iPhone Notes - solved
Posted on August 17, 2008
Filed Under Mac
So, I finally broke down and got an iPhone. I’ve been a Palm user almost as long as it’s been possible to BE a Palm user, culminating with a Treo regifted to me by a good friend, but that gorgeous little landscape screen, the convergence of G3 and Wi-Fi, and the recent announcement of a working SSH client for the iPhone finally sold me.
Imagine my shock and horror at finding that there is no recognized way to put memos (notes) onto the iPhone from your computer, meaning no way to migrate them from an older device, other than kludging them into fake Contact or Mail records. “You have GOT to be kidding, Steve!” Migrating the contacts, almost trivial. Migrating the calendar and keeping it in sync with Apple’s iCal or even with Google Calendar (my favorite choice for sharing), also trivial. “You wanna migrate text into Notes? Go pound sand, or your iPhone keyboard, ’cause you’ve got a lot of typing to do.”
Well, took me most of today and cost me a few bucks that I should not have spent, but there is a way to get your memos off of a Palm and onto an iPhone.
The expense was “The Missing Sync for iPhone” by MarkSpace, which will not upload Notes to the iPhone. Let me repeat that. Missing Sync WILL NOT upload Notes to the iPhone. What it will do is download them from the iPhone to your Mac or PC, and put them into a standalone “Notebook” application, unrelated to anything else on your computer. MarkSpace will allow you to use a demo of the companion product, “Missing Sync for Palm,” which will populate the MarkSpace Notebook app with your Palm memos. Which in and of itself, gets you exactly nowhere.
Enter Ecamm.com and their lifesaver, Phoneview.
Quite simply, it will load data to or from any iPhone app, much as Music Rescue will allow you to grab music from an iPod and save it back to your Mac or PC.
Phoneview was exactly what I needed to get my Notes onto my iPhone.
Cost? About twenty bucks, but the fully-functional demo version was all I needed. It happily copied my 54 entries without a single interruption to say “You gonna pay for this?”
Simple as this:
In MarkSpace Notebook, highlight all your memos and do File > Export. Save them into a new folder, because it’s going to create one new .txt file for each memo.
In Phoneview, select all those new .txt files and tell it to send them to the iPhone Notes application. It’ll want to restart your iPhone. That’s it.
I frankly think MarkSpace should send Ecamm twenty bucks out of my payment for Missing Sync, since Ecamm did what MarkSpace could not.
And oh, goody — iSilo for the iPhone has been released through the App Store. Take your existing Palm iSilo ebooks, stick them on a web server somewhere (your Mac will do just fine) and suck them onto your iPhone or iPod.
I had to finesse the charset to reflect that I had done the encoding using iSiloX on a Windows box, but once I told it to use Windows 1252, all the funny question marks went away and I had a working ebook reader once again.