Springpad

I have been using Remember the Milk and Evernote to keep track of things.  Remember the Milk is a great app to manage task lists, and Evernote is an application where notes, pictures or documents can be stored.  Both of these applications synchronize with cell phones, so you can access your data when you are not connected.

One way that I have been using these apps for is to keep track of things that I see or hear about will want to get later.  For example, when I see a video game, that I don't necessarily want to buy when it first comes out, I want to keep track of it so I can add it to my Goozex list later.  Also when interesting movies come out in the theater, I write them down, so I can remember to add them to my Netflix queue.

The problem with using Remember the Milk and Evernote is that, those entries are not typed.  So when I want to take a look at the items that I indicated some preference for, I need to remember what the item was from the name.  When I want to get one of the items, I need to manually do a search on various sites to get the item.

This post mentions Springpad, which looks like a very promising application.  I downloaded the application on my phone, and created an account, and was easily able to add items.  The best feature of Springpad, is once you add an item, it offers contextual actions.  For example, for a movie, you can purchase a ticket, purchase it from Amazon, stream it from Amazon or Netflix.  I also like the fact that I can choose to make my list public, and you can "follow" other people's list

There are a few things that I don't like, or I think could be done better.

1. When you create an account, and add items, you start getting emails when some other Springpad user adds something that is in you list. I would want to opt-in to receiving the emails.  (You can opt out)


2. By default, certain types of items in your list are public.  Once you add the items, you have to modify the sharing preference for each item already created


3. I don't see why you would use Springpad for contacts or tasks.  I think that there are better tools for those data types.


4. In the application on the phone, I would like it if it wasn't necessary to specify a data type to perform a search.

Archiving Documents

A few months ago, we took a look at our filing cabinet in our office.  We have a lot of documents that we have saved, just in case we had a need for that information.  Unfortunately, over time the amount of paper continues to increase.  So I decided to look for a solution for me to digitize all of this content.

The Evernote blog had a post about Pixily/OfficeDrop.  This is a service where you can mail your documents in and they scan them and run OCR software.  Then they host the files in a digital locker, where you can search or organize them.  This seemd like a reasonable service, but it works best for scanning documents as you receive them.  In order for use to scan through our backlog of documents, it would have cost several hundred dollars.

We decided not to go with OfficeDrop, not only because of the cost of scanning our backlog of documents, but also for the cost of the service.  The amount of storage that you get, I feel, is not worth the monthly charge.

We decided to do the scanning ourselves.  We bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner to do the scanning.  This scanner will quickly scan a batch of multiple side documents.  The included software has some pretty useful features:

1. Automatically detects the number of printed sides on a sheet


2. OCR and creation of searchable PDFs

Evernote iPhone app when offline

I while on this flight, I wanted to review some documentation. Wanted to write some notes, so I thought that I could use the Evernote iPhone application. I figured that the next time that launched the app when my iPhone has a network connection, the note would be synchronized to the Evernote server, and the. I could access that note on any of my PCs.

Unfortunately, the Evernote application will not let you do that. Even though you can access already created notes when you are offline, you can't create or edit them.

I would like for this to be fixed. Other applications do not have this problem. For example, Remember The Milk let's you create, delete and edit tasks offline. The Wordpress application lets you write new posts and pages while offline ( I am doing that now). That seems like the right model as the apps are still functional when offline.