Penguins and Wild Cats

I’ve used Journler for the past 3 years to capture all my rough notes and minutes; think of it as a virtual notebook for your Mac. The Windows analogy would be Microsoft OneNote, but in reality they are very different products with very different purposes.

Sadly, development on Journler has really ground to a halt over the past year or so, and exciting new “cloud” centric applications like Evernote have sprung up, featuring handy smartphone applications and text recognition. I decided to migrate, but did not want to lose my hundreds of existing Journler records.

Here’s how I moved my Journler notes over. This approach will map Journler folders to Evernote notebooks, will preserve create & modification dates of your Journler entries, and preserves HTML formatting. The Journler category is NOT parsed out or mapped, nor are tags supported.

1. Export all Journler records, by Journler category and/or target Evernote notebook. For example, if you have a Journler folder called “Personal”, select all entries and then choose: File / Export Selected Entries. You need to export the entries as “Rich Text”, Include header, Set file creation date, Set file modification date, and “Save each entry … in its own file all in a single folder.” NB: The folder you save to will become the name of the Evernote notebook.

2. Launch Evernote, go into Preferences, and in the Clipping tab, temporarily disable: “Bring note to front”, “Bounce dock icon” and “Play a sound”. In the General tab, click on “Grown preferences” and temporarily disable Growl for Evernote. You can turn these settings back on after the import, but trust me — if you import > 10 Journler entries, you will want these off.

3. Load the applescript below into Script Editor.app, and run it.

4. Pick the folder you exported your Journler entries to. Remember: the name of this folder becomes the name of the notebook in Evernote.

5. Run the script.

6. Rinse & repeat for your remaining Journler categories / notebooks.

7. Done!

You may want to consider using the export process from Journler as a way to remap your categories. If you export multiple Journler categories into the same output Folder, they will end up in the same Evernote notebook after import.

Code for the applescript below. There is no error checking, and standard disclaimers around ruining your existing Evernote records and formatting your hard drive apply.

set listOfNames to {}
set theFolder to choose folder "Select the source folder"

tell application "Finder"
	set filelist to every file of the folder theFolder
	repeat with currentFile in filelist
		set currentFileName to (the name of currentFile)
		set nom to currentFileName
		if text -4 of nom is "." then
			set currentFileName to (text 1 thru -5 of nom)
		end if
		set currentFileDate to (the creation date of currentFile)
		set currentFileLocation to currentFile as alias
		set currentFileFolder to (the name of theFolder)
		tell application "Evernote"
			create note title currentFileName created currentFileDate notebook currentFileFolder from file currentFileLocation
		end tell
	end repeat
end tell

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