19.12.12. Restoring Lost OS X Notes Folders

So I'm a loose fan of OS X's Notes app. It's simple - no having to think of filenames or storage, simple folders if needed, and it syncs everywhere. No dealing with Markdown. It's pretty damn close to a piece of notepaper.


Unfortunately, it has some weaknesses. And the most unfortunate weakness is that its data can be a bit fragile. The data is stored in IMAP on your mail server, and to keep things simple, I just had two folders in my iCloud mail account. All was going OK. Until the app had a mini-freakout earlier (it wasn't showing a cursor in the note area). I quit and reopened the app, and I was faced with a collection of local folders as well as iCloud folders. The local folders had 'recovered data', but I only had one new note in there. So I tried to empty and delete the 'recovered data' local folder.

Instead, I ended up accidentally deleting my Work Folder, and the ten or so notes I had in there. There was a warning dialog that popped up, but I thought it was in reference to the local folder and clicked through it.

So the notes were gone. I had to try to find them, but they were gone. The computer I was on didn't have Time Machine, so I had to hope that there was something I could go back in time and find at home.

Here's the location - {Home}/Library/Mail/{iCloud folder}/. I hit the time machine button once I was in there and was able to go back to yesterday and found a Work.mbox. I restored this .mbox folder, but that alone didn't cause the notes to come back. There are a bunch of folders and subfolders until one comes to .emlx messages. The easiest way to list all of them is to search for .emlx files. They don't open in Notes.app but they will open in Mail.app, with all of their formatting preserved. I imagine if you could open them in OS X 10.7 Mail.app, which still had the integrated Notes folders, you could move the messages into a new subfolder. But on 10.8, I had to manually copy the message text into Notes. It was only about 10 notes, so it wasn't bad. It's better than losing some of this data.

This did lead me to start looking at other options to handle short term reference that was as simple and convenient as Notes, but maybe with an easier-to-restore backup option, but I haven't found it. I am evaluating Evernote, but it feels more complex than what I use Notes for.

For me, Notes.app is a good place for temporary reference or some other minor/personal notes and lists. It's not a permanent archive, but it's a good place to collect thoughts before going into meetings or to hold onto some reference material from emails. Again, I don't need to think of filenames or tags or Markdown or anything fancy with it. I just wish it behaved a little better on OS X. I wish it was an iCloud Documents app that hid the file management part completely, but could take advantage of OS X document management (versions, time machine, etc).

Evernote may solve my problem of where to put notes after they're no longer needed in Notes.app, but feels a bit heavy for the use case outlined above.

Hopefully this is the only time I run into this problem.

31.10.12. Testing iA Writer and Keyboard

This is something that may or may not get me back into blogging - being able to use my iPad but type at near-full speeds. I've added an Apple Wireless Keyboard to my setup. It's an experiment. A friend challenged me to participate in NaNoWriMo. I have doubts about that, but thought that it might be worth a try. I have characters and places and bits of story that are already lying around and it would be good to challenge myself to do something with it. But my main machine at home is an aging (mid 2007) iMac that is really my music studio machine. Well, it's really a media server that services the iPad and iPhone these days. Occasionally it's used for music, but that's like once per month. The point is, it's not the most comfortable writing environment due to the way the desk and iMac are set up.

Part of me was thinking this would be a good opportunity to buy a MacBook Air, I really can't afford one and don't have a strong need for one (they're not strong enough for music, and I don't move around enough to warrant buying another laptop. Besides, I still have an old white plastic MacBook that is serving its remaining years as a bedside Netflix and DVD viewer (and the DVD portion is important). I haven't found need to use for much else beyond that in the past couple of years, so it's getting a bit crusty.

Still, I was thinking about what would help me try to write from a more comfortable place? Well, there's the iPad, of course! Using its onscreen keyboard for longer pieces, such as the one I'm writing now, is inadequate. So I thought it was time to finally try adding a bluetooth keyboard, and most reports I've read indicate that the Apple aluminum wireless keyboard is generally unbeaten. I don't plan on taking this with me to very many places. I just want to stay on this side of the loft with a smaller, simpler, more focused machine. So far, it seems to be working.

For the start of this experiment, I'm typing this all out in iA Writer, a very clean and simple writing app that is a blank white screen and a nice big font. More importantly, to me, is that it supports iCloud's "documents in the cloud" feature. While I like DropBox and have had some success using text editors in DropBox, iCloud's setup when there's a nice corresponding Mac app seems even simpler. I've been wanting to give iCloud documents a serious try, as there are more and more places where I find myself wanting it.

So, a new experiment begins, starting to use the iPad even more seriously as a productive machine.

24.3.11. Forget distraction free, I want file-management free!

A few years back I downloaded an interesting piece of software for the Mac OS - Writeroom version 1.0. Writeroom sells itself as a "distraction free writing environment." It's main feature was that it was plain text only and could run in a full screen mode with default colors of being green text on black background. There was some fanfare around it and some skepticism. Personally, I liked the idea - get rid of all of the other windows, instant messages, dancing gifs, email notifications, etc, and just write.

This is something which I like about the iPad - only the current application has my attention. I hope that this doesn't change. I do not like what I see in Android 3.0, nor what little I've seen of the Blackberry Playbook. Their interfaces look too busy. I deal with busy interfaces all day. For me, the iPad is a relief from the world of current desktop computing.

My favorite key combination on Mac OS X is option-command-h, aka Hide Others. When the screen starts filling up with windows and more windows and more windows, Hide Others temporarily brings some order to the madness.

Back to Writeroom. My favorite feature of 1.0 was actually not this 'distraction free writing environment' nonsense. That was a useful feature, to be sure. But the feature I liked most was that it was a file management free writing environment. Writeroom 1.0 managed its own files. There was no saving, no filename choosing (the document name was taken from the first line of the document). This made it a perfect place for just jotting things down, working small ideas out, and maybe taking them into bigger things. That file management free writing environment was bliss, at least for my uses. Every time you opened the app, there were all your documents. You could close them to hide them, but they were easily accessible from a menu and a keyboard shortcut.

There were some other apps that offered similar features - the Stickies application that comes with Mac OS X (and dates back to Mac OS System 7.5) is another nice tool for temporarily holding small pieces of information without having to worry about file management; Yojimbo is a collection bucket of notes, PDFs, etc, and can be another place for notes to quickly go; and Apple Mail in Mac OS X 10.5 added Notes which could be stored in IMAP (and can finally sync to the Notes app in iOS 4) and offer a nice quick jot-down place that also takes its title from the first line.

Writeroom 2.0 killed this feature. I avoided writeroom 2.0, but when version 2.5 was on the Mac App Store at a temporary discount, I bought it. And I hate it. Now I have to think about filenames. Now I have to think about where things are being stored. Writeroom 1.0 allowed you to easily export a document out, but that kind of decision was usually made AFTER you were finished with the document. There are times when I don't want to think about that stuff when starting out. This is not true for all cases - much of my day work is spent in TextMate writing Python code, reStructuredText documents, and managing configuration files. Of course I need full file management in that situation. But when it comes to just writing down some notes, capturing some ideas, and maybe thinking through a proposal, I miss that Writeroom 1.0 functionality.

And again, this is something that the iPad (and iPhone) gets right, for most instances. Whether its OmniGraffle, Pages, Garageband, or the built in Notes app, starting a new document is damn easy. Saving is automatic. You just start using it.

Fortunately, the next version of Mac OS X, "Lion", looks like it offers many long overdue file/document management features for developers so that they can offer functionality closer to Writeroom 1.0. Again - I'll always need TextMate and some apps to do manual file management, but those uses are specialized and becoming more rare. Mac OS X Lion adds support now for auto-save, reversion, locking, and historical change tracking. In some ways, this feels like going back to some of the ideas explored in the LISA and other pre-Mac user interfaces that weren't shackled to the hardware limitations of the original Mac OS (file management in the Lisa OS was quite a bit different - everything started from the finder, including new documents). In other ways, it feels like we're catching up to what the Newton OS, Palm OS, and iOS devices have long done in their aims of imitating paper notebooks and planners - everything is just saved, automatically.

It's not perfect for every situation, but it's something I've long been wanting in more places than just calendar and contact apps.