I was checking Notae’s page hits to see if my using prMac for this last incremental update was worth it (it is) and noticed a lot of hits coming from Apple’s download page index for productivity tools. Following the link, I discovered Notae hit #3, smack in the middle of some staff picks.

It may only be there for a while, but that’s a nice thing to see.

Notae 2.1 is knocking at the door, but I need some people to break it first. If you like integrating apps into your workflow, I’d love it if you poked at a beta Notae 2.1 for me. I think it’s done, but I do need some folks to test it, first.

A sample of what it can do:

tell application "Notae"
	activate
	make new document
	tell the front document
		make new note with properties {name:"Note 1", note text:"Note 1"}
		set noteTwo to make new note with properties {name:"Note 2", note text:"Note 2"}
		make new note with properties {name:"Note 3", note text:"Note 3"}
		make new note with properties {name:"Note 4", note text:"Note 4"}
		
		make new tag with properties {name:"Tag 1"}
		set tagTwo to make new tag with properties {name:"Tag 2"}
		make new tag with properties {name:"Tag 3"}
		make new tag with properties {name:"Tag 4"}
		
		add tag (tag "Tag 1") to note 1
		add tag tagTwo to noteTwo
		add tag (tag "Tag 3") to note 3
		add tag (tag "Tag 4") to note 4
		add tag (every tag) to note 1
		add tag (tag "Tag 3") to every note
		
		export note 2 as native to ("Kalyke:Users:ahknight:Desktop:export" as alias)
		export (every note whose name is "Note 2") as HTML to ("Kalyke:Users:ahknight:Desktop:export" as alias) without replacing
		export (every note whose note text contains "Note 2") as text file to ("Kalyke:Users:ahknight:Desktop:export" as alias) with replacing
		
		set theImportedNotes to import ("Kalyke:Users:ahknight:Desktop:export" as alias)
		set theImportTag to make new tag with properties {name:"Imported"}
		repeat with aNote in theImportedNotes
			add tag theImportTag to aNote
		end repeat
		
		get the properties of every note whose tags contains tag "Tag 1"
	end tell
end tell

Result:

If you’re interested, please use the contact form and let me know (use the Notae category).

If there’s something you want to be able to do via scripting that I didn’t demo above, please leave a comment and I’ll investigate doing it.

I’m not dead or gone, I’m just busy as hell.

• Notae 2.1 is looking nice. Full AppleScript editing support including making new notes and tags and assigning tags and such. Search via AppleScript may be clunky to make it fast because Apple doesn’t let me override the logic of a “whose” statement, it appears. I’m thinking I may make a command like “find [class] where [property] [condition] [value] (in [list])” so you could do: find notes where name is “bob” in (find notes where tags contains “tag1”). I’ve not gotten that far, so we’ll see if I can make it work.

• The day job has turned from programming to looking for programmers and money. Not fun.

To get money, I have to bug people. It’s a sad fact of software development, but if the software didn’t destruct in a period of time, I’d be working for naught.

Right now, Notae goes four weeks (28 days) in a full-access demo and then locks down, hard. I’m seeing the majority of conversions within the first three days, and most of the rest in the first week. While I look at it and say “I would, myself, appreciate thirty days to get used to something as intimate as a notes program” I can also see getting used to it within two weeks as well.

Of course, with a time period that short, you run the risk of someone downloading it, opening it, poking around, and then forgetting about it. Some weeks later he goes to test it out seriously and bam the demonstration period has expired. Suck.

A compromise, then. I’m considering letting Notae run in a full demo for two weeks, and then locking out the user for two weeks before resetting the demo. That should be just enough time to get used to it if you just downloaded it and then enough of a wait so that if you wanted to try a new release after a couple of weeks that it would let you. The registration dialog would explain this and then give either the date of expiration or the date the lockout will reset.

My concerns, then, are these:

• Is two weeks enough time to get to know a program you’ll use pretty much daily?

• Is two weeks downtime enough? I’ve also considered four weeks here.

Take note, Core Data programmers, something stupid is afoot, and it’s even documented.

If you pass object URIs around like candy within your program for things like drag-and-drop or token fields or any other representation of your objects and then have to get the object back, use objectRegisteredForID instead of objectWithID.

When you use objectWithID you should note that it will never return nil to you on failure. It will create an invalid object and leave it astray in your managed object context preventing your users from saving their document unless you track it down and delete it. What they get instead is the following in the console.log:

Instead of dumping people into either a web forum or Trac, there’s now a middle ground. I’ve installed the Project module for Drupal and have it working quite well now.

Notae’s project page allows you to file support requests, enhancement requests, and bugs as needed. The support page has been updated to show this as the primary means of obtaining official support for the product.

The web forum has been demoted to user-based support and something I’ll get around to reading every few days. But, really, I envision the forum as users talking to users about using the product rather than support.