Evernote, Everpad, and Ubuntu

With Canonical abandoning Tomboy and Tomboy synchronization through Ubuntu One, I have been forced to seek out a different notes solution.  Evernote is very popular, is available for a wide variety of environments (Windows, Mac, Android, &c), and has been mostly free for quite some time.

I’m willing to give it a shot to see how it goes.  I have it running on my work Windows machine and my work Mac.  I have also installed it on my Android tablet.  Finally I installed it on my old Ubuntu 10.04 machine (under WINE) in order to transfer all of my Tomboy notes into Evernote.

In newer versions of Ubuntu you will have access to Everpad.  This is an open source application which takes advantage of the Evernote API (since Evernote has thus far failed to create a native Linux version of their application).

Personally I find Everpad to be a little clunky and it seems to inappropriately fiddle with formatting when synchronizing between instances.  Nonetheless, let’s go over installation and initial set up so you can try it for yourself.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nvbn-rm/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install everpad

You will be required to invisibly enter your password.

Once you have it installed, it’s not very obvious how to get started.

Right-Click Menu
Right-Click Menu

Yep, right-click on the Everpad icon and choose Settings and Management.  This will open the Settings and Management dialog.

Settings and Management
Settings and Management

Now you will need to log into your Evernote account (if you don’t have one, go to their Web site and create one).  Click the Authorise button.

Authorize
Authorize

Log in using your Evernote credentials.

That’s pretty much it.  If you already have notes it will (on schedule) synchronize your notes.  If you’d like to manually synchronize your notes (and again this is not obvious), that’s also pretty easy.

Manual Synchronization
Manual Synchronization

If you click where is tells you about your last synchronization, it will spawn a manual synchronization.  Easy but not obvious.

Again, it tended to goof up my formatting as I moved from Everpad to other instances of Evernote.  As such I am giving Evernote a run under WINE to see how that performs.

So far it seems fine.  If you’d like to try Evernote under WINE, install WINE through the Ubuntu Software Center (or however you’d like) and download the Windows version of Evernote.

Have fun with that.  I’ll report back if I have any issues worth mentioning.

Update:

After having run Evernote under WINE for some time now I can say I see no issue worth mentioning.  You may have some slight trouble with getting the correct icon in the dock (it tends to use the WINE icon instead).  Not a show stopper, obviously.

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