In honor of the 100th post I thought I would revisit how I use some of the highlighted apps that I have mentioned over the course of this blog, and how they are now integrated into my daily flow ...
These screenshots are of my actual desktop now and are the evolution of many stabs at creating a well integrated and simple flow (KISS method of evolution ...) The first one up is the use of StartAid a very efficient bookmark app this is web based ... as you can see by the highlghted buttons ... it is always available in my browser window. The three buttons stand for functions, the first for a normal bookmark, the second for a rapid bookmark (I use this one and later file) and the third calls up the side panel that you see in the shot. By simply hitting the second button I have my bookmark ready to go . The side panel I bring up once a day or so and it is there that I categorize my bookmarks ... so far this has been an extremely valuable addition as the speed and ease of bookmarking have made it a great tool.
The second is one I recently installed the gmail plugin for ... it is the old web favorite Remember the Milk (this link has downloads of various synch items including off line, iphone, twitter, mobile, etc) ... RTM is a great todo list that can be as structured as the best of them, but in this incarnation, functions as a quick and dirty way of keeping tasks under control and functional. RTM is also web based, so no matter what machine I am using, the current list and information is availablel. By simply entering information in the task box right at the top or setting the mail as a task will create an item ... you can add date and time, priority, notes, recurrences .. etc all of this adds to the flexibility and useful nature of the application. This, by the way, allows me to stay in my gmail window and manage items that I need to get done or schedule things as I need to ... very handy in the KISS world ...
The third item is one that was suggested on an earlier post re productivity tips and it questioned why not use Google Notebook which can be found under google apps on their services ... well, I
do use it and this shot shows how it is implemented on my desktop. If you look on the bottom right corner of the screen, you will see the close notebook icon, well obviously when it resides unused it is open notebook and I pressed it and this popout window will come up ... the beauty of this is that you can write things to yourself, copy info in a cut and paste mode or simply capture the full address to refer to it later ... lots of flexibility and the smooth flow of capture and review follows the essence of the Flow ...
The last item would be one of my favorites ... see the little clipper button that is highlighted ... this is the magic copying machine to evernote .. Evernote is one of those incredibly powerful programs that will take every bit of info that you want to throw into it and hyperlink every word with a lightning fast search ... It also has inking capability and the wild abilty to search images (if you photograph or scan an image, putting it into the evernote app will allow whatever is written in the image to be searchable) ... this application has been around a while and I do believe that a new upgrade is approaching soon ... they have this one at a very reasonable price now that a new version is coming .. anyway, once you highlight what you want (notice the pc world article in the background) click the button and it takes whatever you have highlighted and transfers into a note - the metaphor is a long sheet of notetaking paper, thus the date ribbon on the side to give you a sense of chronology on your captures ... anyway, this note is now searchable for any key word or combinations you may wish, you can also tag as you see on the left, but with being able to search for any words, this may prove to be a timewaster ... the final quick trick with this one is that I print to a pdf file which allows me to attach for mail and also file for reference within my normal file system ..
Enjoy these tips and thanks for checking in at Mobile Musings ....
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