Pocket PC notes

For years, I carried an HP100/LX with me everywhere I went. Jeanie referred to it as my "brain."

After a number of years, and a few repairs, I finally broke down and switched to a Windows CE device after my trusty 100/LX went brain dead for the last time. The Windows CE device was lighter and smaller. It didn't make as big a bulge in my pants pocket. And, it had a much higher "cool" factor.

The application I was most fond of on the HP was its built-in database. You could configure databases with whatever fields/columns you wanted. The key database I used was very simple. It had two fields: a title, and a free text note.

When I switched to the CE device (a Compaq Aero 1530) the thing I was most disappointed about was the lack of a similar database application. I did some hunting and found an application from PhatWare called HPC Notes. It worked pretty well, and had the added benefit of synchronizing with the notes function in MS Outlook. That way, I had access to the information on my desktop and on my pocket PC, and the two sources stayed automatically in synch. It didn't allow me to configure my database format, but as all I really needed was the title and free text, it met my needs.

There were a few issues that I had with this solution: in Outlook, there are no scroll bars for the individual notes, and there is no find option in individual notes. In HPC Notes, there was no find option within the individual notes, and you could not jump to a title by entering the first few characters of the title.

So, today, I decided to try to find a new database for the Pocket PC (now an HP Jornada 525). I ended up downloading three different databases, but found them all lacking.

Then, I had an epiphany. Really, all my "database" consisted of was records with a title and free text. Gee, I thought, that's kind of like a bunch of text documents...

Why not just put all of the Outlook notes in individual files and a unique directory, and then use Windows Explorer to list them, and notepad to enter/view/edit them? MS ActiveSync allows you to synchronize files between the desktop PC and the Pocket PC. Now all I needed was a simple text editor for the Pocket PC.

A Google search yielded three promising freeware candidates. Two, iPAD and jsEditPad, were unsatisfactory, but the third one, PocketNotepad v3.0 from Tillanosoft, was exactly what I was looking for.

I had just one last hurdle - converting the hundreds of notes from Outlook note format to text files. After a little hunting, I realized that I could select each note, then do a "save as" and save it as a text file.

The idea of manually doing this for hundreds of notes was more than I could deal with, so I once again turned to Google, and found a great Windows macro utility, Perfect Keyboard Lite, which allowed me to automate the process and complete it in just a few minutes.

So, now I have a solution which meets all of my desires - yippee!

Isn't it amazing how sometimes the seemingly most challenging issues are solved by the simplest solutions?

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Posted by David at October 06, 2002 02:54 PM | Categorized under: Reference