As impressive as Evernote’s ability to read handwriting (even my awful scrawl, occasionally) is, there was always something about it that didn’t seem quite right. Firstly, that it could recognise writing in situations that nothing else can. Also, it seemed odd that it would convert your writing to text, but not give you access to that text afterwards.

Evernote themselves only ever said your text was made searchable – they never said they’d convert it to text.

I’d suspected for a while what was really going on. I figured it might be working out what the images could match, but not being too specific – knowing that some images could match various different combinations of letters is probably a lot easier than working out which ones they actually match.

I wasn’t sure, though, until I searched on two completely different words, and both highlighted the same bit of text. I’d written ‘Tuesday’, and scanned the page. It matched for a search for ‘Tuesday’ perfectly. It also highlighted the word ‘Tuesday’ when I searched for ‘Testing’.

Evernote has no idea what the text says, but it can still make it searchable. They’ve been very clever, and realised that they don’t need to actually read handwriting in order to make it searchable. They just have to match to anything that might say what you’re searching for, on the grounds that false positives will be fairly rare, and don’t actually matter.

The technology behind it isn’t as amazing as it first seems, but the thinking that went behind the technology is brilliantly simple.

• Evernote

I have something of a love/hate relationship with Evernote. I love what it can do. I love that it can handle so many formats of data, at least when just pasted into a note. I love that there are real native clients on every platform, rather than relying on web-based ‘apps’. I love its ability to read text in pictures. I love the way it makes the 40Mb of monthly data transfer you get for free go such a long way – I haven’t needed to upgrade to the paid service yet, even though I use it quite a bit. I love the fact that there’s even a neat syncing client for my iPod.

I hate the Windows client, though, which feels so clunky compared to the Mac client. I hate the way the iPod (iPhone) client just closes itself regularly when you’re using it. I hate the way it can’t access anything offline unless you’ve manually marked it as a favourite on the iPod.

I stuck with it, though, because it was the only thing that did what it did.

Then, a few days ago, things got worse. The iPod client just stopped syncing, claiming it had an error connecting to Evernote’s servers. The sync managed a few stages, so it obviously could connect to them. I tried logging it out and back in, and still had the same problem.

I decided it had to go.

I worked out what I really needed from a note-keeping app, and went on the hunt.

It turns out that Evernote is still the only thing that does what it does.

I plugged the iPod in, unticked Evernote, and synced. I ticked it again, and synced. I then ran Evernote, and it worked fine. Rather annoyingly, I’ve lost all of my favourites – they seem to be a local setting on the iPod. Still, I have my notes back, and I guess I’ll just have to live with the stability issues.

I do get the impression that Evernote (the company) keep working hard to improve the apps, so I’m hopeful that the Windows version will start to catch up to the excellent Mac version, and the iPod/iPhone version will get more stable with updates and server changes.

I finally came close to my free account limit last month, so I’ll probably be upgrading to a paid account soon.

Latest Update: See the ‘Update’ section at the end – a useful extra feature in DoubleTake makes it even better.

One thing that struck me as a bit odd about the whole process of switching to the Mac was that there didn’t seem to be an obvious choice for photo editing. On Windows, I’d happily used The GIMP, and loved it. I didn’t see any reason to change, until I tried actually using The GIMP on the Mac. It doesn’t run as a native app, it runs under the X11 interface. That means it doesn’t get a real menu bar, and it doesn’t look or feel like a real native app.

Things that look and feel a bit crap aren’t so jarring on Windows. On the Mac, though, it’s a different matter. The machine is beautiful. Most of the software is beautiful. Running The GIMP under X11 in the midst of all that just didn’t feel right.

Photoshop is available, but it’s expensive. Really expensive. The vast majority of the editing I do is pretty simple, so there’s just no real need to spend that much. There’s Photoshop Elements. That’s a much more reasonable price. It’s a version out of date on the Mac, I’m not sure I like the direction it’s going anyway, so a step behind isn’t a problem. The feature set isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough for me.

A while ago, I ran a little test. I had trial versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, along with a couple of good Mac native photo editors – Pixelmator and Acorn. I took an image that wasn’t very good, but worked out a few steps that would make it usable. It was a mallard. I selected the duck, inversed the selection, and desaturated the background. I then reverted the selection to the duck, and over-sharpened it to make it pop.

• In Acorn, the selection was really hard work. Feathering the selection seemed to be ineffective. The adjustments didn’t turn out well.
• Pixelmator was better, but still not great. The results took some work still, but less, and looked ok in the end.
• Photoshop was great – easy to make the selection, as if it was doing most of the work for me – and the result was nice and smooth.
• Photoshop Elements was harder than Photoshop, but not much harder. The difference was probably due to it being based on an earlier version of Photoshop.

I concluded that Photoshop Elements was the one for me.

I didn’t get around to buying it.

This weekend, I started trying to work on photos again, and happened on an article that listed some useful Mac apps for photographers.

The main thing I like to do with my photos that requires anything beyond what Aperture can handle is making what I usually call ‘Photo Constructions‘. Think of panoramas, where you take several photos of a scene, with the camera setting locked, and then stitch them together to make one big image. The usual aim is to make the joins invisible. After seeing an article in Practical Photography magazine about Michael Hallett, though, I didn’t want to hide the joins. I loved his style of rough panoramas, or Constructions. I loved his habit of including his own shadow, or even a foot, in the final work. I’d always thought that the last thing I needed, then, was software designed to seamlessly stitch panoramas together.

The article mentioned DoubleTake, though, and I decided to give it a go. It was very quick and easy to use. I threw a pile of images at it, intended for one of my Constructions. It seemed to have a pretty good idea of what to do with them. It did try to stitch them together, but seamless stitching wasn’t possible with such a rough heap of photos. I rather liked what it did with them. I rearranged them a bit, and liked the result even more. I put a few images from the same set around the merged result, and liked it a lot.

The only problem was that it tried to merge any image added to some extent. I couldn’t layer another image over an ‘empty’ part of the original (like an area of grey sky), which I like to do. I realised that I needed two things – one panorama maker, and one more general photo editor. Pixelmator was pretty good at the image editing, and DoubleTake was pretty good at making the base panorama.

I had some doubt, though. Photoshop Elements had a routine for making panoramas, and could certainly do the rest of the job perfectly well. I wanted to try it out again, but installing a new copy still knew my trial had expired. My gut feeling was that Photoshop Elements was the final version I’d get for the money, and it wasn’t a good well-written Mac app. Both Pixelmator and DoubleTake were nicely written, and felt very Mac. I installed the latest version of Pixelmator, and it gave me another chance to try it out.

DoubleTake did it’s job perfectly. Pixelmator is very fast and does it’s job well. It isn’t perfect, but a new version is due soon, free to owners of previous versions, with more features. And, it’s from a small independent developer, not from Adobe. It’s written from the start as a Mac app, not something derived from a bigger app, written primarily for Windows.

I bought licenses for Pixelmator and DoubleTake. Using the SmokingApples coupon code, I saved 20% on Pixelmator, which helped a little. DoubleTake was more expensive than I’d expected, as they seem to have decided that UK VAT is 25%, not 15%, and the Euro exchange isn’t as good as I’d remembered, but even at £20, it does a job that’s otherwise a lot of work, with ease.

I’ll know better when I’ve spent more time with them, but I’m pretty happy with my choice at the moment. They both work very nicely with Aperture, too. I can select the images I want in my basic panorama, and drag them straight from Aperture to DoubleTake on the dock. It attempts to fit them together, so I just need to tweak what it’s done. I then just click the Aperture button on DoubleTake’s toolbar to send the image back to Aperture at full resolution. From there, I can open that image in Pixelmator as the external editor, drag any further images to layer over it straight from Aperture, and save the result straight back. Aperture just shows the final image as a new version of DoubleTake’s original export.

Update

It’s a week later, and I’ve learned a little more. The developer of DoubleTake, Henrik, contacted me to let me know that it actually can build constructions without merging at all – just hit ‘0′, and it stops merging images. I’ve tried it out today, and it works. I’d hoped it would let you turn off merging, and drag another image or two into place, leaving the rest still merged. What it actually does is just turn off merging completely. All the merged images un-merge themselves. Hit 0 again, and they all go back to how they were.

For doing constructions the way I always have, it can do it very quickly and easily, so it’s an even better buy than I’d thought. I may well still play with its merging functions, though, as I do like the results.

Henrik also explained about the VAT calculation. As I really should have known, EU states collect VAT at their own rate, and Danish VAT is much higher than UK VAT. PayPal displays it badly as ‘UK VAT’, but it’s being collected correctly.

I’ll say this right up front – I’m posting this at least partly in the hope of getting more free stuff.

If you use a Mac, though, and you haven’t seen this year’s MacHeist promotion yet, it’s well worth checking out. You get a bundle of apps, for one price: $39. Many of the apps would cost more than the bundle on their own, and 25% of the money goes to charity.

So, what are the highlights? That will depend on what you have a use for, but for me:

• Two great fun games – World of Goo and Cro-Mag Rally.
• Acorn – a reasonably well-featured photo editor. I trialed it a while ago, and decided to pass, but it’ll do nicely when thrown in with so much else.
• Picturesque – makes it very easy to apply some simple 3D effects to photos – I certainly wouldn’t have bought it at full price, but it’s cute, and works well.
• Espresso – looks like a very nice web editor. It’s locked until they reach $500,000 raised for charity, but it seems pretty likely they’ll manage that.

I took part in a ‘TweetBlast’ to get a couple more apps, including the fun Delicious Library.

If a couple of people use the following link, and decide to buy the bundle themselves, I’ll get a couple more freebies, including the rather decent Koingo Utility Package.

It’s well worth a look, and probably worth buying if there are a couple of items there you’d use – there are only two days left to buy.

• MacHeist Bundle 2009

Flock

I’ve started trying out Flock again, since it reached version 1.0 recently, and first impressions are pretty good. If this post looks strange, impressions may be starting to dip – I’m attempting to post this using Flock.

It seems to be able to run the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox, and Google Browser Sync seems to be working ok. I’m not entirely convinced it’s still working in Firefox, but that may be another problem entirely.

The problem I had before with Flock was down to memory management, and I don’t know yet if that’s fixed. It’s not really Flock’s problem as such – Firefox doesn’t seem to manage memory at all well, and Flock adds features on top of Firefox.

Update: Flock hung when I tried to post this – on the plus side, though, it recovered it when it restarted and I opened the blog editor again. It hung again when I tried again, so it doesn’t look like the blog editor likes our installation of Drupal.

Bad Pen Mojo

Today hasn’t been such a good day for pens. My new Clipper Snorkel seems to be having some intermittent feed problems – the ink flow just stops. I’ve just given it a good flush through, then flushed through with some very dilute detergent a couple of times, then rinsed thoroughly and refilled with ink. We’ll see how it gets on after that. If it still happens, I’ll probably try different ink next, and if all else fails, maybe have to ask Andy to have another look at it.

I then remembered that my Tucky needed filling, but as soon as I pulled the filler out, the blind cap popped off and fell on the floor. I attempted to put it back on, and it fell on the floor again. On further examination, it was a strange little setup that was obviously only supposed to be put together with the aid of a special Sheaffer tool. I managed to improvise with my Victorinox, and all was well again.