seeking iphone note syncing

[wagnerone]

Summary: Is there a reliable way with EagleFiler to maintain a subset of notes on the iPhone and edit them in both places?


Long time Yojimbo user kind of depressed about their seemingly leaving the product for dead.

I don't have much to complain about regarding Yojimbo really, but it's nice to have feature development over time in a product one uses as frequently as I use Yojimbo.

EagleFiler looks damn nice and I'm excited it was able to import all my 1000+ Yojimbo objects with just a keyclick and retain all the metadata. That kicks ass.

To my point... I'm on the neverending quest to sync my iPhone notes with my my desktop data management tool. Using Fliq Notes, I was happily syncing (though at times it was flakey) a subset of my Yojimbo notes to Fliq Notes on my iPhone. I could edit them in both places. Perfect!

Now I find myself in a situation where edits I make on the iPhone in Fliq Notes are migrated to Yojimbo on sync, but not the other way around. I futzed with it for a while, but my annoyance and time wasted seemed to indicate it's time to look for something new.

Is there a reliable way with EagleFiler to maintain a subset of notes on the iPhone and edit them in both places?

Thanks,
Mike

[Michael Tsai]

Summary: Is there a reliable way with EagleFiler to maintain a subset of notes on the iPhone and edit them in both places?

Quickword can let you store or access an EagleFiler library on the iPhone. You can either store your library on an iDisk or store it directly on the iPhone and access it from the Mac via WebDAV (this is rather slow, in my experience). Quickword supports editing plain text and Word documents.

Normal rules apply as far as making changes to the library from outside of EagleFiler. In brief, you should create/move/rename the files only from within EagleFiler, but you can view and edit them using Quickword. You can also create new files in the To Import folder using Quickword. If you store the library on an iDisk, be sure to sync when the library isn't open in EagleFiler.

There may be other applications that can do this type of thing. Searching through the App Store is pretty overwhelming! If you only need to read the files (not edit them) there are lots of options.

[wagnerone]

Never hopped back on to thank you for your suggestions, Michael. Thanks.

I thought I'd post what I found to work for me in terms of synching EF documents to my iPhone for viewing and editing.

On the iPhone I am using 2 pieces of software to a) view non-editable documents and b) view and edit text based documents stored in EF.

I am using Dropbox to store documents I don't intend to edit on the iPhone (though I am patiently awaiting the official Dropbox app for the iPhone (apparently in Apple's approval queue for a good while now)) and SyncBook for documents I want to be able to edit in both EF and on the iPhone.

For Dropbox, I moved my "Dropbox" documents folder into the EF library and then updated the Dropbox prefs to reflect the new location. I add and remove files to my Dropbox through the EF interface and all is good with auto-syncing, etc.

Notes editing/synching in both EF and on the iPhone is a little bit less intuitive and required some more fiddling and experimentation. This solution is far from perfect.

I chose SyncBook for the iPhone for textual note taking/editing after researching a bunch of alternatives. The major drawback to SyncBook is that it is text only... no rtf. So, when creating notes to sync with it in EF, they have to be plain text or SyncBook's Mac synching app won't even acknowledge them.

The setup goes as follows... I launched and let SyncBook on the Mac create its "NotesSync" folder where it wanted (~/Library/Application Support/NotesSync). I then quit SyncBook and imported its folder into EF. Next I created a symlink from the newly imported "NotesSync" folder to the old, expected location (~/Library/Application Support/).

The rules I am currently following for NotesSync/EF integration are:

1) SyncBook Mac has to be relaunched after each file addition/removal to/from its EF based "NotesSync" folder in order for it to recognize the change

2) if you delete a note in iPhone SyncBook, delete the corresponding note from EF before syncing SyncBook iPhone with SyncBook Mac

3) create all new notes in EF. it won't see newly created notes made within SyncBook Mac or synched in from SyncBook iPhone. (maybe there is a way for EF to do a force refresh of a given folder, but I haven't explored that yet -- Michael?)

4) I am avoiding editing a note in both places between synchs as I assume that will cause havoc :)

So, SyncBook Mac is merely a way to sync EF based SyncBook plain text files to SyncBook iPhone. I don't use it for any editing, adding/deleting of notes, etc.

If anyone knows of a different iPhone app which allows RTF/Word/etc. editing that would replace my SyncBook app choice in this method of synching, please let me know.

Mike

[Michael Tsai]

I thought I'd post what I found to work for me in terms of synching EF documents to my iPhone for viewing and editing.

Thanks for the follow-up. I’ll have to check out SyncBook. No, EagleFiler currently does not have a “refresh” command.

[Michael Tsai]

3) create all new notes in EF. it won't see newly created notes made within SyncBook Mac or synched in from SyncBook iPhone. (maybe there is a way for EF to do a force refresh of a given folder, but I haven't explored that yet -- Michael?)

EagleFiler 1.5 adds a Scan for New Files feature that would be useful here.