.

It is a console application (sorry, no pretty GUI this time) that reads the contents of input.txt (in the same directory as the app), it then counts the occurrences of each character and outputs the results to the console. Simple!

If you make any improvements to the code please leave a comment and/or email the changes to me: gringod [at] gmail [dot] com.