Evernote API: Geo Helper Where Now

WhereNow is a geo-assistant on the phone, an application for personal sharing of a location with friends and family in one click, which you can trust without worrying about your privacy. Denis Magda, developer and co-founder of the application spoke about the experience of integration with Evernote.

Appendix: WhereNow / GeoMe
Developer: gdeseychas.ru
Location: St. Petersburg
Platforms: iPhone , Android , Chrome , Pebble
Category: Communication, Social Networks
Integration: Connect an Evernote account

In addition to the main function (to find out who and where is located) Where Now is a tool for working with geo-notes. Unlike social services such as Foursquare and others, this is not about public places, but about household: home and work addresses of friends, places with no definite name / address that may be useful in the future.

Integration with Evernote

After connecting to your Evernote account, the corresponding contact will appear in the contact list of the application. He can send data about his locations and the locations of friends - they will be automatically added to the notebook "Where Now" in your Evernote account. All important places and addresses will be collected in one place, and the user will not lose them. You can add geo-notes with additional information through your Evernote account, regroup into notebooks, share with friends, etc.
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You can connect Evernote directly from the application in the extensions section or on the website - gdeseychas.ru/apps/evernote/detail .

Interview with the developer

Denis Magda, co-founder, iOS developer

When, how and why did you decide to create this product? What problem does your application solve?

We started discussing with the guys the idea of ​​Where Now about two years ago. It was to make an application to replace the phone call with the question “Where are you?”. The application was built around this issue.

Already at that time there existed locator applications from giants (Google’s “Locator” and Apple’s “Find Friends”) and instant messengers with sending geo-positions. But locators, it seems to me, violate personal freedom, allowing you to track your movements imperceptibly (apparently so I didn’t meet people who would use them), and messengers only partly solve the problem - it’s still easier to call when you meet the driver or on the go.

I initially had just the interest to try myself in iOS development. But after the development of the prototype, when we started using Live Now, it became clear that the idea was worth it. And later I devoted myself completely to the project.

Why did you decide to integrate with Evernote? What are the benefits of this integration? When can it be useful?

In addition to the main task - to find out who is where - in Where Now, the useful and irreplaceable function of working with geo-tags (selected places) has been self-educated. When I send or receive a position now, it is stored in the history of correspondence with a contact. And later you can find the right place, get directions or send the coordinates to a friend. It can be anything: work / home address of a friend, the coordinates of a country house, a place for outdoor recreation, a good restaurant, a car-care center, a storehouse, etc.

When it came to notes, we first looked at Evernote. Having made a tool to quickly save geo-notes to Evernote notebook, we thereby gave the user a convenient tool for further work with geo-notebooks, without complicating our application. The Task Where Now is to quickly save the position, possibly with a photo and a comment. And later at home, at the computer, you can organize your geo-notes, distribute them into notebooks, add an additional description, share a notebook, etc.



A link Where Now + Evernote can be used not only to create an archive of your seats, but also for individual tasks: for example, to compose notes after a trip. One of our active users, for example, applies this function for their business purposes (in the outdoor advertising business): saves geo-notes just from a photo without comments, and later, complementing the note with the necessary information, creates orders for placement.

Tell us about your experience with the Evernote API

Evernote supports oAuth authorization, and the platform API is supported by libraries in the main languages, so the connection took a minimum of time. There is nothing special to tell - it means there were no problems with the API. Any note is a small HTML document, so the developer is free to save any content to the note. But in our case, the presence in the note of a specific “Location” field indicating the geographical coordinates of the place turned out to be useful.
This means that Evernote geo-notes can later be conveniently viewed in official applications, for example, using the Atlas function, regardless of the source and content of the note itself. So, a geo-notebook with notes about the trip or the search for an apartment for rent can be displayed at once on the map for easy viewing.

Do you use yourself or someone from your Evernote team?

I have been using Evernote since its launch in Russia (then it was published for the first time on Habrahabr), but for me personally it is not a tool for every day.

On which devices do you use it and for what tasks?

The main use is an archive for notes, which I can return to much later. On the computer I use the web version and Web Clipper . On the iPhone is the official app . Evernote itself rarely open. Just save there notes from a third-party application / site and I understand that this will not disappear from me.

What are your future plans for developing Where Now? Or maybe some other applications? Will they be integrated with Evernote?

We will promote the application in the US, work closely with wearable gadgets (smart watches, Google Glass), make the application even faster and easier.
As for integration with Evernote: at the moment there are no convenient tools for working with household geo-notes. We will try to make this tool inside Where Now, and integration with Evernote is simply necessary here. Therefore, gradually we will more closely integrate Evernote into our applications, so that the user does not think about manually saving important places that may later be useful to him.