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Posts Tagged iPad

Evernote bookmarklet for iPad

Mar 11

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

Image representing Evernote as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Evernote is great, and I often use the Evernote web-clipper to clip and save text and pictures from the web. The web-clipper automatically saves the date I clipped it and the URL of the site I clipped. This is the tool I use the most.

Now I’m using my iPad more and more, but there is no web-clipper tool for Evernote iOS. Bummer! Believe it or not, I actually had to copy stuff and paste it into a new Evernote, then go back to Safari and copy the URL and go back to Evernote and paste it in, and tag it “ToDo” for later when I’m on my computer.What a life for us iPad slaves! Is this dignified?

That was then. This is now!

Thanks to Lorenzo, who left this very helpful comment on this website, last night I visited his website, followed his easy-peasy instructions and successfully installed the script.

Thanks, Lorenzo! 

You can setup the web clipper for Evernote on mobile iOS devices in just a couple minutes. This has the benefit of allowing you to clip content into Evernote while browsing the web in mobile Safari.

via Comment on Brooks Duncan reviews Evernote Essentials 3.0.

Lorenzo has several other useful iPad bookmarklets and many tutorials you might want to check out.

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Dads using Evernote to raise kids

Feb 7

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

From the Nikkei Weekly:

Ayatomo Miyahara, a 41-year-old father of a high-schooler and two grade-schoolers, maintains an online family album. Videos of them are posted on a private YouTube account. He tweets about his kids and updates his Facebook pages with information on his daily dealings with them. He also uses Evernote, which stores data in the cloud and can be linked to via a Website or app. The data can be accessed anytime, anywhere from a computer or smartphone.

Miyahara is a director of a nonprofit organization called Fathering Japan Q-shu which supports men who are raising children. He was using Evernote to store rough drafts of his speeches and other types of information. As he began receiving paper correspondence from his children’s schools, he decided to scan and manage them online as well.

Evernote

Evernote (Photo credit: Wikipedia),

He quickly opened a new account on Evernote. He has kept all types of data related to his children

…The stored data can be viewed by any member of Miyahara’s family on an iPad mounted on the refrigerator. The iPad has become an information station for the family; all messages to and schedules of the children are managed and viewed on it.

via 2013/02/04 – Dads using office skills to raise kids.

The article mentions that a premium account at Evernote costs 4,000 yen/month. This is incorrect. It is 450 yen/month or 4,000 yen/year.

If you are new to Evernote, consider buying Brett Kelly’s Evernote Essentials. It’s a very good manual for a beginner still trying to figure out what Evernote can do, as well as for a veteran user (e.g. me) who can’t quite remember the search function that will pull up all the audio files in Evernote. Click here to read more about Evernote Essentials.

Alternatively, consider Dan Gold’s $5 guides to GTD (Getting Things Done) and Evernote. Click here to visit Dan Gold’s online store

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Evernote + iPad? You need offline notebooks

Apr 8

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

iPad/iPhone Evernote offline settings

iPad/iPhone Evernote offline settings

If you’re using Evernote, unless your iPad is 3G and connected to the Innernet-thingy 24/7, you’ll need offline notebooks.

What are offline notebooks? I’m glad you asked! They’re notebooks that you can read even while off-line, that is, even when not connected to the Innernet-thingy. Which in my case is most of the time. My iPad is useful, but it let me down badly when I discovered that my zillion Evernotes were invisible on my iPad: “This note could not be shown because iPad is not connected to the Innernet-thingy”. Swot it said, right there on the screen, when I was in my meeting and I fired up my iPad2. And I was awake and everything, all dressed up but nowhere to go.

So as I’m in a charitable mood, I thought I’d write a post on offline notebooks and how to create them and everything. But then I changed my mind and decided to send you to Hickey’s brilliant post Did You Know: How to Access Notes Without an Internet Connection

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The Best PDF Reader Apps for the iPad

Dec 13

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | 2 Comments

pdf-notes and iAnnotate for iPads

Looking for a good PDF reader/annotater for your iPad? iAnnotate PDF is the best, according to this review. I actually downloaded it a while back, but have been too busy playing with pdf-notes (review here, on iTunes here) to try it out yet (also, I couldn’t see that it could do anything that pdf-notes can’t, but I now see there are a few). That will change.

I agree with the reviewer below in his opinion of iBooks (poor). The article reviews a total of 6 pdf-readers for the iPad. If you’re looking for one, I recommend this review.

‘iAnnotate PDF‘ is like the PhotoshopCS5 to the other apps’ MS Paint. In fact, it may suffer from too many features, with a zillion helpful pop-ups for every page and tool. Thankfully, once you’ve worked your way through the app’s myriad options, you can turn off the help windows, and customize the interface within an inch of its life. It sports dynamic highlighting, a pen tool, notes and bookmarks, all of which can be saved to the file so that they can be read in any PDF reader on any device. If you have a free Dropbox account, you can wirelessly sync files from your computer to iAnnotate either via Wi-Fi or 3G — perhaps the best feature of the app. It features an in-app Web browser, the ability to pull in your e-mail attachments, and other necessary goodies. Conspicuously absent from other PDF readers is the ability to read more than one file at once; iAnnotate thankfully provides you with much-needed tabbed browsing. It may be a stretch for cash-strapped students at $10, but its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink features make it our best bet.

via The Best PDF Reader Apps for the iPad.

What I don’t like about iBooks is you can’t do anything with PDF files on it except bookmark pages. You can’t can organize your pdfs into folders or categories, but when I upgraded a few months ago, I discovered most of my pdfs no longer showed the author, so I couldn’t even sort that way to help me find the pdf I’m looking for.

Also, when I changed the title of a pdf file on my iPad from within iTunes, the change wasn’t reflected when I next opened my iPad (after disconnecting).

PDF-notes is good for annotating – you can annotate using your finger, very useful when trying to work standing on crowded trains. It also has a text-note function. I only view my annotated PDFs on my iPad, but I understand your annotations are saved and viewable in other PDF-reading programs.

What you can’t do with pdf-note is select, copy or highlight text in the pdf, which might sound a trivial gripe, but it’s something I often want to do, especially to add snippets and quotes to, e.g. Evernote. (I haven’t figured out how to add pdfs to Evernote notes on my iPad – is this even possible?). If iAnnotate can do this, I’ll be delighted.

Here’s another reviewI found, tho not quite as useful as the one quoted above.

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TouchFire iPad keyboard – very cool

Dec 13

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

Damn! This is what I bought recently:

This is what I’d like now:

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Naming files

Nov 6

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

In his video on going paperless, Brooks Duncan says it doesn’t really matter what you name a file, and he gives an example where he names a pdf that he’s just imported into Evernote. He puts the date of the pdf, or the date it was created, at the front then adds a descriptive title.

The organizing software that comes with my Fujitsu ScanSnap also automatically assigns the date and time as the default name for all scanned docs.

This can be useful, but there’s a problem when I import the pdf into my iPad2: there are only 2 ways to search for pdfs in iBooks and that is by author or title.  Also, you can’t assign the pdfs to categories (it is possible using some other pdf-reading/organizing software, e.g. pdf-notes allows you to do this).

Update: Clarification – I don’t (yet) have Evernote premium and so cannot view the contents of Evernote notes when I’m offline, which is most of the time. What I’m describing here is viewing pdfs on my iPad2 using the iBooks app.

I have a bunch of pdfs that are related to the various places I work at. I don’t always put them into pdf-notes because, altho the categories are useful to help locate the files I need in particular workplaces, I can’t use it at work because I installed the app via my home computer. If I try and upload a pdf into pdf-notes at work, it tells me the pdfs I list will REPLACE the pdfs already uploaded into pdf-notes.

Also, I don’t want to waste time TYPING the file name into a SEARCH box. I just want to flick down thru the list of files listed by title and find all the pdfs I need for a particular context/location all together. This is my work-around for having no folders to organize my pdfs on my iPad.

So I name my pdf files according to location (“context”, to use the GTD jargon): all files required for or related to a particular workplace get the name of that workplace as a prefix to the file name. Pdfs unrelated to workplaces I assign my name as the prefix. Like this:

  • WorkA_calendar
  • WorkA_address_list
  • WorkB_calendar
  • WorkB_address_list
  • WorkB_Phone_numbers
  • etc.

I don’t need the date in the name.

So far, this convention is working well.

The next thing I want to organize is the workflow:

  • did I already upload this file to my iPad?
  • which files need to be uploaded to iPad?
  • Where should I store files that are waiting to be uploaded to iPad?
  • If I use a temporary holding folder like “To iPad”, what happens to the files in iTunes when I delete them from the temporary holding folder?
  • I lost track of some files (forgot where I was in the workflow) because I dragged them out of their original folders and put them in the “To iPad” folder, then
    • forgot where they’d originally come from, or
    • thought I’d already copied them into iTunes, then
    • deleted them from the “To iPad” folder, only to discover that
    • I hadn’t yet uploaded them to the iPad, and now
    • iTunes on my computer couldn’t locate them (because I’d just deleted them), but
    • “not to worry, there’ll still be a copy in the original folder… won’t there?”
    • No there won’t, because I dragged them to the iPad folder, not copied them.

Coming soon: workflows are fun!

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