issue with syncing

[ahn5...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I just subscribed to Clevernote. I created about 20 notes sorted in folders. When I go to my google drive, i see the clevearnote folder with the right subfolders and the files corresponding to each note. However, when I click on the note, they are empty. Can someone please let me know if I do something wrong?

[ahn5...@gmail.com]

I was reading the previous users question and your reply and it seems that you store quick notes not like text file but in the description of that file. Is this correct? If it is so, I personally would prefer that quick note type of files were saved as simple .txt so that they could be edited in gdrive as well. Will you consider to implement that suggestion? If not, at least can you provide a simple button/functionality allowing user to change the existing file's type on your web from quick to formatted one?

[sup...@clevernote.co]

Let me expand on the storage mechanism, and its history.

Formatted notes are stored as HTML files within Google Drive. Quick Notes are stored as the Description of a Drive file, so to Drive it appears that a Quick Note has no contents.

This might sound odd, and in many ways it is, but there is a reason for it. The Drive API that Google publishes for developers is beset with performance, reliability and quota issues, that developers such as ourselves need to work around in order to create great products. The first Beta of CleverNote took the obvious approach of storing notes as Google Drive documents, ie they were editable as Drive documents. Because Google uses a proprietary (and undocumented) document storage format, every time we exported a document for editing within CleverNote, and re-imported it, formatted was being lost. We also suffered from duplicated and lost notes due to another (still unresolved) bug in the API.

In the end we, somewhat reluctantly, took the decision to reduce the API usage by storing Quick Notes within the file Description. This was based on a policy decision that CleverNote's use of Drive for storage was independent of using Drive applications (eg. the "Write" application). As we move forward, we will be introducing additional note features such as check lists on steroids, which will be a cross between the simple checklists that Keep provides, and a more complex structure that hitherto you would probably have stored in a spreadsheet. We are currently prototyping the various Drive storage mechanisms to determine the best approach, but again, it will be reliability that will be the most significant factor. At some point we may even offer alternative storage back-ends such as DropBox or even ownCloud, to allow users portability between providers.

We do understand the concern about potential lock-in, and we will be adding an import/export feature that will allow your notes to be converted to/from Google Docs to address this.

I hope this background helps, and thanks again for the feedback.

Kind regards
Lyn

[ahn5...@gmail.com]

Lyn,

Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. Now it is clear on why you made such a choice. It is great that you also think about adding an import/export feature that will allow your notes to be converted to/from Google Docs to address this. A nice feature would be to allow a certain type of files be placed in Clevernote folder in google drive and they are automatically converted into notes.

One question about your integration with Google tasks. I created a task in Clevernote and as expected it was also visible on google tasks. However, when I create few tasks on google tasks and add it to Clevernote list, they do not appear in clevernote website. Is your task integration just a one-way sync or am I doing something wrong?

[sup...@clevernote.co]

On Wednesday, August 6, 2014 3:15:08 PM UTC+1, ahn5...@gmail.com wrote:

 A nice feature would be to allow a certain type of files be placed in Clevernote folder in google drive and they are automatically converted into notes.

This was in fact an early feature that we dropped. The reason is to do with how Google Drive handles permissions. When you first run CleverNote, you are prompted to give us access "only to files that we create". So CleverNote has insufficient privilege to read any pre-existing Drive files, or files created with other apps including Google's own. We did this to give prospective users confidence that they weren't opening up potentially sensitive documents to access by a third party. The approach that we will take is to create a separate Drive import/export app which has permissions to read all of your Drive files, but which you will typically only run once, after which you may cancel the privilege without impacting CleverNote's functionality. So it's the eternal trade off between security and functionality.

 

One question about your integration with Google tasks. I created a task in Clevernote and as expected it was also visible on google tasks. However, when I create few tasks on google tasks and add it to Clevernote list, they do not appear in clevernote website. Is your task integration just a one-way sync or am I doing something wrong?

The synchronisation is currently one way. Our intention is to build a Tasks view into CleverNote which will give you two way sync.