IMG_0074As my Twit­ter fol­low­ers know, I’ve been pretty peeved with Ever­note recently. The iPhone client ver­sion has decided that it absolutely, pos­i­tively will not com­plete a sync with the Ever­note servers on my 3G. I’ve done every­thing I can, even sent my log files to the com­pany (no response as of yet), and all of my tou­bleshoot­ing comes down to the same thing. Even after a fresh reboot of my iPhone, with 30MB of RAM avail­able (the most a 128MB 3G ever gets after load­ing the mobile ver­sion of OS/​X), Ever­note will fight for a while and then either spit up the error mes­sage you see here or just crash com­pletely and dump be back to the home­screen, the typ­i­cal reac­tion when an iPhone app runs out of RAM. (The new iPhone 3GS seems to run Ever­note just fine, but then it would; it’s got 256MB of RAM, or five times the free RAM on boot as the 3G has, 150MB com­pared to 30MB.)

The prob­lem with this is that up until just a cou­ple days ago, the mobile web ver­sion of Ever­note wasn’t all that impressive.

en3mobweb_main_listThis was a pain in the ass to use on my Win­dows Mobile devices, and it’s a pain in the ass to use on my iPhone. It’s a sim­ple WAP-​style page that doesn’t do much. But hey, it worked on my iPhone when the ded­i­cated client didn’t, so at least it was some­thing. I only used it for look­ing up notes, opt­ing to email new notes to my pri­vate Ever­note email address when I wanted to cre­ate some­thing new. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Well, now it’s pretty too.

Main ScreenThe new ver­sion of the mobile web Ever­note uses some nice iPhone/​Androidish CSS to look far more pro­fes­sional, more like a real app than a web page. It even sports some slick new menus that are both touch friendly and easy to use.

Main MenuNote Menu

It’s a webapp rather than a native app, but that really isn’t a prob­lem for me. I’m already using the Safari-​optimized Gmail instead of the iPhone’s Mail client for read­ing my Gmail, the Safari-​optimized Google Reader instead of Byline, and iPhone-​friendly ver­sions of Google News, AP News, GoodReads, Wikipedia, the list goes on and on. Using webapps instead of native clients is a way to mul­ti­task on the iPhone with­out jail­break­ing and run­ning Back­grounder since you can have up to eight pages open at a time. And the inter­face for man­ag­ing them even bears a strik­ing resem­blance to man­ag­ing cards on the Pre.

Only one prob­lem remains, really. There is a JavaScript-​based clip­per avail­able for Safari Mobile that allows you to send what­ever you’re cur­rently look­ing at to Ever­note. The JavaScript looks like this:

javascript:location.href=‘http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title);

And it works.

Clipped

The prob­lem, as you can see above, is that this script directs you to the full size ver­sion of Ever­note rather than a mobile page. This is espe­cially awk­ward when try­ing to tag what you just clipped.

Tagging

I’ve tried every vari­a­tion I can think of to merge the JavaScript above with the URL of the new mobile site:

https://www.evernote.com/mobile/MobileSetup.action?noRedirect=true

And noth­ing seems to work. So for now, I’m deal­ing with the awk­ward clip­ping in Safari, but pretty happy with the rest of the Ever­note Mobile Web expe­ri­ence. So much so that I’m really not even all that wor­ried about the iPhone client. The mobile web ver­sion does almost every­thing I need, and for the rest — pho­tos and other mul­ti­me­dia — I can email stuff to Ever­note. All I’m really miss­ing is the iPhone client’s offline favorites, but I’ll live.