Evernote API: Geo-Assistant Where Now

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

Application:  WhereNow / GeoMe
Developer:  gdeseychas.ru
Location:  St. Petersburg
Platforms:  iPhone ,  Android ,  Chrome ,  Pebble
Category:  Communications, Social Networks
Integration:  Connect Evernote Account 

In addition to the main function (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 everyday ones: home and work addresses of friends, places without a specific name / address that may be useful in the future.

Evernote Integration

After connecting to your Evernote account, the corresponding contact will appear in the application’s contact list. You can send him information about your locations and the locations of friends - they will automatically be 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. Through your Evernote account, you can add geo-notes with additional information, rearrange them in notebooks, share with friends, etc.



You can connect Evernote directly from the application in the extensions section or on the website - gdeseychas.ru/apps/evernote/detail .

Developer Interview

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 the idea of ​​Where Now with the guys about two years ago. It consisted of making a phone call replacement application with the question “Where are you?”. Around this question, the application was built.

Already then there were applications locators from giants (“Locator” from Google and “Find Friends” from Apple) and instant messengers with sending a geo-position. But the locators, it seems to me, violate personal freedom, allowing you to discreetly track your movements (apparently that's why I did not meet people who would use them), and instant messengers only partially solve the problem - when meeting while driving or on the go it’s still easier to call.

Initially, I was just interested in trying myself in iOS development. But after developing the prototype, when we started using Where Now Now live, it became clear that the idea was worthwhile. And later I completely devoted myself 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 a useful and irreplaceable function of working with geo-tags (selected places) has formed itself. When I send or receive a position in Where Now, it is stored in the history of correspondence with the contact. And later you can find this right place, get directions or send the coordinates to a friend. It can be anything: the worker's / home address of a friend, the coordinates of a summer cottage in the country, a place of outdoor recreation, a good restaurant, car service, a storehouse, etc.

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



The Where Now + Evernote bunch can be used not only to create an archive of your places, but also for individual tasks: for example, to compose notes after a trip. One of our active users, for example, uses this function for their work purposes (in the outdoor advertising business): it saves geo-notes simply with photos without comments, and later, supplementing the note with the necessary information, makes the placement orders.

Tell us about your experience with the Evernote API

Evernote supports oAuth authentication, 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 - that means there were no problems with the API. Any note is a small HTML document, so the developer is free to save any content in the note. But in our case, it turned out to be useful to have a specific field “Location” in the note indicating the geographical coordinates of the place.
This means that Evernote geo-notes can later be conveniently viewed in official applications, for example, with the Atlas function, regardless of the source and content of the note itself. So, a geo-notebook with notes about a trip or finding an apartment for rent can be displayed at once on a map for easy viewing.

Do you use it 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 this is not a tool for every day.

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

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

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

We will promote the application in the USA, 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, we will gradually integrate Evernote more closely into our applications, so that the user does not think about manually saving important places that can be useful to him later.