CintaNotes Forum

Not until now had I come across such a complete dealbreaker situation.

Today I brought home my notebook.dat from work, hoping to merge it with the domestic one, and got totally stumped: I was able to export notes to unicode text or XML files but found no way to re-importing that data, so my notebooks can't be merged.

As it is, I can hop from notebook to notebook, but I can't have all my notes available in just one.

I even tried copy & paste from one notebook to another, but all I got was a massive new note with all the text, but none of the tags and urls, of the former notes.

CN was really living up to its promise up to this moment. HELP, please?!?! xO

EDIT: maybe you could document your notebook.dat format, so if you're not working on this, others could possibly find a manual workaround. Thanks.

Hi Midas,

please hang on there for a couple of days! I won't leave you behind! I'll finish the XML import feature and provide a pre-BetaM7 version for download so that you can import your notes.
Documenting the file format will take longer in terms of time, which is precious for me now since I'm very late with Beta M7 (had great workload at my day job).
BTW, if your notes are not top secret data and you don't mind using a free Internet service, great way to sync CintaNotes files is to put CN in a DropBox folder (see http://www.getdropbox.com).

Ok so here it is. Thanks for your patience.
Using File/Import you can now import notes from .dat files, as well as from XML files.
Please backup all files prior to doing anything, just in case.

As usual, just replace the cintanotes.exe executable to install.
Please tell me whether everything went smoothly. Thanks

Many, many thanks.

Testing currently underway...

Midas wrote:Many, many thanks.

Testing currently underway...

My thanks as well! Been using this for a couple days now, import works perfectly. I'm using this version portably and it seems a little slower than before...

Importing went alright, so I'm one happy Joe.

Can't figure the new file note order, it looks like the notes got appended at the end of the note file (shouldn't it at least get re-sorted by date?). Come to think of it sorting options should contemplate ascending or descending date order among any other options -- I would prefer my new notes to get added at the top of the notebook. As the note order seems hard coded right now, is there any way to fiddle with this?

More later...

I second on the descending sorting option. Even better if the you can break the notes display order into two parts: Sort By (Last created, Last Modified, Alphabetical etc) and Sort Order (Ascending or Descending).

Anyway, thanks for the cool app. Being a developer who always receives calls from clients, it helps a lot to have a note-taking app that is so easy and simple to use like this. Love it much. Much better than opening notepads to take small notes.

toddclausen wrote:Been using this for a couple days now, import works perfectly. I'm using this version portably and it seems a little slower than before...

What exactly is slower? Actually the program engine hasn't changed at all. Maybe you now have much more notes?
I'm going to make note saving asynchronous, which should render the application much more responsive when run directly from an USB stick. If I don't manage this in time to include it in Beta M7, I'll make an update.

As a sidenote, updates are much easier to make than official releases, since I don't have to announce them on the site, change all the materials etc. I also think that people who frequently read this forum should be rewarded with possibility to have the most up-to-date version of the program. And of course, the early feedback is really invaluable!

Midas wrote:Importing went alright, so I'm one happy Joe.

Great! Meanwhile, I've found a bug - the XML import hasn't been doing unescaping of special entities like "&quot;" and "&gt;". So fields containing the '&', '<' and '>' characters were unlucky.
Here is the fixed version:

Midas wrote:Can't figure the new file note order, it looks like the notes got appended at the end of the note file (shouldn't it at least get re-sorted by date?). Come to think of it sorting options should contemplate ascending or descending date order among any other options -- I would prefer my new notes to get added at the top of the notebook. As the note order seems hard coded right now, is there any way to fiddle with this?

Yes the note order is top priority, but still won't be in Beta M7.
Now the only way to fiddle with note order is via XML. Export your notes to XML, move the corresponding <note..>..</note> blocks in there, and import it back. Not very convenient, I know, but at least its possible.

CintaNotes Developer wrote:

toddclausen wrote:Been using this for a couple days now, import works perfectly. I'm using this version portably and it seems a little slower than before...

What exactly is slower? Actually the program engine hasn't changed at all. Maybe you now have much more notes?
I'm going to make note saving asynchronous, which should render the application much more responsive when run directly from an USB stick. If I don't manage this in time to include it in Beta M7, I'll make an update.

Testing the import feature tripled the size of my notebook, but it is still only a couple of MB. Just updated to 7.2 and thought it was faster again, but went back to test with 6.3 and then 7.0 and felt they were the same as 7.2. Also tested all three on Windows 7 and couldn't perceive a difference - must have been something else going on with my machine...

Thanks for the smaller .exe file in 7.2!

Just wondering how hard it would be to do a differential check and only import notes that are new or different? Like a synchronize? I am using CintaNotes on several machines - most of the time from a flash drive so not normally a problem. Testing the import gave me two or three copies of some notes which I manually deleted. I may be getting close to feature bloat here. Thanks for the DropBox suggestion, I may try that.

I am finding I really don't feel the need to sort notes into any particular order as the search is good. Sort could be added to the search function as a bonus!

CintaNotes Developer wrote:Yes the note order is top priority, but still won't be in Beta M7.
Now the only way to fiddle with note order is via XML. Export your notes to XML, move the corresponding <note..>..</note> blocks in there, and import it back. Not very convenient, I know, but at least its possible.

Thanks for the bug alert and for the sorting hack, which comes quite handy. CN is getting to be one of my essential tools.

Midas wrote:Thanks for the bug alert and for the sorting hack, which comes quite handy. CN is getting to be one of my essential tools.

You're welcome! And also now there's alt-up/down note reordering. In the next version I'll make it more rounded - provide context menu entries and also "move to top/bottom" options.

toddclausen wrote:Just wondering how hard it would be to do a differential check and only import notes that are new or different?

Yes I guess this is a sensible thing to do, thanks for the suggestion. Maybe a more universal solution would be to implement a "Find and Remove Duplicates" command, which would merge duplicate notes into one, preferring those with the earliest date and merging tags if necessary.
Also I wanted to add to the import function the possibility to specify a tag which should be added to imported notes.

toddclausen wrote:I am finding I really don't feel the need to sort notes into any particular order as the search is good. Sort could be added to the search function as a bonus!

Note sorting will be implemented as it is a useful tool for working with information. But I guess implementing section tabs, tags sidebar and autocomplete is going to have higher priority.