[tomboy-list] Evernote Addin

[Sandy Armstrong]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Doug Johnston <doug.johnston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I made a two-way sync addin that interfaces with Evernote[1] . It
> works fairly well right now, although the markup conversion is rather
> lossy, so all sense of lists, fonts, or any tags are getting lost.
> This will be remedied, but I want to try to do it right.

Dude!  You are awesome!

> If you want to take a look, the project is up at
> http://github.com/dvj/EvernoteSyncAddin
> Take a look at the README in there for details.
>
> If you just want to try it, first backup your notes (there are still
> sync issues), and grab the binary from
> http://github.com/dvj/EvernoteSyncAddin/downloads
>
>
> I have a few questions about finishing it off.
>
> 1. Evernote uses SSL to set up the connection, and transmit passwords.
> This works fine under .Net, but Mono by default doesn't accept any
> security certificates. (See
> http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Security). If you are connecting to a
> known trusted source, you can create an instance of an
> ICertificatePolicy to allow access.  In the WbSyncService, there's a
> blank certificate, which I used. Is this really the best way to handle
> this?

I don't really know, but it works.

> 2. In the WebSyncService again, there is the NoteConvert class, which
> does some basic xml wrapping. Is there a complete description of
> html<->tomboy conversion? Evernote uses a modified xhtml
> representation, and I have some very ugly conversion code right now.
> How do I best preserve all the formatting in the note?

You can look at the ExportToHTML add-in for the XSL used to do
Tomboy->HTML.  In Snowy, you can find an XSL based on that one, and I
believe there is also one that does the reverse (though it's not very
well-tested).

You could ask Rodrigo Moya from Canonical for tips, since they're
doing this for Ubuntu One.

What we need to do is put together a nice library of complex note
files that everyone (Tomboy, Snowy, U1, Tomdroid, Conboy, etc) can use
in their test suites.  That would be extremely helpful.

> 3. I dont really understand how the sync lock is supposed to work.
> Should I even bother with this? I assume the evernote servers do
> something intelligent if they are getting multiple requests on the
> same note at once.

Yeah, I think the lock is less important when talking to a web service
(see the TomboyWeb sync service add-in).  It's mostly necessary when
faking a server like the file-system-based add-ins do.

Thanks for this work, I'm sure it will be helpful to a lot of Tomboy users,

Sandy