Converting Notespark data to Simplenote

Notespark app users like myself face the scheduled 12/31/13 closure of the Notespark service. I am currently converting to other apps and services, but my commentary may help others with their own choices. When I was able to grab chunks of time, I painstakingly converted the majority (over 1000) of my Notespark data (notes and tags) manually via copy-and-paste into Simplenote clients using the Simplenote service. During that work, I unexpectedly stumbled upon this prescient 6/8/13 Notespark note to myself: "Simplenote might be a viable substitute (which actually may have a superior search capability) if Notespark server ever disappears".

I have also already bulk-converted a mutually exclusive subset of my Notespark data (about 400 notes) into a paired PlainText WriteRoom app + Dropbox app and service solution, about which I hope to write in a future blog entry. Those notes are understandably not connected to my Simplenote data, so cannot share tags (or the quasi-equivalent). There are issues with using Chinese vocabulary notes (I had bulk-converted over 200) in this solution, but there seem to be some viable workarounds; hopefully I won't later have to switch them to Simplenote via manual copy-and-paste.

This blog entry, moreso than any others here, will likely be subject to frequent updates, at least until 12/31/13. I'll try to add immediately below, in reverse chronological order, dated summaries of materially significant updates, if I don't incorporate them into a more suitable place further below.
11/21/13: Changed my other solution mentioned above from PlainText to WriteRoom from the same developer. The latter was serendipitously temporarily free during my investigations, and it has more features (and no ads!). (11/17/14: I discovered rather late that in a 1/6/14 blog entry, the developer announced that he would stop selling both of those iOS apps, mentioning PlainText 2 by 433 Labs as a replacement for both. That is likely to be my solution at whatever point I can no longer use [probably due to an iOS upgrade] my 3.3.5 version of Simplenote.)
11/18/13: Described my workaround for keeping the contents of Trash (and device-local notes) in sync across iPod and iPad.
11/16/13: Recently finished this data conversion. Updating and adding various details (including, among other things, starting my promised list of web client issues, and further discussing ResophNotes), and expect to continue doing so for a while yet.
11/9/13: This blog entry first posted. Due to time constraints, I'm leaving out a number of already-known details, but hope to add them later.

Particulars about my situation

For the "Your Mileage May Vary" department.

Note data

1. More than 1500 Notespark notes, most of which I want to keep.
2. About 60 Notespark tags; many notes have multiple tags.
3. Used + (plus character) in some tag names, including as the final character. With hindsight, using + was a bad choice, which also led to some (rare) inconsistent behavior in Notespark. When converting, I would have done better to switch to some other "regular" character when I created the analogous Simplenote tag; I had to deal with tag fallout from not having done so. I found it difficult/impossible (had to do it more than once, and I don't remember all details) to delete such a tag (and also, later, my test tag [zz上面z] which contained Chinese characters) from the iOS app unless I first changed its name to have only "regular" characters (e.g., from "A+" to "Aplus").

Hardware and software

1. iPod 4th generation (primary iOS device for note usage)
2. iPad 2
3. Older, weaker PC running Windows XP is my primary computer. With Firefox/Chome/Opera browsers, that seemed to be unable to effectively use the Simplenote web client after I had loaded several hundred notes. Although I've only done a small number of tests, ResophNotes looks promising as an alternate client; I'm using the portable 1.5.7 version. When editing a larger note, I sometimes find it helpful to write it, or at least part of it, separately in a text editor (e.g., an older version of EmEditor Free or Notepad++) to avoid the lag that comes with syncing to the Simplenote server; I did the same thing with respect to the Notespark server. When I'm finished, I copy the new text into ResophNotes (or Notespark's web interface previously). The ResophNotes programmer welcomes donations to support future development; it's already been very useful to me and I'm convinced it will continue to be, so I contributed.
   
   Related comments: http://help.simplenote.com/customer/portal/questions/1479733-simplenote-on-www-and-resophnote-unusable-slow
4. Staying with iOS 5.1.1 because of particular functionality which is lost in iOS 6 (and presumably iOS 7 as well).
5. As a consequence of (4), using the older 3.3.5 version of the Simplenote app (the newest version which runs under iOS 5).
6. Using the older 1.3.2 version of the Notespark app. I seemed to have better results with it than with 1.4, the latest version (although all versions have been removed from the Apple App Store in anticipation of the closure of the Notespark service).

Note management functionality important to me

Having a clear idea of what's important can help you decide where you're willing to accept compromises, which may include handling some of your note needs in other ways (e.g., using other software and/or services). I probably left out some note management functionality which is sufficiently basic that any "self-respecting" note management app would have it. My need/desire for the following functionality is what makes manually copying and pasting what may ultimately be more than 1000 notes worth doing.

1. iOS app with fast, efficient note management, limited to text only. Extra features like text formatting (bold, italic, etc.) would probably impede my own note usage.
2. Ability to sync data from iPod/iPad to a "master" data copy on a server over wifi; that master data copy serves as an ongoing backup.
3. Ongoing consistent data across different client software.
4. Ability to view notes grouped by tag.
5. Ability to apply multiple tags to a single note (traditional folder-type grouping of notes is not ideal).
6. Ability to search through notes, ideally either as a tagged group or all notes, for one or more text strings.
7. Web client which enables copying text into and out of any note in the master data copy on the server.
8. Ability to bulk-export a local backup of data from either the master data copy on the server or from iPod/iPad. The Notespark service is closing; one must be prepared for a future similar occurrence which would force you to again find a replacement solution.
9. Ability to handle French (ideally Spanish as well), Chinese characters, and Chinese "Pinyin-toned" vowels (e.g., the ā and ē in kāfēi), which presumably means Unicode.
10. Avoid the need for notes to be created as operating system files. Such files require assignment/maintenance of a file name for each note, which is unnecessary and counterproductive for the way I use notes.

Some issues I encountered with the above:

Re: (2) above:

• When I copy-pasted 30 or so notes from Notespark to Simplenote without wifi, then later connected to wifi, I got 30 or so blank notes in Simplenote after that automatic sync. Now I try to avoid adding larger amounts of data when I lack a wifi connection, in hopes of minimizing such problems.

Re: (3) above, I unexpectedly found myself willing to accept shortcomings in ongoing data (note/tag) consistency.

• Fresh reloads of data from scratch often failed to load hundreds of notes. Perhaps their server load (and/or changing server configurations?) was a factor, but I sometimes saw, e.g., 89 total notes when hundreds more should have been loaded. After about a dozen or 20 fresh reloads, I finally got the proper, matching number of notes loaded onto my iPod and iPad. One tag was out of order on the iPad (11/15/13: and more have gotten out of order since), which I could live with (unfortunately, more got out of order later). I'm hoping to avoid needing fresh reloads as long as I can (perhaps until device hardware failure). The (beta) export capability (http://simplenote-export.appspot.com) may confirm that the service "knows" the correct number of notes, even if you can't get them to the iOS client reliably during fresh reloads. I haven't yet investigated http://ziptest-dot-simple-note.appspot.com, which is mentioned on the Simplenote blog here.
• Tag order often inconsistent across software clients. Simplenote allows you to order your tags (instead of alphabetically ordering them, as Notespark does), but Simplenote clients don't reliably order tags as they are ordered on the Simplenote server (at least I imagine the server has some defined order of tags). Each client might show tags in a different order.
• Tag duplicates sometimes showed up after I changed tag names and/or tag order.
• Blank tags sometimes appeared in the tag list.
• Sometimes, a note deleted while using a client other than the iPad (definitely at least using the iPod) had to be subsequently deleted on the iPad as well, although I believed it would/should have been deleted there by the automatic sync.
  
  11/18/13: To reduce (maybe even eliminate) chances of mismatched deleted notes on 2 (or more) iOS devices, create a special tag (e.g., ToDelete) and attach it to notes to be deleted on any device (or a combination thereof). Then, only when both devices are connected to the Internet and are both running Simplenote in the foreground, delete all those notes from each device as needed: I've experienced the full gamut of sync consistency. Once, it was sufficient to delete them from only one device, and they were properly deleted from the other device as well. On another occasion, all those notes needed to be deleted from both devices. On yet another occasion, deleting them all from one device deleted all but one of them from the other device. Finally, tap the Empty button in the Trash (which should only need to be done on one device, and the other[s] should automatically update).
• For note usage, the iPod is my primary device, so I make some effort to make note changes on it instead of on the iPad when I have a choice. My idea is that whenever note/tag inconsistency is introduced, it would be better to occur on my secondary note usage device, the iPad.

General user interface issues observed in the iOS app

1. On the iPod (though not less so on the iPad), impossible must be very fast and precise (much more so than in Notespark) to use the two-finger tap to select a line -- neither of your fingers should be moving appreciably up or down (or probably even side-to-side) when they contact the screen, and they can't linger on the screen, either (contact the screen and get off FAST). You can alternately use rapid quadruple tap to select a line. Possibly due to the automatic syncing and device sensitivity.
2. When creating a new note or editing an existing one, the "Tag:" input area is sometimes inaccessible, so it is impossible to assign any additional tags to a note. The solution that has worked for me is to quit the app, expel it from RAM, then restart it. I'm already used to using that workaround for recurring problems with Apple's Calendar app and other third party app(s), so doing so is second nature to me.
3. On the iPod, when pasting 5 lines of text into an existing note which had been accessed via a tag "folder", the note's single tag was lost. As in (2), the "Tag:" input area was blank and inaccessible, though I'm not sure if that occurred when the note was opened, or perhaps after the pasting in of text. Check your note's tag situation after you are done editing if you need to confirm its tag(s).
   
   11/16/13: Having at this point seen similar behavior on numerous occasions, I believe that when starting (or perhaps switching to) the app and opening a note, I believe the "Tag:" input area functionality can fail for any write operations (note/tag/pin). The reason for this might be that the device is running low on usable RAM. As long as you do not edit the note/its tags/its pinned status, the note will not lose its pre-existing tag(s), so there should be no need to fear tag loss if you are only reading the note. The fix is exactly as described for (2) immediately above.
4. On the iPod, I pasted text into a new tagged note (tagged by virtue of my having been in that tag's "folder" when I created the note), tapped the end of the first line, typed in a two word parenthesized phrase and was surprised to see Simplenote remove(!) the two word phrase. Amusingly, it was "(didn't happen)". This happened to me on another occasion, and I think the issue is that you should not do further edits if you see the rotating "throbber" reflecting ongoing syncing activity.
5. I wish they had put the Settings button in the upper right corner (which is empty) instead of in the upper left, and for that screen had left the upper left corner as a no-operation zone. The upper left corner is the same place shared by the Back button (on a preceding screen). The Back button doesn't necessarily effect a prompt change in the app (and after being tapped, the button's visible appearance changes only a modest amount), leading me to sometimes tap that area twice, wondering if I actually made a proper first tap. The app's delayed response often enough means that I land in Settings instead of simply back one level. Notespark's equivalent tap-functionality was better designed: the Note*spark and the All Notes/Starred/Tags/Shared/Trash buttons occupied the upper left corner, but Settings was in the upper right corner. Notespark's speed of response when tapping those buttons was also normally/always immediate, which meant I would never tap such buttons twice just to make sure that the app had registered a tap.
6. On the iPad, when using landscape orientation, you can't always get to the lower ones if you have a larger number of tags. The fix that worked for me was to temporarily switch the iPad's orientation to portrait, then switch back to landscape.

(More issues to be filled in later. This list is intended to be separate from issues with data consistency, which I should have listed earlier in this blog entry.)

General user interface issues observed in the web app

1. If a tag contains Chinese characters, when you create a new note while inside that tag "folder", everything from the first Chinese character on in the tag is inserted into the note.
   
   Aside: if you name such tags with an ASCII character[s] at the beginning, e.g., zz上面z [ZZ Top, ha ha], you will be able to add such tags even from a browser where you lack access to enter Chinese characters. I added the trailing z to zz上面z to test if that would change the above-mentioned behavior, but it didn't.

(More to be filled in later. This list is intended to be separate from issues with data consistency, which I should have listed earlier in this blog entry.)

Miscellaneous comments

1. No way to see all notes lacking a tag (unlike Notespark's untagged "pseudo-tag"). This is more of a problem because of both item (2) above in General user interface issues observed in the iOS app, which can lead to your inadvertently making a note without a tag (though not for lack of trying to add such a tag), and also because my belief is that more than one of my notes has seemingly lost a tag for no obvious reason. The ResophNotes Windows client mentioned above has a "No-Tag Notes" pseudo-tag through which you can see such notes, which is helpful. (6/4/14: Per http://help.simplenote.com/customer/portal/questions/5820090-can-we-have-a-no-tag-filter-, tag:untagged works on the website.)
2. Note-pinning capability, which keeps notes at the top of all others, can be more useful to me than Notespark's note-starring capability, e.g., to keep a frequently modified grocery shopping list near the top of All Notes. As part of my conversion from Notespark, I discovered I had starred so many notes that the star had become largely meaningless for some (primarily older notes, which had aged out of my usual "radar screen" of notes -- out of sight, out of mind). Pinning does change the Modified date of notes, which can affect you if you are using that characteristic for ordering of notes (Notespark starring did not affect the By date sort order).
3. Unlike Notespark, has in-note search, which has unfortunately proven rather buggy in my experience (1/13/14: It appears that if a note is "long" [not sure what the character count threshold for "long" is], the in-note search fails to highlight occurrences of the search string in it, although Simplenote should correctly have returned the list of notes that do have the search string in them. If all your notes were "long", the functionality would be no more than what is in Notespark). My using "more-rarely-used" ASCII characters and/or Chinese characters in my notes might be causing or contributing to this problem. (Evernote highlights all occurrences of the search string within a note).
4. Functionality differs between iOS client and web client; sometimes one can fix an issue that the other cannot.

Other recommendations

Make yourself one or more Simplenote accounts and do your own testing with a subset of the data you intend to import to better gauge how well it might work for you. I did preliminary testing that way, which guided my subsequent real conversion efforts. Simplenote's account deletion process seems to be quite thorough and complete; I think I made and deleted the same test account (defined to be associated with an e-mail address) about half a dozen times. Regrettably, my preliminary testing did not reveal all of the issues I would eventually face.

If you're manually converting hundreds of notes, it's probably most reasonable to convert them in groups (tagged groups, presumably). If you want to preserve at least the chronological order of last update from Notespark, copy and paste the notes into Simplenote from oldest to newest; when doing so on iOS, take advantage of Notespark's left/up triangle button to go to the previous note (presuming you sort your notes By date).

If you're keeping notes about the conversion during the conversion, keep them in Notespark instead of in Simplenote. That presumes that you're satisfied with Notespark to date and that Simplenote is new to you. I did not think of this aspect when I started my conversion, and to some extent regretted keeping some such notes in Simplenote, where I was bitten on multiple occasions by unexpected, sometimes inconsistent, behavior.

Browse their Support Center at http://help.simplenote.com; you might find (or provide!) some useful information.

Recalcitrant iPod Home button and AssistiveTouch

The Home button on my 4th generation iPod Touch running iOS 5.1.1 has gotten inconsistently responsive over time. It no longer consistently registers a single press, or a double press, typically necessitating repeated presses beyond what the number which should be normal. At times I press it once, but that registers as a double press. completely failed. The degradation of response is no surprise to me. The device is a replacement remanufactured one, which I got from Apple at no charge near the end of the one year warranty period from my original 4th generation iPod Touch purchase. At that time, after confirming that it had not been immersed in water (there's an internal indicator for that), the Apple Store employees agreed that its Home button response had degraded badly enough to merit a hardware replacement. The replacement's Home button worked great for several months, but apparently the honeymoon (and, more significantly, the 90-day free replacement period) is over. (Interestingly, I don't remember noticing this problem with my 3rd generation iPod Touch, which I had also used under iOS 5.1.1.)

I stopped into an Apple Store and asked a floor employee (I didn't have a Genius Bar appointment) about possible remedies. The fellow I spoke with introduced me to iOS 5's AssistiveTouch, of which I was only dimly aware, if at all (It is documented in the iPod touch User Guide For iOS 5.0 Software, and probably elsewhere as well). It can be set in:
Settings > General > Accessibility > Physical & Motor > Assistive Touch
I also activated Triple-click Home > Toggle AssistiveTouch. (After the Home Button completely stopped working, I changed this to Triple click Home > Off since I needed the AssistiveTouch button all the time.)

AssistiveTouch wasn't intended as a fix for a recalcitrant Home button, but it works pretty well for that. When it's active, the AssistiveTouch button appears in one of 8 positions for the pre-5th generation iPod Touch: 4 along each of the left or right edges of the screen. The longer screen of the 5th generation iPod touch may add 2 more positions. Drag the AssistiveTouch button (even part of the distance) to change its position; it will jump to the new position.

It will likely be helpful to have a usual position for the AssistiveTouch button, so your finger automatically knows where to go. For portrait mode, which I use far more often than landscape mode, the 4 positions in the lower half of the screen are a poor choice, since they can interfere with keyboard input. When using the iPod with one hand, the 2nd position down on the left was a comfortable position for my left thumb. You might, as I did, rearrange apps and app groups on your various Home Screens to work better with the AssistiveTouch button's normal positioning. You can still open an app which is obscured by the AssistiveTouch button, but you will have to be more precise with your tap.

The concentric circles in the AssistiveTouch button are opaque white when it's first activated. After a short time, those circles and their square background become translucent, allowing easier identification of the area of the screen behind. The AssistiveTouch button is thus normally always present on the screen, either opaque or translucent -- you might want to turn it off before, e.g., watching a video. Screenshots are regrettably heavily obscured by AssistiveTouch, although some options supposedly exist for getting around that obscurement if you jailbreak your device.

Tap the AssistiveTouch button to bring up the options, one of which is a software version of the Home button. Tap that once or twice as desired, just like you would the hardware Home button. With AssistiveTouch I could make one additional tap (to bring up the options) and then do a single or double tap of its Home button, or I could make some unpredictable (because I never really know how any given tap will register) number of taps of the hardware Home button to do the same thing. I use the hardware and software Home buttons at different times, and am pretty happy doing so.

Depending on usage, I sometimes drag the AssistiveTouch button elsewhere (because I need access to the area of the screen where it had been sitting), but much of the time it's fine on top of the position of the app (or app group) sitting in the second row and first column of a Home Screen. When drafting this revision in Notespark, it was useful to move the AssistiveTouch button to the upper left corner, the lone position out of the 8 possible which would not interfere at all with my text editing.

The software Home button is additionally quieter than the hardware Home button. It's also more gentle/discreet to, from the AssistiveTouch options, tap Device > Shake, instead of physically shaking the device (e.g., to Undo Typing).

Apps useful for my trip to London

Recently I traveled to London. I am not much of a photographer, neither in frequency of shots taken, nor, as many will rightly say, in quality of shots, but having the 4th generation iPod Touch with its camera led me to take some shots, like this one of the Big Ben Clock Tower.

In preparation for the trip, I created a (free) Google Voice account which would be able to call U.S. (and Canada, I believe) numbers for free until the end of 2012 (I believe that was extended from its original end of 2011 cut-off date) 2013 (http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/free-calling-within-us-and-canada.html). A knowledgeable friend had advised me that such an account could be used by the (free) Talkatone app to turn the iPod into a phone (1/3/14: That capability is ending on 5/5/14 due to changes by Google; see, for instance, the 10/31/13 post on https://www.facebook.com/talkatone.). I installed Talkatone, and despite a few hiccups during stateside testing, it worked quite well from London, allowing me to retrieve some messages from my answering machine. After returning from London I did a little more testing and, on one occasion, I was surprised that I could call a landline but could not reach a cell phone. Anyway, the combination of these two things served me well across the pond, even if the sound quality is not great.

I loaded up some additional free apps for the trip, listed below in approximate order of usefulness. Some of them would have been more useful, except I had alternate, more helpful, resources, which I will also mention.

• London: Travel Guide - Time Out has assorted information about London.  I did browse this a bit, but it was of minimal use to me because I had the good luck to borrow from the library the (more useful) 2010 Kindle e-book of Time Out London, which I consulted instead.  I also had several similarly recent, printed London travel materials on loan from a friend.
• Brighton Museums was good for £1 off entry to the Royal Pavilion in Brighton (about an hour by train from London).  It has photos and brief information about the Royal Pavilion and other attractions, but its primary benefit to me was the discount.
• Tube Map has, in addition to a map of the London Underground ("the Tube"), a Lines button which shows up-to-date information by subway line, e.g., "Good service", "Planned closure", "Part closure", "Line issue" (all of which I am seeing as I write this entry).  A small popup window may show periodically on the map with Tube alert-type information; I'm not sure if that overlaps with the Lines information.  The Tube Map app's buttons, advertising, and alerts naturally take up part of the iPod's precious screen space.  With hindsight I should have checked the Lines status each day before leaving the hotel (or leaving anywhere else I had WiFi), but I did not run into any meaningful Tube schedule disruptions (and at various stations I did learn in person of some minor scheduled service changes which were part of preparation for the coming Summer Olympics).  I had also loaded a PDF of the London Tube map (which I'd found using Google) onto the Dropbox app and saved it as a Favorite therein so that it would be available without WiFi access.  That was my real Tube resource, and was extremely useful both for scoping out trips in advance and while on a train.  In the most extreme situations, when riding with only one hand free, it was still easy to use spread-to-zoom and swipe motions to confirm that I was on the proper train, which easily beat doing so using a clumsy folding map with tiny print.
  (3/21/12: With their 4.1 update, the makers of this app have added integration with their Bus London app, of which I just learned, and could have been handy for the Tate Britain museum, which is a bit of a walk from the nearest Tube station. Supposedly within the Tube Map app, you can now find bus departures around a Tube station.)
• Hidden London contains photos and information about some less well-known attractions.  Although I had mentally noted some of those attractions before the trip, in the end it was only by accident that I happened to walk by one (the Cartoon Museum) and actually went to one (the Cafe at Tate Britain).  Regarding the latter, I had gotten confused about museums and went to the Tate Britain instead of the Tate Modern, but as this app notes, this "little know[n] excellent cafe hides in the basement of this grand art gallery.  Open daily, the cafe serves amazing cakes, snacks and a range of tea and coffee."  The cafe truly was excellent!
• ExCel London provides some general information, including food availability, about the convention site, which would presumably only be of interest if you are attending an event there.
• i-Shop has some information about possible discounts or tax refunds from selected shops.  I did see the Global Blue symbol (Global Blue is either the producer or somehow related to this app) inside the Tower of London gift shop, but I did not buy enough stuff to make serious investigation of this app worthwhile.

In addition to the Time Out London e-book mentioned above, I also borrowed a recreational reading e-book from the library before the trip.  Library e-books "return" themselves, so you never need to worry about them (unlike the half-read physical book which I had to return to the library on my last night in the U.S. during last minute trip preparations!).  I also bought an e-book for the Kindle app, so was well stocked with reading material.

The Notespark app, which I originally wrote about here, facilitated organizing London topics and a daily schedule.  I used a particular Tag for all London notes, and starred all of those notes.  Most of the time I would just work with the group of Starred notes.  I also dedicated a single note for each day's potential agenda, an agenda which often went through revisions.  When the contents of any note were no longer relevant for the remaining days of my trip (although I expected to revisit all London notes after the trip), I unstarred that note so that it would no longer be visual clutter.  I could use Notespark to search through whichever group of notes was more relevant, the Starred ones, or the group associated with the Tag which I used for this London trip.

When I had WiFi access both before and during the trip, I saved static copies of a number of London-related web pages, e.g., for various tourist attractions and travel tips, using the Opera Mini browser (about which I wrote most recently here).  I'll admit that despite getting a bunch of information in advance about Oyster Cards and Travel Cards (both of which are options, pointedly not mutually exclusive, for using the Tube and some other transportation systems), it wasn't until pretty late in the trip that I felt I really got a fuller understanding of them.

Crash landing on iOS 5.0.1

I had not been planning to upgrade my 3rd generation iPod from iOS 4.3.5 to iOS 5, having been happy with its capabilities as is.  I had also learned of, and/or experienced, a number of problems associated with iOS 5.  Typically, iOS 5 either broke an existing app, or an app's functionality worsened when the developers updated it to accommodate iOS 5.

I've mentioned on multiple occasions how my iPod has a hardware port problem. Aligning its cord properly to charge can take a few minutes of fiddling, and properly aligning it for a PC iTunes connection is even more demanding.  In those delicate alignment attempts, "Charging is not supported with this accessory" is a message I've periodically seen for more than two months.  That message came up again yesterday as I was trying to get it to charge, and when I tried to lower the brightness...bam, it was totally hosed.  The screen displayed only the iTunes icon and a picture of a USB cord, as shows up when you activate a pre-iOS 5 iPod, which requires a wired connection to Mac/PC iTunes.

After several hours of work, including numerous error messages and laborious re-seating of the cable at multiple junctures, my iPod is now at iOS 5.0.1.  I mistakenly thought that I would be able to restore from my less than two week old PC iTunes backup and remain on iOS 4.3.5.  However, it seems that PC iTunes only allows loading of the most recent iOS version that works for your device -- not unreasonable.  At least I was able to get back my 102 apps from PC iTunes in a single operation.

Backing up to iCloud should reduce my cable alignment problems to only recharging the iPod, since I should be able to restore over wireless from now on.

I was surprised to discover there was no way to mass-reload my hundreds of French language instruction podcasts, but I have started rebuilding my collection manually.  (2/9/11:  Actually, I could have used PC iTunes to copy over all that I had previously synced.)

I was also surprised that my small number of not-particularly-important photos did not come back.  I have seen a few web articles suggesting ways to get them back, and I may yet pursue that.  If I do, I will try to report the result here later.

The Traditional Chinese handwriting recognition seems tangibly slower, both on a 3rd generation and on a 4th generation iPod, than it was on a 3rd generation iPod running iOS 4.3.5.
(12/2/14: When only a single app [Notespark, as a device-local-only scratchpad] is in RAM, the speed of recognition is quite good, possibly similar to the speed under iOS 4.3.5. I'm surprised that I didn't think of testing this approach previously. Of course, it's inconvenient to eject all the other apps from RAM, but in some cases it's worth doing; when I'm done handwriting the Chinese text, I can Select All and copy it elsewhere as desired.)

As I worked to recreate groups of apps and reassemble my desired first Home Screen ("springboard"), I seem to have moved some app icons so quickly that the iOS became confused.  For a while the icons of some random apps (no more than one per screen, I think) became invisible, although their titles remained visible.  With all the icons jiggling and me swiping screens left to right and right to left, the app which was invisible would sometimes change (i.e., an invisible one would become visible, but a different app on the same screen would become invisible instead).  I found it was possible to drag an invisible app onto a visible one to create a group, but not vice versa.  That invisibility problem eventually cleared up, so everything is visible now.

Although Apple tried to disallow moving the new Newsstand app into a folder and off of the first Home Screen, folks have found out how to do that.  I moved it into a folder with Messages and Reminders, two other new apps for which I have no particular need, then moved the folder off the first Home Screen.  A Google search for "ios 5 move newsstand to folder" should find assorted pages with the technique, which does require a certain quickness of action.

Below is a list of some of the functionality which I wanted to recover, and commentary on what was involved.  I tend not to give my location to apps to use, normally entering that manually when I want (e.g., in The Weather Channel app).

1. Calendar (iOS 5.0.1):  I use a Google account for Calendar, so it was simple to add that account to the iPod.  Although the Day and Month views showed my events, the List view was empty at first, so I feared I would have to create another calendar from scratch (ugh) to restore that functionality.  However, the next day the List view showed events normally.
2. Contacts (iOS 5.0.1):  I use a Google account for Contacts, so again, it was simple to add that account to the iPod.
3. Notespark (1.3.2):  All my data is already on Metaspark's webserver, so all I had to do was login and tweak a few settings (e.g., font size, etc.), and I was back to pre-crash functionality.
4. iCED (3.2.3):  I had previously made a Murage account and it was straightforward to download my paid Add-ons again.  I made a few tweaks to settings (e.g., maximize History).
5. tChess Pro (1.7.1):  Much like Notespark, I just had to tweak a few settings to get it to look and behave the way I like it.  I normally e-mail myself the pgn of individual games that I play through using tChess Pro, so I can easily reload those.  I have also kept files on my PC of pgn collections of games, which I can similarly e-mail myself to reload.  (This is one of my most-used apps, so a blog entry on it should eventually appear.)
6. Opera Mini (6.0.1 - pointedly not the latest version, which is 6.5.1, which for now I'm holding off on upgrading to):  Initially I started recreating my Speed Dial locations manually, and had 8 of the total 9 set up -- I didn't know the 9th one's URL.  Then I used Opera Link to restore my (generally-rarely-changed) bookmarks from the last time I saved them, and it loaded the missing 9th Speed Dial location.  Apparently I wasted my time loading the first 8 manually.
7. Safari (iOS 5.0.1):  I was pleased to discover that Apple was apparently already saving bookmarks, so they all came back automatically.  I still prefer Opera Mini, though.  I tend to use Safari only when Opera Mini can't do the job.
   After first writing this Safari blurb, I checked out Safari's new Reader feature, which can render some web pages in a more readable way (hiding ads, too!). In my limited testing, Wikipedia article pages work well with Reader (though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_page not so well), as does this eminently readable article about iOS 5 improvements, which is what led me to really test the new Reader and Reading List features. This wiki article about "Kindle Myths and Partial Truths" (some content of which is relevant to iOS devices using the Kindle app) has part of its content cut off on the sides in the Reader view.  I have observed that an advertisement embedded within a column of text on a web page can render Reader results incomplete (on one occasion, none of the article text actually came through in Reader).
   To compensate for the small screen of the iPod, I have long used Opera Mini's Single column view to transform the elements on a web page, including the font(s), into a presentation I find easier to read. Reader fulfills the same function with more polish, but can transform far fewer web pages than Opera Mini.  Without these transformations, text can sometimes be difficult to read without "spreading" pages with your fingers (to enlarge the image), after which you might additionally still need to move the display back and forth to see different parts of the whole text.
   Reading List saves bookmarks to iCloud and shares them in Safari across iOS devices (and Macs, supposedly, too, but I have a PC). The Reading List bookmarks didn't show on my other iOS device in either "direction", initially, and multiple web pages, some from as recently as October 2011, suggested that it didn't work. Perhaps from iOS 5 this syncing was fixed in 5.0.1, because eventually the same Reading List bookmarks showed up on both my iPod and iPad.
   Reading List's syncing seems to be forced among iOS devices sharing an Apple ID. Opera Link's similar syncing of bookmarks is optional, and can be done manually or automatically among Opera Mini instances within which you have logged into Opera Link.
   
8. Kindle (2.8.5):  Login, all my books were under Archived, and it was simple to download 15 of them into Home.  (2 were expired library loans.)  Select a word in any book, then download the dictionary to make it available going forward regardless of Internet access.
9. iBooks (iOS 5.0.1):  Login, go to Store, Purchased, and download each of the 14 (all freebies) again.  Maybe I was doing something in a non-optimal way, but it seemed to be an extremely clunky and user-hostile interface.  I could only download the top 3 books, then had to Swipe to the right to be able to Hide each of them in turn so that I could access the next 3 lower books on the screen.  I had to repeat that procedure to get through all 14.
10. The Weather Channel (4.1.1):  Add my location to Favorites under Bookmarks and get rid of whatever is already there.
11. Dropbox (1.4.6):  Login, mark as Favorites the documents I want saved locally so they're available without wireless Internet access.  Set Local Storage to maximum reasonable for device's capacity.
12. OverDrive (2.3.3):  Although the iPod didn't need an Adobe ID to authorize usage under iOS 4, it requires one under iOS 5.  Download my usual Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar to confirm download of public domain ebooks, then test other types (e.g., Adobe ePub from the library) as desired.  (I wrote in another blog entry about how to view Kindle books on library websites using an iPod.)

I am updating this entry with additional items and comments, and am also revising earlier entries accordingly, as time permits.


One of the reasons I started this blog was because I had read Sonny Hung's My Apple Newton (PDA) blog, which he introduces as:

This blog records my Apple Newton experiences, as well as comparisons with other PDAs, Smartphones and Mobile Devices. It is also a repository for storing complex set up procedures for future reference.

I thought I might enjoy doing something similar for the iPod since I found it to be an extremely useful PDA.  Based on the web searches that brought people here, this blog may have been helpful to some other folks, but in any case, it has certainly proven useful to me after this crash.  Given how my iPod seems to be living on borrowed time, my blog will likely serve me well again similarly in the future.

iPod RAM

Apple does not advertise the amount of RAM (Random Access Memory) in the iPod (or iPhone or iPad). On computers, memory normally refers to RAM. However, common (Apple-promoted) usage of the word memory in the iOS device context refers to what is typically known as storage on computers (hard drive or solid state drive capacity).

Some folks typically take apart each new Apple device to find out how much RAM it has, then post their findings on the web. Based on that information, my 3rd generation iPod has 256 MB. In practice the question of whether your iOS device has enough RAM probably boils down to, "Does it do what you need it to do?"

In my earlier experimentation, I was loading 4 Chinese dictionary apps. That, plus being in the midst of watching a movie on Netflix and loading multiple pages in Safari may have been the most demanding usage I was making on my iPod's RAM. In any case, I began experiencing performance delays.

Entering my Passcode, there would be a delay between when I tapped the screen and the (normal) black dots showed up. When I wrote Chinese characters using strokes, there would be a delay before the strokes actually appeared on screen.

I also started experiencing crashes in Safari. On the iPod, restarting Safari is pretty quick, so that didn't really put me into a tizzy. I also experienced one crash in Notespark while editing a note that was entirely in Chinese.

I eventually concluded which of the 4 Chinese dictionary apps met my needs best, so I no longer needed to access the others with any frequency. After 2 longish "intermissions", I also finally finished watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Netflix. That allowed me to release the RAM those apps might have been holding.

After double-pressing the Home button to show recently used apps, tap-hold any of the app icons until a red "minus" circle appears in the left corner of each icon (the icons also start jiggling). Tapping on the red minus circle of one of those recently used apps should release any RAM it has been holding onto.

Reducing the number of apps in that recently used set, and keeping fewer pages open in Safari seem to have largely eliminated my iPod RAM issues. It would be swell if my iPod had the 512 MB RAM that the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 have, but managing my app usage a little more tightly seems to have eliminated practical issues.

Someday I may go back to using apps with wild abandon, without explicitly freeing RAM as described above, to see if any issues surface, now that I'm largely done testing those 4 Chinese dictionary apps. After all, ideally a consumer need not concern himself overly much with RAM issues. If I find anything of interest, I will try to update this entry.
4/27/11: Forget that wild abandon. Slow performance in Safari showed up almost immediately.

8/26/12: On my (now) 4th generation iPod running iOS 5.1.1, I had more apps open than I realized, and was surprised to discover that it was so low on available RAM that it couldn't send Camera Roll pictures out via e-mail, and within the Mail app, the Outbox messages did not even show the images.

10/22/12: Once again, I had more apps open than I realized, and found that the Mail app could update neither the iPod's mail message counts, nor mail messages for activity (e.g., deletion) that had already occurred on the multiple mail servers I use. Because of my 8/26/12 experience, I quickly realized what the problem likely was, and quit other apps to free up RAM, and things worked again as desired.

iPod is a dream device for practicing Chinese

For years I have kept notes of assorted Chinese vocabulary to which I have been exposed and which I seek to remember. Most of those notes are on paper, but occasionally they are in electronic form, like in Palm Note Pad, which allowed drawing of anything, e.g., Chinese characters, as graphics.

With the iPod, I finally have a take-everywhere combined reference and repository to lookup (via dictionary apps, such as these) and record (using Notespark) things. I am manually transferring some of my Palm Note Pad Chinese vocabulary to the iPod, and perhaps will similarly transfer some of my old paper entries.

Within Notespark, I have a 中文 生詞 (Chinese vocabulary) Tag. Each note labeled with that tag typically gets the "triplet" of English + Chinese character + Pinyin, e.g.:

paper clip 迴紋針 huíwénzhēn

Limiting a note to a single vocabulary item allows me to see a list of the items I've entered for easy review, even if the entire triplet (which becomes the note's title), is not immediately visible. If I want to record a date or some other piece of information with a vocabulary note (e.g., because it helps me think of associated circumstances), I put it on the first line, which makes it the note's title instead. The triplet still shows up underneath the title, in a smaller font size, and in gray instead of in black.

Originally I labeled these vocabulary notes with a 中文 (Chinese) Tag, but I now use that Tag strictly for notes which contain Chinese but are not intended as vocabulary records.

Since the iPod supports entering Chinese characters via strokes, I am able to practice my character writing skills, instead of just exercising my phonetic memory of words to generate characters using Pinyin, the typical computer method. Using Chinese this way in notes, e-mail, and blog posts is fun with the iPod!

"Converting" Palm Tasks to iPod using Notespark

6/23/12: I eventually decided I wanted a dedicated to-do list app, and found a good one: GoTasks.

1/3/14: Notespark services except for export were shut down on 12/31/13.

The Palm Tasks functionality is like a to-do list, with the ability to assign a priority between 1 and 5 to each item. You could check each item off when it was done, keeping an archive record of it on your PC if you chose. I just learned a moment ago that you could also set a due date on an item, a feature I obviously never used.

I simply used Palm Tasks as a somewhat longer term to-do list, which I only occasionally consulted.  Given that, I created five Notespark (which I first wrote about here) Tags tasks1 through tasks5, and used copy and paste operations on my PC (between Palm Desktop and Notespark's web interface) to throw all the items having a priority of 1 into a single note with the Tag tasks1, doing the analogous operation down to the items having a priority of 5.  Then I synched Notespark to get those items onto my iPod.

I never archived checked-off Tasks items on the Palm, I merely deleted them.  Keeping all the items in Notespark notes allows me to access them rapidly without needing a dedicated to-do list app, and I just delete the text of any item that I finish.

Converting Palm memos to iPod using Notespark

12/29/13: I switched to both Simplenote and to WriteRoom+Dropbox for different portions of my Notespark usage, which I wrote about here.

10/26/13: I am so sad to learn that the Notespark Team plans to shut down the Notespark service on December 31, 2013, suggesting:

We recommend that you export your notes and import them into an alternative product, such as Evernote, which is free, or one of the many Dropbox-based notes apps (e.g., Notesy, Nebulous, Write, PlainText).

They have apparently removed the app from the Apple App Store. It was a great run, but having observed the slowed pace of the app's development in recent times, I'm not totally surprised by this news.


I recently got a used 3rd generation (no camera) iPod Touch. It has an unreliable communication port, so synching data with iTunes does not appear to be a practical possibility without a $200 repair (3/20/11: If I really needed iTunes connectivity, an Apple Certified Refurbished iPod Touch could be a better deal, coming with a new battery and outer shell, plus free shipping). However, after fiddling with the connected cable, I was at least able to upgrade the iPod's iOS to 4.2.1. Then my adventure began, and a most enjoyable adventure it's been.

The first Palm PDA data I converted for use on my iPod was Memos, of which I had a couple hundred. After discovering that the iPod's built-in Notes application was incredibly ("laughably") basic compared to Palm Memos, I researched various replacement apps in Apple's App Store and on the web.

The clear winner: Notespark (version 1.3.1; $4.99 when I installed it). It quickly and correctly converted all of my Memos into its own notes, translating over the Palm category (e.g., "Business", "Personal", plus the categories I had created) into a Tag.

Notespark synchronizes note data from iPods over the web (using https) to their servers. Although I originally wanted to keep the synching of data between my iPod and my PC, I couldn't do that with the iPod's broken communication port -- the iPod wouldn't show up reliably as a device in iTunes. However, my notes being on Notespark's servers brought the huge advantage of being able to edit notes over the web. Using a computer, I can copy lengthy text from the web onto my iPod (after a sync), or edit Notespark notes whenever a computer keyboard is more helpful than the iPod's on-screen keyboard (most of the time, although at the moment, I can only enter Chinese from the iPod).

Some Notespark note advantages over Palm Memos:

• Notespark Tags are like Google Mail's Labels: more than one can be applied to a single data object (a Notespark note or an e-mail message, respectively).
• Accepts Chinese characters, providing a great practical opportunity to practice writing them more often. To use Chinese characters (I use traditional, but behavior is presumably the same for simplified) when creating a new Tag, you must include a regular English letter to activate the Save button. Then you can delete the English letter and use the still-active Save button. I've notified Notespark of this bug; the Notespark web interface works fine with Chinese characters and does not need this workaround.
• Lengthy notes are possible. On the Palm, I had been forced to split some text across multiple memos because it wouldn't fit into a single one.
• You can limit the scope of a search to the notes within a given category, e.g., All (closest to the Find capability on Palm, which always searches through all Memos and other data stores such as Calendar, Contacts, etc.), Starred, or associated with a specific Tag you have created. If you have a Tag for, e.g., Project_1, and you only want to look for occurrences of a particular string within notes that have that Tag, you can do so, avoiding superfluous search results associated with other Tags. (Herein is mention of how a Tag and Starred was useful to me for travel.)
• Because you can sync data on the Notespark server with your iPod, if your iPod is out of power but you have access to an Internet-connected computer, you can make changes to your notes over the web and sync them to your iPod later, when it does have power.
• The reverse chronological ordering, based on date last edited, of notes, can be helpful. One time I had edited multiple notes having multiple Tags, and a short time afterward I remembered there was something I had written which I had wanted to deal with. Checking the All category showed me the notes I'd edited recently, so I was able to quickly find what I was looking for.

Some Palm Memo advantages over Notespark notes:

• Can rename a category and simultaneously update all memos already associated with it. Pick your Tag names carefully in Notespark, or else you may be in for some laborious future renaming, one note at a time (speaking as someone who knows from multiple such experiences).
• Categories sort case-insensitive, the most intuitive way. "iPod" should not appear lower in an alphabetical list than "Zune", which is what would happen now in Notespark on an iPod. Before converting from Palm Memos you may wish to rename all your categories to use consistent letter case for sorting consistency within Notespark. The Notespark web interface does sort categories case-insensitive. I've notified Notespark of this inconsistency; they've filed it with other bugs, and hopefully it will eventually be fixed so that iPod Notespark sorts categories case-insensitive, as it should.
• Memos stay in the order found on the Palm (this was even a choice within the Palm Desktop PC client: Sort by "Order on Handheld"). If you grouped two memos adjacent to each other, you could edit either of them without disturbing the order in which they appear among other memos. Notespark Settings allows notes to appear either in reverse chronological order by last date edited, or in alphabetical order of "title" (what I believe is the first line of text of a note). Notespark's title order option is not as useful as the arbitrary order of the Palm, which you could set yourself by dragging a note to a different ordinal position.

I've only lightly touched on the web interface and other aspects of Notespark. Check out https://notespark.com for more information.

I have no affiliation with Notespark other than as a satisfied customer.