Sync Yojimbo Notes With Simplenote

Note: All the information below applies very little to you if you have not invested in SimpleNote. If you haven’t bought SimpleNote yet, we have far more to talk about, such as, why? So go to the app store and spend $2 on a great, minimal, notes app that will not just sync into mail.app like Apple’s Notes app.

Preview

The buzz around SimpleNote has been amazing. People are developing ways to sync the minimalistic notes app for iPhone with just about everything. I’ve seen work being done with Evernote, DevonThink, Notational Velocity, and most importantly in my eyes, Yojimbo.

Shortly after Dropbox released their iPhone app, this gem of a blog post was written explaining how to sync photos from your iPhone to Yojimbo using Dropbox. Excellent! But I want more than just photos.

Since BareBones Software have decided that they don’t want to give any real information about a Yojimbo iPhone app, we have to resort to hacks and work arounds to keep our data N’Sync in sync.

Solution

Great, so I can sync my photos but I still have some notes on my iPhone that I want to throw at Yojimbo. While poking around on the ‘Yojimbo Talk’ Google group, I stumbled upon this thread. I read the title, “Simplenote and Yojimbo sync app, – alpha testers?” and perked up. This was what I wanted. After reading through the thread I thought, “Well, why not?” I backed up Yojimbo and my SimpleNote notes and installed this little app. Install complete. I ran the alpha software and it popped up asking for my SimpleNote email address and password. Ok, fine, take my password, have access to my grocery list and my school assignments, whatever.

3 seconds later my notes popped up in a new Yojimbo folder called SimpleNote. There they are, perfectly synced with Yojimbo. Now, in order to sync you do have to run the application, this is a bit of a pain. So you can deal with it or you can make it simpler. I chose simpler. I jumped into Quicksilver and set up a trigger to run ‘SimpleNote Yojimbo Sync’ (what a mouth full). The trigger I chose is CTRL + Y. When pushing this shortcut the app runs and pops up asking me if I want to run a script, hit return, and sync.

This is alpha software and I had a few issues with notes so there are little issues with things not working perfectly but I’m confident this will serve as a solution. My main issues are with deleting notes both in Yojimbo and in SimpleNote on iPhone and then having them reappear during the next sync.

A Litte Extra

If you aren’t using Yojimbo but find it annoying to use a web-interface to get to your SimpleNote notes? Have a look at this post that outlines a way to sync notes with a minimal app called Notational Velocity. I would not recommend this technique for just anyone – although, the directions are laid out quite clearly.

∞