I’ve been thinking of the direction I want to take Notae recently (after fixing that damned speed problem with Leopard that Apple seems to want to ignore). I want to do the following things:

• .Mac Sync of notes and tags.
• Cleaner tags. Right now, while it works, it feels a little off when you use the tag palette to find things. It could be exchanged with another GUI element that makes it easier to manage tags as well as organize by them.

Unfortunately, Spotlight in Leopard has a bug. A pretty bad one.

As the notes change, Spotlight feels the need to hit the Spotlight index file 22-27 times for no reason, and only for some people. Two out of my three machines are affected. I’ve been told there’s nothing I can change and that I should wait on an update to the OS to resolve the issue.

This sucks, generally, but looking at how the issue presents, I can’t see a clear way around it (as notes change, I load a new NIB — the act of reading the NIB causes Spotlight to go haywire).

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: {{paragraph count:1, creation date:date "Monday, July 16, 2007 2:55:57 AM", modification date:date "Monday, July 16, 2007 2:55:57 AM", size:360, editable:true, class:note, comment:"", note text:"Note 1", name:"Note 1", word count:2}}

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.

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: