Say Hello to Evernote Hello

December 18, 2011 | Comment

I really like Evernote I really do. It is probably one of only a handful of apps that I use every single day without fail. But I just don’t get their new app Evernote Hello. I think this quote from a ReadWriteWeb article sums it up:

It’s completely awkward for any social encounter where you’re meeting two or more new people at the same time.

I just cannot imagine saying to someone “do you know I am really likely to forget who you are so do you mind if I take your picture?”. That’s going to kill the conversation right … Read the rest

Rapportive

December 6, 2011 | Comment

What I love about Google Chrome the most is that it has a vast number of really great extensions to do almost anything. Not only that there are also competing extensions so you get choice too.

One are where there is plenty of choice is in the personal profile space, in fact Google has it’s own extension for this too. In this context I am talking about the ability to display detailed personal information for a contact alongside an email that you receive from them. There are a number of players in this space including Xobni and Google themselves but … Read the rest

Slideshare Participates in Rip-off Britain

November 8, 2011 | Comment

Slideshare is one of a number of online services that allow you to post and share presentations to a wide audience. We have been using it at work to promote some of our own presentations for a while now. It works well but has a major drawback on the free edition in that it looks ugly and is full of ads. That’s fine as I get something for free and if I want I can upgrade to get rid of the ads. So this is what I decided to do – upgrade our account and get a better looking page.… Read the rest

Evernote Web Clipper now a Rival for Instapaper?

May 24, 2011 | Comment

One of my favourite tools has got to be Evernote, the service that allows you to upload pretty much anything and have it indexed and available to search and view pretty much anywhere.

Evernote have today upgraded their Chrome Extension to extend it to offer “smart clipping”. Previously when you clipped a webpage to Evernote unless you highlighted the bit you wanted stored you simply got the weblink. Now it automagically seeks out the body of the web article and stores that. The only other app that I have seen do this is Instapaper the read-it-later service. While it is … Read the rest

Mac Folder Action Scripts and Evernote

May 15, 2011 | Comment

For reasons that I have yet been able to fathom the functionality levels between the Mac and Windows Evernote clients is subtly different. For example on Windows there is the very useful ability to be able to add a watched folder that when anything gets added to this it automatically gets added to Evernote. This is not an option on the Mac version. However, all is not lost using Applescript and Folder Actions Scripts it is easy to replicate this action.

I say that it is easy but that is only the case if you are au fait with the … Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

Last year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest

Small Scale Outsourcing

October 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Outsourcing is big business. I should know as I have been using it for over 10 years now to get access to some highly skilled and cost effective development and testing resources. But what happens if you don’t need a resource for a long term project or just want to get access to a skill that you don’t have in-house?

For example the business I work for often needs access to designers to do small scale work for our website. We can’t afford to retain the services of someone locally as we simply don’t have enough business to put their … Read the rest

Google goes Bing!

June 10, 2010 | Comment

When Bing launched the most striking think about it was its look with backdrops made of some stunning pictures. Google suddenly seemed very plain in comparison.

Now Google has struck back even allowing you to use your own pictures as the backdrop and the results can be similarly stunning – providing you have the picture to use. To add you own picture click the “Curious about today’s homepage? Add your own background image now” and select your own picture from your hard drive or Picasa. Couldn’t be simpler than that.

The picture left is of the Cape Otway Lighthouse on … Read the rest

Subsonic vs. Spotify

May 30, 2010 | Comment

I wrote in my previous post about the really rather wonderful Subsonic and how it was part of my armoury in the battle to rid myself of iTunes. Well I discovered today that it is rapidly becoming a complete replacement for Spotify too.

In my short(ish) life I have seen a number of changes in the music world as it transitioned from records to cassettes to CDs and lately to MP3s. Now there is a new revolution in town – streaming. Up to now you have always owned what you played, or perhaps to be more strictly accurate, you have … Read the rest

The Long Memory of Zumodrive

April 25, 2010 | Comment

I am a highly active and avid user of the cloud storage system Zumodrive. In fact I have written about it a number of times before and it was one of my favourite apps from 2009.

One of the things that it can do (unless you turn it off) is to give you little pop-up messages telling you what it is up to. On a Mac this is done via the Growl notification system which I then have pushed to my iPhone. Today I received a notification from Zumodrive that it had updated six files in the list … Read the rest