seeking iphone note syncing

Never hopped back on to thank you for your suggestions, Michael. Thanks.

I thought I’d post what I found to work for me in terms of synching EF documents to my iPhone for viewing and editing.

On the iPhone I am using 2 pieces of software to a) view non-editable documents and b) view and edit text based documents stored in EF.

I am using Dropbox to store documents I don’t intend to edit on the iPhone (though I am patiently awaiting the official Dropbox app for the iPhone (apparently in Apple’s approval queue for a good while now)) and SyncBook for documents I want to be able to edit in both EF and on the iPhone.

For Dropbox, I moved my “Dropbox” documents folder into the EF library and then updated the Dropbox prefs to reflect the new location. I add and remove files to my Dropbox through the EF interface and all is good with auto-syncing, etc.

Notes editing/synching in both EF and on the iPhone is a little bit less intuitive and required some more fiddling and experimentation. This solution is far from perfect.

I chose SyncBook for the iPhone for textual note taking/editing after researching a bunch of alternatives. The major drawback to SyncBook is that it is text only… no rtf. So, when creating notes to sync with it in EF, they have to be plain text or SyncBook’s Mac synching app won’t even acknowledge them.

The setup goes as follows… I launched and let SyncBook on the Mac create its “NotesSync” folder where it wanted (~/Library/Application Support/NotesSync). I then quit SyncBook and imported its folder into EF. Next I created a symlink from the newly imported “NotesSync” folder to the old, expected location (~/Library/Application Support/).

The rules I am currently following for NotesSync/EF integration are:

  1. SyncBook Mac has to be relaunched after each file addition/removal to/from its EF based “NotesSync” folder in order for it to recognize the change

  2. if you delete a note in iPhone SyncBook, delete the corresponding note from EF before syncing SyncBook iPhone with SyncBook Mac

  3. create all new notes in EF. it won’t see newly created notes made within SyncBook Mac or synched in from SyncBook iPhone. (maybe there is a way for EF to do a force refresh of a given folder, but I haven’t explored that yet – Michael?)

  4. I am avoiding editing a note in both places between synchs as I assume that will cause havoc :slight_smile:

So, SyncBook Mac is merely a way to sync EF based SyncBook plain text files to SyncBook iPhone. I don’t use it for any editing, adding/deleting of notes, etc.

If anyone knows of a different iPhone app which allows RTF/Word/etc. editing that would replace my SyncBook app choice in this method of synching, please let me know.

Mike