Tag Archives: evernote

April 11, 2013, 8:00 am

Three Applications for Planning Classes

[This is a guest post by Doug Ward, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, where he is teaching a research and digital literacy course he developed called Infomania. You can find him online at www.kuediting.com and www.journalismtech.com, and follow him on Twitter @kuediting.--@JBJ]

Planning a new class is a lot like starting a new research project: filled with the anticipation of discovery but also the trepidation of organizing material in a coherent way.

I’ve found that a combination of three tools — Scrivener, Evernote and Workflowy — eases some of that trepidation.

ProfHacker readers are no doubt familiar with Scrivener and Evernote. Ryan provided an excellent overview of Scrivener, explaining how he uses it for writing. George wrote about using it for transcription, and Mark and Billie looked at the Windows version (the one I use). Kathleen…

February 6, 2013, 8:00 am

A Quick Look at Penultimate 4

By Amy Cavender

Evernote released Penultimate 4 late last week. (Unfortunately, it’s only available for iOS 6 at the moment, though support for iOS 5 is expected in the next update. Penultimate is currently not available for Android, though they’re apparently working on that.)

Heather and Ethan have mentioned Penultimate in this space before, and we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink over Evernote itself.

There are two major features to this release of Penultimate:

Automatic synchronization with Evernote (to which the user must deliberately opt in; it isn’t forced) and
Handwriting recognition within the application itself, not just within Evernote (though this feature does require Evernote sync).

The app is free, so it’s definitely worth checking out. As I experimented with it, though, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to work well for me.

The automatic…

December 10, 2012, 8:00 am

Found Knows Where Your Files Are

By Jason B. Jones

ProfHacker readers are unusually bright and well-organized people, obviously, so this probably only happens to me: You’re *certain* you saved a file, or at least saw it . . . but where? Did you save it to a local folder? Dropbox? Evernote? Maybe it was an attachment to a message in Gmail? Oh, wait–it was a Google Doc! Right?

As with Joey Tribbiani trying to open milk, there’s gotta be a better way!

Found is a free app for Macs that searches both local and cloud services to find your files. In addition to searching key folders on your local drive, it will also search Dropbox, Evernote, SkyDrive, Gmail, and Google Drive/Google Docs. There’s a video demo here.)

Found is preposterously fast, returning search results as you type. It lives in the menu bar, but the best way to invoke it is by double-tapping (cf. Zombieland) the CTRL key. The Found window appears on the left of…

November 21, 2012, 8:00 am

Updates to Evernote

By Amy Cavender

That members of the team here at ProfHacker are fans of Evernote is hardly a secret; we’ve mentioned it on numerous occasions. It’s very useful for storing and searching whatever information you want to keep track of, and it syncs across platforms, so all your notes are available to you, no matter what device you’re using.

Within the last few weeks, Evernote has released updates to the Mac and iOS versions of its client software. I won’t bore you with a list of the features; the posts linked in this paragraph (with their accompanying videos) provide a good overview for those who want it.

What I’d like to do instead is point out two of the new features that I find useful for my own work:

The new sidebar in the Mac version. I have a lot of notebooks, and a lot of tags, but there are only a few that I use with any great frequency. The ability to add them to the…

April 24, 2012, 8:00 am

Managing Meeting Notes with Meshin Recall

By Amy Cavender

Meetings, meetings, meetings. They’re part of many people’s lives, and there’s no exception for those of us in academia. Often, when we attend meetings, we need to keep notes about them.

One way, of course, is to do it the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper. Those who prefer to take notes electronically, however, might want to have a look at Meshin Recall. Meshin works in tandem with Evernote and with the calendar application on your iOS or Android device. Opening the application brings up an agenda view of your calendar events. Clicking the + sign next to an event starts a new note in Evernote; you can assign the note to any notebook you wish, and Meshin gives you the option to set a notebook as the default if you like.

You can quickly find your notes in one of two ways. If you want a quick overview of which calendar events have notes, just tap the icon in the top right corner …

February 16, 2012, 3:00 pm

Note-taking on a Nook Color

By Amy Cavender

In a recent post, I mentioned that I’m a new Nook Color user. Among the things I wanted to use it for (besides reading, of course!) were accessing class notes, and, equally if not more importantly, taking notes of various sorts.

The stock Nook Color software lets users easily highlight passages as they read, and make notes on them. Provided the wifi is on, it will sync those notes and highlights with NookStudy or Nook software on a PC or Mac. Though they can’t easily be copied within the software itself, they can easily be exported to Word or plain text format, so it’s fairly easy to make use of those notes when writing. ProfHacker favorite Evernote is also available for the Nook Color.

Here’s the catch: doing much writing with the Nook Color’s onscreen keyboard is, frankly, a pain–and as far as I’ve been able to determine, there’s simply no good replacement keyboard available for…

November 17, 2011, 8:00 am

Google Reader Alternatives

By Amy Cavender

The photo in this post expresses what a lot of people seem to be feeling over recent changes to Google Reader (one of many Google tools that’s been mentioned frequently here at ProfHacker). A great deal has been written about the changes since they rolled out a few weeks ago; some users mourn the loss of the old sharing features, while others (myself included) are less than thrilled with the new design.

Those who miss the sharing features might want to check out workarounds such as ReaderSharer, which can restore some of that functionality. For those of us who didn’t use those features but who don’t like the new design, this may be a good time to consider switching to a different RSS reader.

As it happens, I’ve been using Google Reader only sporadically for the last several months, anyway. My usual tool for reading news feeds is Reeder (Mac and iOS only, alas), which I’ve come to…

September 15, 2011, 8:00 am

Skitch for Android

By Amy Cavender

We’ve written about Skitch before here at ProfHacker. It’s a very handy application for quickly grabbing, annotating, and sharing screen captures.

What makes Skitch worth mentioning again is the fact that, a few weeks ago, it was acquired by Evernote. This means a number of things:

Users will no longer have to pay for access to the full version of Skitch.
Skitch will be available for mobile platforms. An Android version is already avaialable; a version for iOS should follow in the relatively near future.

I took the Android version for a test drive, and it looks good. (more…)

July 12, 2011, 11:00 am

Evernote for Android (Now, with Sharing)

By Mark Sample

Evernote for Android App The note-taking and information-shepherding application Evernote is a ProfHacker favorite. Although I tend to use other apps for making quick notes on my phone (for example, Catch, Power Note, and Springpad), I do use Evernote for taking longer notes—during a meeting, for example—on my iPad or laptop. It’s helpful to be able to access those notes no matter where I am, which is why I have Evernote on my Android phone, right alongside those other note-taking apps.

While Jason highlighted Evernote’s dramatic redesign for the iPhone in March, we never mentioned Evernote’s similarly (though different) dramatic redesign for Android in April. As the Evernote developers explain in an overview of the changes, the most significant new feature of the Android app is sharing. It is now possible to share an entire notebook with another Evernote user (though only paid, Premium users can…

March 3, 2011, 8:00 am

The Redesigned Evernote iPhone App

By Jason B. Jones

Several of us at ProfHacker use Evernote (exhibit a, exhibit b, exhibit c), the popular external-brain software. It lets you put all a satisfyingly wide array of information all in one place, and makes it searchable, without a great deal of fuss. And in those earlier posts, we’ve talked a bit about it the iPhone/iPod app for Evernote, which, theoretically, is a big part of its appeal: use the camera, the microphone, or the keyboard to take notes in whatever format you find most appealing. There’s a new version of the app out, and while in general we don’t intend to go version-chasing every time a smartphone app updates, there are some interesting changes this time that are worth mentioning.

Although I use Evernote heavily, the iPhone app has never really worked for me. I love the desktop app, for the ease with which it lets me clip and sort information (this really helps with the…