FacileThings

Evernote Integration Updated

AUTHOR: Francisco Sáez DATE: September 23, 2019

This weekend we have completely updated the integration process between FacileThings and Evernote.

The purpose of this update was not to add new features but to redesign the entire process to make it more effective and minimize the problem of the rate limits that Evernote imposes on third-applications users:

In an effort to ensure the best possible performance of the Evernote service, we have implemented rate limits for third-party applications and services… Rate limits are applied to calls against the Evernote API on a per API key, per user, per time period basis.

This means that the number of accesses you make to your Evernote data from FacileThings (during sync processes) has an hourly limit. If that limit is reached, Evernote blocks your user for a period of time and no data synchronization will take place until Evernote removes that lock again.

Evernote does not indicate what the limit is, but it encourages developers to follow some guidelines in order to offer the best possible experience to the end user:

Make economical use of Evernote API requests.
Notify the users when they exceed the rate limits so that they know why the data is no longer synchronized and when the service will be restored.

Basically, that is what we have done in this update:

We have completely redesigned the process and reduced the number of API requests by more than 60%, so users who previously used to reach that limit will now take much longer to do so.
If you are still an Evernote power user and reach the limit at some point, you will immediately receive an email notifying at what time the synchronization service will be restored.
All the sync processes that take place when a user is locked are saved and rescheduled to be executed again when the lock is released. Thus, although with delay, all changes should be synchronized at the end.

In addition, we have solved a couple of important issues:

Sometimes Evernote sent the changes made in a note so quickly that a duplicate of the note were created in FacileThings. That is fixed.
When you modified the description of the note in FacileThings (the title) and included line breaks, the description was not updated in Evernote. Now it is.