Welcome to MacNoteTaker

What is it?

I used to use the built-in MemoPad on the Palm for taking notes in lectures but soon ran into three problems. Firstly the notes would often extend over the 4k limit. Secondly I soon ended up with so many notes that the 16 category classification was woefully inadequate. Thirdly reading memos on the Mac using the desktop software is a nuisance since you can only have one window open at a time. So I wrote MacNoteTaker to fix all these problems (and I quite fancied writing a Palm application anyway).

MacNoteTaker lets you write notes up to 32,676 long. It stores them in a hierachical structure with unlimited nested folders just like the files on your computer. When you do a hotsync it synchronises the folder structure of your notes with a folder on your Mac. If you have a lot of small text files you want to cart around on your Palm then this is the easiest way to do it! Since they are just plain text files you can view them any way you like (TextEdit works very nicely).

Where do I get it from?

You download it from this web site of course! The application is available here (you may need to option-click or click-and-hold to get it to download properly). Alternatively you can download a compressed version here. The MacOS classic conduit is available separately here. The documentation is this web page, and there's some online help too.

The source is also available here (warning this is a big file!).

A MacOSX version of the conduit is available here. This should decompress to a mountable disk image (just double click the file). To install the conduit you need to copy the "MacNoteTaker Conduit" file to the "/Library/Application Support/Palm HotSync/Conduits" folder that was created when you installed the Palm Desktop. You should see all the other conduit files in there. This conduit is actually very reliable but will certainly not cope with filenames longer than 31 characters. Your files are stored in Documents/Palm/Users/HotsyncName.

Recent News (20th October 2005)

There is a solution for people who need to use non-ASCII characters kindly provided by Rudy Girón. The trick is to use TextEdit as your editor on the Mac side of things and to set the following preferences for Open and Save. Under Opening files select Western (Windows Latin 1) and under Saving files select Western (Windows Latin 1). This keeps all the text files in the Palm's native encoding and you should be able to use whatever accented characters or odd currency symbols you normally use.

On this subject I am toying with the idea of full unicode support so that it can cope with Japanese text however I may need to get a Japanese Palm Pilot to get this to work. 私わ古い日本の「PalmPilot」を使いないです

The MacOSX conduit works with MissingSync which is nice since the future of Palm synchronisation on the Mac is uncertain. There are some issues about allowable file names but this is discussed on the MissingSync noticeboards. It looks like most people have no troubles at all.

How do I use it?

When you start MacNoteTaker you are presented with the note selection screen. This works rather like the file chooser on a Mac. You create new notes by tapping the "New" button, and you can create new folders by selecting the "New Folder" menu option. New files are named by the current time and new folders are called "Untitled" but you can change the name by selcting the item and tapping the "Rename" button. You open an existing folder or note by selecting the item and tapping the "Open" button or alternatively by double tapping the item. Folders and files can also be moved by selecting and tapping the "Move" button. One of the move options lets you move the item (folder or file) to the "Trash" directory which acts pretty much like it does on a Mac. You can empty the trash by choosing the appropriate menu option. There is also a menu option that lets you import you existing MemoPad entries. You can create folders in folders in folders as much as you like and you move back up the folder tree using the pop-up menu in the top right corner (wjhere you would expect the categories to be).

You can import your existing Memos using the Import Memos menu command. This option copies all your existing memos into a folder called Memo and the categories each have their own sub-folder. It does not delete any of your memos so if you have a lot of memos this is the time when you are most likely to run out of memory on your Palm which is never a good thing to do so be careful. As long as the check memory option is on the import should stop before this happens.

If you open a note or create a new note you are taken to the note editing screen. This is all fairly straightforward. Notes can be up to 32,676 characters long which should be enough. All the standard editing functions are available. I've also implemented a local find function which is accessed by the small "F" button. Find again is activated with the "A" button. "Done" saves the note and exits back to the note selection screen. There is also a "Replace" menu option that takes you to a special search and replace screen. Line 1 Rename lets you rename the file based on the first line. This can be a handy timesaver.

The conduit requires a bit more explanation. You install it by dragging the NoteTaker Conduit (PPC) file into the Conduits folder that is inside the Palm folder that was installed on your Mac when you installed the Palm Desktop. When you run a HotSync it will create a directory called NoteTaker in the User folder that is also inside the Palm folder. This folder is named after the user name you set on the Palm Pilot (in my case Bill Sellers) and is inside a folder called Users that is in the Palm folder. If you can't find it, you can always use Sherlock to seach for NoteTaker on your hard disk. The notes stored in MacNoteTaker are copied into folders that are stored in the NoteTaker folder. Each folder on the Palm Pilot has its own folder. To copy files to the Palm Pilot you drag them into the NoteTaker folder or into one of the folders inside this folder and it will be copied over on the next HotSync. If you drag a folder into the NoteTaker folder then all the files in it will be all be copied and a new folder created to match.

To recap, a standard install of Palm's hotsync software will create a folder called Palm - by default it will be on your startup disk but you can put it anywhere. Inside that folder is a folder called Conduits and that's where you put the NoteTaker Conduit (PPC) file. Also in the Palm folder is a folder called Users and this will contain one or more folders named after the HotSync names you use on your Palm Pilot(s). Files or folders to be transferred to your Palm Pilot should be put inside a folder called NoteTaker inside the folder named after your HotSync name. Folders in the NoteTaker folder translate to folders on the Palm Pilot. You may want to put an alias to the NoteTaker folder somewhere a bit more convenient. I have mine in the Favourites menu so I can access it easily.

The conduit has the standard options. The overwrite options work as you would expect. The synchronise option requires some clarification. What it does is match files by name and folder(s) and where two names match it copies the one with a newer modification date over the one with the older modification date. If names do not match it assumes it has a new file and copies the file onto the system that does not have the file. What this means is that if you delete, rename or move a file or folder on either the Mac or the Palm you are likely to end up with two copies after a synchronise. In practice it's often more useful to set the default behaviour to "Handheld overwrites Macintosh" because this option will never delete files (it copies all the existing Mac files into a directory in the Trash folder).

If you suffer from crashes it can be because the database on the Palm has got corrupted. If you sync with the "Macintosh overwrites Handheld" option the Palm database is completely rebuilt from scratch which should fix any problems. Hopefully with the latest version of the software this shouldn't happen but if you are upgrading an older version may have left you with a corrupted database.

IMPORTANT: you may need to increase the amount of allocated to the Conduit Manager program on the Mac. You can find the program in the Palm folder and you can change the memory allocation using the "Get Info" memory option in the Finder. How much you need depends on how many notes you are transferring but I've got lots and have it set to 10MB.

Some Features

• The conduit copes with text files with Mac, Unix and Windows style end of line markers. It does not however attempt to match the character codes used for non ASCII codes (accented characters, symbols etc.).
• It does not cope with word-processor files so make sure you use the "Save As Text" option. If the file on the Mac is bigger than 32k bytes then it will be converted into a series of files approximately 20k long contained in a separate directory named after the original file.
• You can access the menus by tapping on the title bar in older versions of the PalmOS.

What does it cost?

You? Nothing. It's free - unless you arre a corporate user and want to install it on your company handhelds in which case there is a small fee. I'd obviously appreciate any emails, postcards, donations. I'd even appreciate suggestions. This program is not public domain though. You are not allowed to sell it to anyone but please give it away to anyone who wants it. You can also distribute it on your web site although I'd appreciate you linking to my site so people can get the latest version. Use it at your own risk. It shouldn't eat your data but I'm not responsible if it does.

Version History

The version number is contained in the Info Box for the application. It is rather harder to find for the conduit but you should always download the latest conduit when you download the applicaiton (assuming you use it).

12th February 2001 - Version Beta 1 - first public release.

19th February 2001 - Version Beta 2 - reduced maximum note size to 32k after a report that notes >32k were unreliable and might lead to data loss. Conduit and application changed to accommodate this. Also implemented a clock in the title bar so you can see how much longer you are going to have to sit in the meeting without surruptitiously looking at your watch.

4th March 2001 - Version Beta 3 - fixed a bug that caused the month display to be wrong. Another major change in the conduit that means it should synchronise more reliably and now it does sensible things with files larger than 32k (see above).

2nd April 2001 - Release 1.0 0 - seems stable so far! Now has a lot more free memory checks which should mean that it will not crash when memory is getting tight. These are on the pessimistic side so you can turn them off in the preferences if you want to live dangerously. I've also added extra scroll arrows so you can quickly go to the top or bottom of a document. There is also now an option to turn off the autoshift (autocapitalize) feature.

3rd April 2001 - Release 1.0.1 - important bug fix for problems with emptying the trash and accessing the preferences dialog. Both of these are serious bugs and you should upgrade to this version ASAP.

11th May 2001 - Release 1.0.2 - fixed a bug that caused a crash when moving a file into a directory ending with a space character. Added the Line 1 Rename feature.

6th March 2002 - Release 1.0.4 - fixed a serious bug in the Line 1 Rename feature that could (rarely) lead to a corrupted database.

20th March 2002 - Release 1.0.5 - added a double tap feature to allow notes to be opened by double tapping. There's an option to turn it off if you don't like it too.

Known Bugs

There are some navigation quirks when editing notes that I think are actually bugs in PalmOS. Occasionally the cursor leaves a permanent vertical line and the scrolling is not quite right. I do not think there is much I can do about this unless I write my own text editing engine - which is potentially a lot of work.

The conduit does not support the mapping of Mac style international characters to Palm style international characters. I keep meaning to fix this since it is quite straightforward but I am afraid I haven't yet.

I hope all the Mac and Palm Pilot uses out there find this useful.

Cheers

Bill Sellers