Of Evernote and Androids

I’m going to stop blogging about Evernote soon

…but I’d like to just share my latest findings and opinions in case this will help you to decide whether or not to take the plunge.

For the most part, I am still pretty confident that Evernote will become firmly fixed in my routines as my main admin and organisational tool. Of course, the more time, effort, and data you commit to these things the harder it is to back out later. I think I’m approaching that point of no return.

I currently have two big concerns about whether Evernote is up to the job:

1) Security

A big concern is the ongoing fuss (and fear, outrage, shrugging of shoulders, boredom, acceptance etc) about the NSA and it’s Prism program – sucking in the minutiae of everyone’s lives by stealing all our online data. Like all online companies, Evernote will reveal your data to the US authorities if compelled to do so by a Court Order. Whether or not the NSA already has Evernote data is anyone’s guess. But what about the portions of encrypted text in an Evernote data file? Will the encryption keep the US government out? No chance whatever. Evernote uses an ancient method of encryption called 64-bit RC2. Asking the US authorities to crack data protected by this method is a bit like asking Marvin to open doors ( “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to open a door” – Marvin the Depressed Android, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

Also on the subject of data security, it’s possible to prevent the casual snooper from getting into your Evernote data by protecting it with a password, but I understand that the data file kept on your hard drive is, in fact, unencrypted. A quick test of this was thwarted by Windows telling me that I couldn’t open the file because it was in use (which it shouldn’t have been as Evernote was closed). I think it’s prudent to assume that the data isn’t secure.

2) Data File Sizes

Those nice people at T-mobile gave me a new smartphone last week. It’s a rather nice Sony Xperia SP. I wasn’t sure why they had given it to me as we’d already agreed the details of my renewed contract. It dawned on me after I’d received it – it’s got 4G capability. I started getting text messages from them suggesting that I might like to upgrade my (freshly renewed) contract. I don’t like. Can’t see the point at the moment.

Anyway, it’s an Android phone (nothing whatever to do with Marvin: “Android” is the operating system, like “IOS version 6” is the current operating system on an iPhone). It’s had good reviews and I thought it a good idea to bring myself up to speed with Android on mobiles, so I’ve been playing with it. I’m just getting to the tipping point where I might put my “proper” SIM into it. However, there’s a problem. The phone only has about 5gb of useable internal storage. That’s fine, normally, as you can fit a micro SD card of up to 32gb capacity. The problem is that Evernote does not allow the phone to move its data onto the SD card. It has to sit inside the internal 5gb. Well, my Evernote data is already 0.7gb and I’ve only been using it for a couple of months. There’s just a chance of there being a silly but big problem ahead when the data gets too big (and there will undoubtedly be other demands on that limited internal 5gb).

Nevertheless, I think I probably will make the move over to the Xperia as it’s very fast (especially with Evernote), has a bigger screen than the iPhone 3GS, and is rather nice.

The reason I keep pointing out the potential problems with Evernote as I find them is that I know what a big commitment it is to move over to a new admin system. In fact, I really like Evernote. It’s not perfect by any means but it feels solid and consistent, as well as flexible. Just to counteract some of the seemingly negative comments above, here’s a tip:

Prioritising – one of my notebooks contains a list of “to do’s”. Each item in the “list” is a separate “note”. It is, of course, useful – and easy – to be able to sort the list into different orders, but Evernote does not have an inbuilt way of assigning a “priority” to a note, so sorting on this is not readily possible.

The answer is to create a tag for each of the numbers 0-9 (or more if you are even more neurotic about admin and organisation than I am). Then just add the relevant tag to the item (this doesn’t, of course, affect any other tags already assigned to the note). Then, just sort the list of items into tag order (see illustration). Since Evernote sorts each note’s tags alphabetically it means that the number tag comes to the left of the list and the entire list will be sorted on “priority”.

I wonder if Marvin could have thought of that.

(Last updated 07/12/2023)