Hi there. I picked up Tinderbox in the Winterfest sale because I wanted to migrate from using Evernote. I do still plan on using Evernote as a mobile note-taking tool, so your ‘watch Evernote Folder’ ability was very attractive.
One of the things I was hoping to do was move everything from my Evernote to Tinderbox. Once I got my license key I instructed Tinderbox to ‘watch’ the largest of my Evernote notebooks – a general purpose notebook I scribble random thoughts and ideas in. This notebook is almost exclusively text (as are most of them) and it has 860 notes.
This turned out to be a mistake? I think? Because it locked up Tinderbox and my computer for almost three hours. It crashed once and when I reopened it, it continued its scan… and eventually it got to a point where it had 9xx notes (??) and the number didn’t seem to be changing, but Tinderbox remained using the entire CPU. I finally managed to save and close the file and Tinderbox promptly crashed twice in a row. I now have it open and it seems quiet and stable. The save-file for the Tinderbox file is quite small, 14mb (in comparison an enex export from Evernote of the same notebook is 114 mb).
Was it doing something that would finish, and if so, when? If it’s just work that has to be plowed through, is there some way to throttle it so I can use my computer?
I’m also open to any general tips on moving thousands of Evernote notes across dozens of notebooks and hundreds of tags into Tinderbox, preferably without losing access to my computer for hours at a time.
I’d envisioned watching a small folder of active notes — a small inbox of the latest additions to a project. Watching every note in a large and active project is likely to be a challenge.
Crash logs: I think there should always be a popup: that’s a function of the system, not the application. It sometimes takes some time to appear.
Copies are kept in the User Reports list of your Console app, and in ~/Library/Logs/Diagnostic Reports/ in Finder. Again, this is determined by the system.
Importing Notes: copy/paste of the text is boring, but may be the best route for moderate tasks. I’m a big believer in touching your data! Exporting to HTML and then importing the files might be another answer. Much depends on just what sort of data you keep in EverNote!
Open the Console app and look in the System Reports and User Reports sections. If you find a report regarding Tinderbox with the .crash extension then select it (or more than one if necessary) and use the Share icon on the Console menu bar to email the reports to Eastgate, per above.
There’s definitely some notebooks where I should do it manually; I’m never going to dump any of my notes but Evernote was always an inferior replacement for Hog Bay Notebook for me and I’m hoping to go back to my beloved nesting for story planning and brainstorming and I’d like to put at least the notes for the unfinished projects in that kind of order.
I’ve found some likely log files and I’ll pass those along. And I’ll take a look at the HTML import.
The data is… everything I think, or want to remember. Kids SSNs. Medical notes. I have notebooks with 50-100 notes for each novel I’ve written and some projects I haven’t started. I have some scans of my mother’s journal and some receipt photographs (but not many of those). I keep track of my dreams, and random ideas, and writing techniques I want to eventually share. Todo lists and menu plans. I plan out games. I tend to make a new note for each new thought, but some notes I ramble in for quite a while. Stuff like that. I’d really like to get it all into Tinderbox and see about turning the tags I’ve used (just basic stuff like ‘dream’ or ‘idea’) into better organization I can search on.
Happy to report that I took one of my project notebooks, exported its 51 notes to HTML and dragged that folder into a new Tinderbox file and everything showed up fine and dandy. Only issue is an aesthetic one because every note name now ends with .html. There’s probably some agenty way to fix that though.
Evernote notes that have images – such as web pages that were clipped to Evernote, or Penultimate pages saved to Evernote – can easily cause significant import delays and beachballs.
You can do this in an agent… I used to have lots of things like this. Now I do this sort of thing in a stamp. It’s not really something I need running all the time. It’s more like I’ll spot a note that has a name I don’t like, and run the stamp. Or maybe use an agent and disable it when I’m done.