Tag: Evernote »

Penultimate has received its 5.0 update, bringing the options to zoom and drift. Is this "Penultimate Racing" or something? That'd be cool! The zoom feature does exactly that - zooms - as users can now zoom in and write anywhere on a page. The drift feature comes in handy when zoomed-in as it'll automatically match the user's writing speed and scroll down as they write. Nifty! Now go back to writing!

The NeatConnect is a huge evolutionary jump for Neat. It adds many awesome features and scanning options to their current scanner line and even cuts the cords. Perfect for iPad and iPhone use as it doesn't require the use of any desktop software. The NeatConnect can send documents directly to cloud services which can then be used from iOS apps. It's quick, easy to use, and honestly pretty cool.

The NeatConnect can be set up from the iPhone shaped screen on the front of the device. User credentials can be input directly into the device for the services used. In addition, document can be scanned and immediately emailed from the device by putting in a email address as the destination.

I'm really impressed with the NeatConnect, even at it's $499 price. Neat has done a great job of delivering the options people want (and need) these days. The cloud options cover just about everything anyone could want. And no subscription fees make this a truly honest product. A great buy and will be available this October.

Take a look at the overview video below for a great intro to the NeatConnect scanner.

Evernote released an update today to enhance the app and move to the iOS 7 user interface style. The update includes a new home screen as well as the ability to share items via AirDrop. The biggest feature is the use of background sync to keep your notes up to date and ready for you whenever you need them.

• New home screen – everything on one screen: personal and business notes, notebooks, tags, plus shortcuts and announcements
• In notes section the app displays your two most recent notes for quick reference
• Quicknote features – start a new note, snap a photo, create a reminder, and make a task list
• As soon as the note editor opens, the cursor moves into the note body with the keyboard in view
• Image and PDF markup – premium feature, EN premium users can mark up any attached PDFs
• Notebooks and Tags
• Share notes with AirDrop
• Keep everything in sync – EN is able to keep your acct updated when the app isn't active

I'll bet you're sitting around wondering to yourself, "Self, I wonder what apps Powerslyde is recommending this week?" Lucky dog! We've got the answer to that very question.

Back to school is in full effect this week:

Khan Academy
Evernote
iTunes U
Poshmark
MLB.com At Bat

Khan Academy has changed the education game forever, and now no student worth his or her salt should be without it - particularly for its in-depth math and science instruction. Likewise, iTunes U delivers a miraculous wealth of content all via a teeny-tiny app. And is there ANYONE on the planet who has not heard of Evernote? It's only the premiere cross-platform note taking app.

Finally, all students need apps for their free time, so Poshmark is there to help ladies (and occasionally gentlemen) find amazing deals on clothes, while MLB.com At Bat keeps all baseball fans in touch with their favorite teams in the home stretch of the season.

Thanks to Powerslyde, the app that recommends apps, for our list this week. What apps do you recommend? Drop us a comment below, or send us a message on Facebook or Twitter. See you next week!

Pocket Informant Pro is a super powerful information manager app with a ton of built in features, along with several that can be purchased as add-ons, increasing the functionality in specific ways.

Now, however, the app's developer has added Evernote support, with a host of ways to integrate your Evernote reminders and other notes right into Pocket Informant Pro. The concept is to bring together everything about your day into one place, and let you customize every part of the app to make it individually useful to you.

Sounds good to me!

Evernote Integration also includes:
* Rich Text Notes
* Lists
* Styles
* Evernote Reminders and todos
* Stacks
* PDFs
* Word Documents
* Images
* Attachments
* Support for Evernote "linked notebooks"

Over one million apps have made their way onto the App Store during its five years of existence. A million. That's a pretty miraculous number when you think about it. However it's not the amount of apps we have to pick from that I find so fascinating, but rather just how much things have changed since 2008. Pickings were comparatively slim at first, and many developers were just starting to dip a toe in the waters of Apple's new smartphone.

On top of that, the technology itself has changed tremendously in a relatively small amount of time. It makes me wonder if anyone from 2008 would even recognize current iOS devices, and by extension the App Store. Would a newer Apple initiate have any idea what they were looking at if they somehow managed to take a trip to five years ago? I think it warrants a look at how the hardware, the App Store, and the apps contained within it have evolved.

2008 - The Beginning of the Beginning

The App Store's first year was a rough but promising one. The iPhone 3G rolled out to coincide with Apple’s new software venue and the original iPhone was still viable. The iPod touch was also present and accounted for, while the second generation appeared closer to the end of the year. Even at this point many developers were eager to push these early iOS devices to their limits, to make them more than just a phone or an .mp3 player with a fancy screen.

Handy apps like Pandora Radio, Last.FM, Facebook, and Yelp were to be expected, but that didn't make them any less impressive to have on a handheld platform. Others such as the intuitive personal organizer Evernote, the eerily accurate song-identifying app Shazam, eWallet’s convenient and secure account password management, and MLB At Bat with its extensive baseball coverage further capitalized on the particulars of the hardware and its general portability. Of course there were also some pretty unnecessary options out there, too. Flashlight kind of served a purpose but was also fairly pointless. It wasn't as bad as stuff like More Cowbell!, though.

At the same time, the games available on the App Store were beginning to show people that "mobile" didn't have to equal "mediocre." Sure there were a few simple ports of the odd classic such as Ms. PAC-MAN, Vay, and Scrabble, but there were also some impressive iOS renditions of popular console games like Super Monkey Ball coming out. Potential mobile gamers also had a few really special titles such as Galcon and Fieldrunners to tide them over. When all was said and done there were over 7,500 apps on the App Store by the end of the year, with more being added every day.

2009 - Moving Right Along

The following year saw even more impressive releases as Apple's digital marketplace began to expand. The second generation of iPod Touch was the bright and shiny new toy at the time, but it was followed shortly by the iPhone 3GS in June while the latest and greatest third generation Touch closed out the year in September. It all meant better processors, better CPUs, more advanced operating systems, and so on. All stuff that developers needed to acclimate to, but also stuff that meant they could push their boundaries even further. There was no loss of steam when it came to content, either: the App Store finished off 2009 with well over 100,000 apps available.

Many of the basic smartphone necessities were covered, but there was room for so much more. Especially while the technology was improving. Plenty of people used their iPhones as phones, sure, but with the addition of Skype they were able to enjoy the added functionality of instant messaging and voice chat without cutting into their data plans (so long as a wifi connection was present). Big companies were really starting to take notice as well. That same year Starbucks and many other big businesses threw their virtual hats into the ring with their own apps designed to make life a little bit easier for their iOS-using customers. Practicality was also becoming an even bigger focus. The Kindle app gave iOS users a practical e-reading option, and Dropbox was there being Dropbox. By which I mean "an awesome and super-convenient way to transfer files between multiple platforms." And this same level of refinement could be seen creeping into the games as well.

So many of the App Store's most notable games and franchises came out around this time. It was almost a mobile rennaisence of a sort. This was the year Real Racing first blew mobile gamers' minds, even causing some of them to question the legitimacy of in-game video footage until they were able to see the finished product for themselves. Zenonia was just a fledgling action RPG at the time, and while a lot of people liked it I doubt they knew just how many sequels it would spawn. The same goes for Pocket God, although with updates rather than multiple releases. Flight Control began to eat away at peoples' free time, Angry Birds and Doodle Jump hit it big (like, super big), and Myst and The Sims 3 further displayed the potential for major releases on mobile platforms. Oh, and Canabalt almost single-handedly invented and popularized a genre.

The App Store launched July 10, 2008 and brought with it a whole new way of distributing and purchasing software. The first several months were a wild west frontier of pricing, business models (or the lack thereof), and genre, making the iPhone the place to be.

As the years have gone by, things have gotten more crowded, more predictable, and perhaps more "same-old" to some. Let's take a look back at those early, heady days with ten of the best iOS apps from the launch of the App Store.

Cro-Mag Rally - Kart racing with cavemen? Yes, please! This launch title from veteran Mac developer Pangea showed us all how much fun the iPhone could be, paving the way for a host of ports and new gaming experiences on the go.

AIM - Before the recent spate of apps that bring multi-client, desktop-style instant messaging to the iPhone and iPad, there was only AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM. This launch title clued us in to the future of always being in touch, even if we didn't know it at the time.

Fieldrunners - Oh, tower defense games, why do you torment us so? Fieldrunners took the concept already on the web in Flash games and brought it to the devices we had in our pockets every day, iterating its tower defense gameplay to a fine polish. We were hard-pressed to stop playing, to be honest, and still are.

Yelp - Like Urbanspoon, Yelp brought location-based awareness together with user-based opinions on local restaurants and coffee shops at a level we'd never seen before. Yelp has become an indispensable tool when traveling, and even while staying in our hometown, letting us find interesting places to eat and drink at a price we can afford.

Super Monkey Ball - Wait, we were just playing this on our GameCube! How cool is it that we can tilt our iPhones and roll that adorable monkey around the maddeningly difficult tracks? Ten bucks! That's a sweet deal! Oh, what a difference half a decade makes.

Google Earth - This one came out in October of 2008, quickly amazing us all with its innovative zooming interface as well as its comprehensiveness. Finally, we thought, an interesting app from Google.

Rolando - Wow! This game showed us that we didn't have to own a PSP to get a quality arcade puzzle platform game like Loco Roco. It also allowed the early promise of ngmoco;) to shine forth like a beacon in the wilderness.

MLB At Bat - Updated on a yearly basis since 2008, MLB At Bat came onto the scene like a home run, proving that this little App Store thing was for more than just fart apps and casual games. Serious sports fans rejoiced in 2008 when this baby was released.

Galcon - This real-time space-themed strategy game was ready on day one of the App Store, bringing a depth of gameplay not seen yet. While games like Mushroom Wars and the like have since iterated on the concept, Galcon remains a perennial favorite.

Evernote - This essential app has been around since day one, and still continues to improve. Evernote showed us how important it was to have access to our notes, files, and pictures across all the devices we used, whether they were on a desktop or in our pocket.

The App Store turns five this week, and we'll be taking a long look back at this disruptive force in the way we use our mobile devices. Back in 2008, when the App Store launched, we had no idea how far it would come in such a short time, but hindsight is a good thing.

During that time, there have been a ton of apps that changed and improved the state of the art. Here, then, are ten that we think really matter, apps that had an effect on our lives, even now. Apps that changed the landscape of what we expected from a mobile device, and gave us new ways of interacting, sharing, and understanding our world.

Instagram

The grandaddy of social image sharing, Instagram created, with an ease of use and pretty image filters, a whole new social network based on images. In an era of Facebook (who eventually bought the service) and Twitter, that was no small feat.

Snapchat

While derided as a possible porn-chat app, Snapchat took a single idea and refined it to a razor's edge: take a picture, caption it, and share with your friends. Then, zen-like, that picture disappears. The hidden potential in this app caught on with young and old alike, changing the way we communicated with pictures. Without an archive, Snapchat lets users freely share what they might not otherwise.

Whatsapp

Here's an app that allows anyone on any platform to exchange messages with anyone else on any other platform. In a world where you're just as likely to have friends using Android or Blackberry as iOS, this was a revelation. Many other apps tried something similar, but Whatsapp has the userbase and an easy to use, intuitive app that brought it to the forefront. Now we can stay in touch with all our friends and family, regardless of platform, for free.

Camera+

The photographer's photography app, Camera+ fairly invented iPhoneography, letting iPhone users capture and edit better photos than the built in app with ease. Since its launch, the app has kept pace with upgrades in technology and the camera lenses in each iteration of iPhone, empowering real photographers and talented amateurs alike. Heck, they even pioneered using the volume button as a shutter release, until Apple shut that down, only to use it in the built-in Camera app.

Dropbox

Before Google Drive, before iCloud, there was Dropbox, a service that mirrors your documents across computers with a simple, unified login. The Dropbox app on the iPhone took the same, intuitive simplicity and allowed us all to access and edit the same documents on the go as easily as doing so on our Macs and PCs.

Evernote

Take notes, save pictures, record audio, bookmark websites. Do this on any device you own: Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android. Evernote has become the de facto standard for network-connected note taking, and much more. You can use this app to write a shopping list on your computer, and then pull it up on your iPhone while at the store. You can collaborate with others on documents, sharing notes and notebooks with ease.

Shazam

Ever been in the car when a song comes up on the radio and you just can't remember the artist that performed it? Hold your iPhone up, launch Shazam, and let the app magically recognize the music, returning the artist name, album, and easy-purchase buttons for the iTunes store. Newer features include movie preview recognition with links to more information, and television ads that, when recognized, provide links to vendor websites. It's magical technology at its best.

InstaPaper

Marco Arment created Instapaper as a basic web app, single handedly creating the "read it later" market that many other apps now compete for. Arment started the service in 2008, built the iPhone app himself, and saw the service grow far beyond his initial vision. He's subsequently sold the app to another company, who promise to maintain and improve it as we continue forward.

Waze

Waze was one of the first social mapping and traffic app, allowing users to share road conditions with each other while on the go. It may be one of the most unappreciated apps on this list, but it continues to serve a loyal and vocal user base, providing real-time help from users to help us all plan the best route possible.

Foursquare

The check-in craze started here, with Foursquare. Becoming the mayor of a location, along with various gamification features, provided a stickiness not seen before the apps release. Even with privacy concerns dogging its every step, Foursquare has managed to remain in the public imagination as the way to let our friends know where we are at any given time.

Flipboard

RSS is great, as are Twitter and Facebook feeds. But what we really want is a place to see all of those things at once, published in a slick, easy to use layout. Enter Flipboard, still the best darn social news reader around. It makes the various web sites and social feeds we all rely on much prettier and interesting to look at, letting us keep up to date without having to dip into several different apps to do so.

Pandora

Founded as a streaming internet radio service on the web, Pandora made the transition to iOS brilliantly, becoming a force to reckon with in the competitive streaming music market, as well as a household name known by one and all. While other services continue to chip away at the venerable service, offering on-demand music access, Pandora continues to be the music access app of choice on iOS devices everywhere.

Urbanspoon

Can't decide where to eat? Shake your iPhone and Urbanspoon will randomly choose a restaurant nearby that matches your criteria of price, cuisine, and distance. Released in August of 2008, Urbanspoon was the first app on the App Store to combine GPS location data with a database of local dining and drinking establishments, creating a loyal community that reviewed meals, restaurants, and service for other users.

Evernote now comes with reminders to ensure that you never forget an important note. You can pin a note to the top of the list and add a due date to receive in-app and email notifications. It will also mark a note as done when you complete your task. Now we shall never forget to do anything...hopefully.

Skitch receives an update adding the ability to view PDF documents by signing in. Users will be able to try a free 30-day preview of PDF support, allowing them to mark and share ideas, while premium users have full access. It also adds Stamps allowing you to give feedback by approving, rejecting or alerting parts of an image.

Remember when scanners were big, bulky things that plugged into obtuse parallel ports and almost never worked as well as they should have? Long gone are those days, both in terms of the ports they use and being so restricted to bulky equipment. Now, there's a whole selection of iOS apps out there, keen to make things easier by turning an iPhone or iPad into a portable scanner. We take a look at our four favorite OCR apps.

Image To Text
It might not be the most feature rich of apps here but, crucially, Image To Text is a free app and thereby, an ideal starting place for anyone keen to scan in content. All the user has to do is take a photo of a document that they want to extract text from, then leave the app to do all the work, thereby converting everything to a text file with editable text. It's not perfect, and it's restricted to text only, but it's a handy and reasonably quick tool to try out.

Prizmo
The most expensive entry here, Prizmo offers plenty of different features. The app can be used to scan and recognize many types of documents, including business cards, bills and whiteboards, making it easy to share via various services. With the business card interface, it's possible to create contacts through the information gleaned, while receipts and bills can be exported to a spreadsheet. Crucially, it's often very accurate, especially under a bright light. A text-to-speech facility completes the package.

Evernote
It's easy to forget that Evernote does everything. Ok, maybe not everything, but it does a whole bunch of useful things, including offering a free way to scan in useful pieces of information. It's possible to create notes with content that has been scanned in, both of the picture and text variety, all for future reference at a later date. Searching functionality is as powerful as one would expect from the Swiss Army Knife of productivity apps.

Scanner Pro
Providing a high level of accuracy, Scanner Pro works well in its efforts to turn someone's life paperless. Users can scan receipts, notes, book pages and mostly everything else they can think of with this app, with everything converted into a PDF file. With email and print features, the app is particularly useful for those who need to sign contracts before sending them off via email. Online storage capabilities are also there, meaning it's possible to securely store many different types of document through this app.

Evernote Food keeps record of all your food experiences, but now also does much more. In this update, with OpenTable integration, you will no longer need to make phone calls or send texts in order to place reservations at your favorite restaurants, as you will now be able to make your reservations straight from the app. Also, you will be able to see venue ratings from Foursquare so that you know if you want to make that reservation or not. Additionally, you can now share recipes through social media and email along with adding recipes from Evernote to the My Cookbook section using specified notebook or tag options.