Steve Wagar

CalS, I was inspired to do more searching in the App store and I found an app called Shortcut by Yannick Rave for $0.99 that solves my problem better than Phrase Express would. I got the app, and it's keyboard only does one-tap shortcuts; it is not a normal full-featured keyboard like Phrase Express's. However, those shortcuts can be plain text or dates formatted any way you like. There is no doc, but you can see the date format in the example picture. I use {{Date: yy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss}} for Date and time. Works like a charm and easy to pull up. appadvice.com/app/shortcut-abbreviation-keyboard/1173982216

You can close this topic... the latest update from yesterday corrected this problem! Thanks!

I did as exhaustive a search as I could in the App Store; didn't find any. It's a very niche market, and it looks like phraseexpress has done a great job, but should perhaps consider allowing very limited access to macro functionality in their cheaper versions.

Since templates were introduced, new notes created on my iPhone don't initialize right and I have to click Done and + again. What happens is the Title box shows up, but the note area that is supposed to say "Start writing or choose a [Template]" doesn't, and a spinning icon is in that area. When I click Done, the new note is not there, even if I had entered a Title. The second time I click + always works. It only happens when I open up the app after it has been closed for a while (which is, of course, almost every time). Sometimes if I wait a while before creating a new note it will initialize right. I figured I clicked + before it was ready. But this doesn't always help. Also perhaps related, since templates were introduced a large green spinning wait circle appears in Evernote for about 5 seconds before you can do anything. Evernote used to work instantly. So it has been slowed down. Perhaps I see these issues more than other users because I have over 1000 notes; just a thought. But I see this slowdown and this bug every time I use it, so I would think this would have been noticed and fixed quickly. Thanks!

CalS, the prices I quoted were from www.phraseexpress.com/docs13/09/shop.php: $49.95 standard, $139.95 pro. But you are right, in the phone app it is $5 for standard and $25 for pro. More info: www.phraseexpress.com/datestamp.htm and www.phraseexpress.com/docs13/09/macro.htm So I tried it out on my phone. I enabled the keyboard with full access; PhraseExpress says "PhraseExpress never sends any of your text input or saved phrases anywhere. Period." So I trust them. I was able to use the {#DATE} macro for free out of the box. But it expands to "12/7/18 ## Update to Pro Edition to use of macro function without this text ##". Aside from it not being practical to erase all that text (the extra text only appears about 25% of the time), the date format can only be changed with the pro version, I believe, and for sorting it must be YY/MM/DD. So ok, $24.99 and my problem is solved. Not the end of the world, but maybe still a bit pricey for me.

Thanks, gazumped. Yes, Phrase Express is available for iPhone, and it looks like it will solve this problem -- if I get the Pro version, which costs $149. That is overkill for this problem.

Yes, scripting would be nice if I could easily do it from my iPhone; seems unlikely. I agree, they probably won't add a note type for this, but it is what would work best. And I contend that it is what people would like, though I am of course conjecturing.

80% of the notes I create are journal or log entries. I create one per day to track what I did that day. I just type the date as the title of the note, and then I can recognize it as a log note. I just use "MM-DD" format, which doesn't reveal the year or time, which can matter. I propose there should be a new note type (in addition to Audio, Photo and Reminder) that is the same as a normal text note except that that the title is prepopulated with a time in the format "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM". This is the only format that will sort dates and times correctly (using a 24-hour clock). This would save me time, and would sort right. Now I see entries for 12-5 from 2016, 2017 and 2018 next to each other; not good. Alternately, a way to insert a date/time stamp (under iOS) in the above format into the title would also help, though not as much. By default, notes have no title (though they will copy the text up to the title if you don't enter one). While you can move your cursor to the title and type one, often you don't really care; you just want to know when you wrote the note, so having the timestamp as the title for log notes can be very useful. A whole lot of effort went into making templates; I can't think of any time I would ever use one. This is a very small feature that probably everyone can benefit from. The Evernote help says that date and time stamps can be inserted on some clients, but I couldn't get it to work on Windows using Ctrl-; or Shift-Alt-D. It says: You can also insert date and time stamps directly into the body of a note on some clients: Evernote for Mac: Date Stamp (Shift + Command + D) or Time Stamp (Option + Shift + Command + D) Evernote for Windows: Date and Time Stamp (Control + ; or Shift + Alt + D)

Not only are my eyes a little weak, my fingers are a little fat. I do a lot of editing and need to be able to move the cursor quickly, and I find myself struggling quite a bit more with the tiny text size. I love all the other features, it seemed a no brainer when I test drove it on my PC, but when I found you can't even get a small/large text size default or anything at all on mobile. I hate to throw more time at reviewing other apps, because I doubt they can match everything EN does, but I guess I'll have to.