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 not exactly the same, Instapaper converts it into something that is more or less a black and white article what Evernote is offering is pretty similar along with the added bonus so syncing to all places I have it installed and that it pretty powerful.

This has led me to think that perhaps I could dispense with Instapaper and go with Evernote alone. On first view the answer would seem to be yes.

Tried clipping with the new Evernote extension? How good has it been for you?

I say that it is easy but that is only the case if you are au fait with the way that Mac Folder Script Action work, which I was not and to make matters worse the way they work seems to have changed between Mac OSX versions making a Google search a challenging exercise.

Anyway, here is what I did to get a watched folder for Evernote on a Mac running OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard):

1. You will need to create a new folder that you want to be “watched”. I created one called Evernote in Documents.

2. You will need to go to the following article on Thought Asylum on Evernote watched folders on OSX. Copy the script to the clipboard.

3. Open the Applescript Editor and paste the script from step 2 into the editor.

4. Compile the script

5. Choose File | Save As…from the menu

6. This is the important bit! You must save the script in the following location: /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts. I called the script Save to Evernote.

7. Now go back to the folder you created in step 1 and right click on it and select Folder Actions Setup… Ensure that Enable Folder Actions is ticked and that the Folder you want the action on is listed and ticked.

8. Click the + button under the right hand pane and a new screen with a list of scripts to attach will open. On this list you should see your newly created script.

And that’s it. I hope that someone finds that useful.

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 made it all the more useful and a large part of my day is spent within the browser.

Google Mail/Calendar/Reader

Here’s the first casualty of 2010 – Google Reader. I can date the day that I stopped using Google Reader to the day that Pulse for iPad was released. All my mail is delivered to one of two Google Mail accounts – either Gmail for home or Google Apps for work, and then pushed out to my iPhone with no fuss. Love it because it simply works.

Remember the Milk

According to Remember the Milk I completed 3,523 tasks with the service in 2010. I think that speaks volumes of how valuable it has become to me. I am often to be seen sat with my iPhone in hand tapping out a quick thought task into RTM. Only gripes are that 1. there isn’t a dedicated iPad application, although one has been promised and 2. I cannot sync my tasks with any third party apps. Come on guys, no one likes a closed platform.

Evernote

Another absolutely essential application. Evernote now has literally everything fed into it as I have gone completely paperless. I scan all paper documentation into Evernote and then can quickly search for it when it is needed. Both the Mac and Windows applications have been updated this year to be faster and more usable.

iPhone/iPad

When I first heard about the iPad I dismissed it as just a large iPhone – how wrong could I be? My iPad has transformed how I consume information, particularly news feeds and magazines. My main way of accessing both RSS feeds and twitter is the iPad – I love the ease with which the information is made available.

This has meant that I have used my iPhone less as the screen is just too small for some things, such as accessing the web.

Unfuddle

Unfuddle continues to be my primary work application. Using the web based service to record all enhancements and bugs in our product. It hasn’t changed all that much in the last 12 months but does now have the obligatory iPhone app.

Zumodrive/Dropbox/iFolder

Zumodrive is one of those applications that could easily be forgotten about it is so tightly integrated into the operating system that you might be forgiven for thinking it was part of Windows/OSX. It has become something that I am using all day everyday and would be lost without it now which is why I read with trepidation recently that Zector had be acquired by Motorola. I hope that they remain true to their word and the service stays as it is.

While I still use Dropbox it is not as key as it once was, particularly as it now is being replaced at work with iFolder where we get more control for free.

Skype

When Skype went down earlier this year it was a big deal for our business as this is the primary means of communications between us and our developers who are off shore. It really hampered out progress while it was down which is a testimony to Skype’s importance and the need to ensure that you have a contingency in place for when something like this happens.

Sony Reader

I read more books in 2010 that I have in any other year of my adult life and the Sony Reader is the reason why. Its compact design, clear screen and ability to hod more books than I would likely read in a lifetime make it great. It’s not without its problems and the price of ebooks and availability is just shocking but nevertheless it means I can and do read more than I did before.

Why don’t I read ebooks on my iPad? Simple the size and brightness of the screen is just makes it a tiring experience.

MacBook Air

A couple of years ago you would have been hard pressed to find an Apple product in our house, these days it’s hard to find a Windows machine. Apple’s build quality is just stunning and justifies, in my opinion, the premium you pay – and the MacBook Air is a premium product. Its size and its weight make it the machine to slip into a case and carry with me everywhere and it is instant on, perfect for meetings and quick presentations.

I am less bought in to OSX and think that Windows 7 has the measure of it.

WunderRadio/Subsonic

Subsonic is just brilliant and is not pretty much the only way that I now listen to music. Whether it is on a computer or portable device I can have my whole music collection available and queued up. WunderRadio does the same for me only for listening to music.

DOA

So that’s the list. But what about those that have dropped off the radar? Well the move to Mac has made me rethink how I blog and having been a staunch follower of Windows Live Writer I have now ditched it in favour of either Wordpress itself or Blogpress on the the iPad. Also gone is the Netbook the MacBook Air has seen that off pretty effectively.

That’s my list for 2010 – what have you found to be invaluable?

Let me repeat that…

My iPad backup is going to take a massive 21 hours to complete. Yes, TWENTY ONE HOURS! To put this into perspective my 32GB iPhone takes about 10-15 minutes to backup and that is full. My 64GB iPad, which is only two thirds full, takes some 84 times longer – I just don’t understand it.

I am really looking forward to iOS4 for my iPad with all its folders and multi-tasking but Apple really need to get this iPad back-up sorted and soon. Come on Steve sort this out. I want my iPad back!

I have a couple of blogs and post to each on an irregular basis. When I am at home I use Windows Live Writer which, in my opinion, is the best blogging app by far and is the only reason I continue to run parallels on my Macbook.

The iPad strikes me as the perfect blogging platform with its big screen capable of working with text and pictures (which I will cover in more detail tomorrow) and therefore I was disappointed with both the choice and the quality of the blogging apps on offer.

I used three “apps” to try and find the best fit for me and these were: Blogpress, a third party iPad application which supports multiple platforms (including Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad). Wordpress’ native iPad application, which only supports Wordpress and a dedicated, web-based, mobile interface for Wordpress.

It was immediately obvious that all three suffer from the same problem – they are little more than simple text editors. You get zero control over the look and feel of the text, for example, you cannot embolden or italicise text, nor can you change the justification. This I can live with as it is not a major issue for me. What I found most frustrating though was the inability to be able to hyperlink some text or to paste in a link and have it converted. This seems a glaring omission that I hope is rectified in a future release.

Both Blogpress and Wordpress are supposed to offer facilities to insert pictures and to save drafts locally for future updates. Here Blogpress wins hands down on both points. While the picture handling is basic you do get a variety of options for where you want to upload a picture to, including Flickr, and this works faultlessly. I have never been able to get the Wordpress app to insert a picture – it always crashes.

One thing that the Wordpress app does do that Blogpress does not is allow you to see and manage comments and if you get many this may be a time saver for you but if it is blogging you are interested in then Blogpress is for you, even if it is not free.

Feeling that there had to be a solution to this once again took me to the net and I quickly discovered that I was not the only one with an issue, but nobody had an answer. There is, however, what I consider to be a workaround and that is turning off backups altogether. BackOff allows you to turn off iTunes backups which certainly speeds up the syncing process but is only any good if you also do manual backups on a regular basis (or are willing to lose the contents of your device in the event of a failure).

So for now I am doing a backup when I can and using BackOff at other times. Not terribly satisfactory but you never know there may be a solution coming from Apple. This is one they can’t resolve with a free bumper.

Picture Kominyetska.

For me, since moving my media collection to a centrally located server on my home network, iTunes has become unusable – I simply cannot get it to work reliably with the media held on a network server. There are lots of internet posts with people trying to get this scenario to work with mixed results. In the end I simply ran out of patience and looked for a solution that worked.

My quest was two fold – one was to find a way that suited me better for managing my music on my iPhone and iPods and secondly a better way to play my music. Clearly I had hoped to find this in a single package but in the end I found two.

The first is a free Windows application called CopyTransManager which, as the name suggests, allows me to manage media on my iPod and, crucially, my iPhone. There are a number of media managers out there but few of them seem to cater for the iPod Touch and IPhone which are different to the rest of the iPod line up in that they don’t mount their disk as an additional drive.

CopyTransManager is simplicity itself – you plug in your device, the media contained on that device is displayed (see screenshot below), you manage that device. However, it is different to iTunes in that you do not get a view of your media collection, only what is on your device. When you want to add tracks you browse for them using the standard File Open dialog, select them and then add. If all you are looking to do is add and remove files from your device then this is perfect. The other thing to note is that in order for CopyTransManager to work you need some components of iTunes so you may need to have it installed.

The second tool I use for my iTunes replacement is the superb Subsonic music streamer, which is available for free for Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix. At it’s simplest Subsonic is a browser based music streamer which has a number of advantages: no client software to install (server side only) and it will work anywhere – and I mean anywhere. I have been in Australia been able to open up a browser go to my Subsonic page and play my music! Even better is that Subsonic can have multiple “players” which you can then select in the browser interface. This means that you can be listening to different music from different browser in different locations.

Subsonic lets you browse and search your collection in a number of different way and allows you to add tracks to your playlist without affecting what is currently playing. It also allows you to select a random number of tracks to add to the playlist based on a set of parameters. It is a great experience. Those not wanting to use a browser can use the Adobe Air application (see screenshot below) which is smaller and doesn’t take up a precious browser tab.

Subsonic is perfect for those of us that have centrally located music collections, as opposed to storing them on a client machine, as you simply install and point Subsonic to you media and off it goes.

So it is (almost) goodbye to iTunes thanks to two great pieces of free software – what are you waiting for?

Perfect Evernote bliss has finally been achieved!

One of my clients is going through a website refresh and was looking to put some screenshots on the home page but they wanted them to appear to be disappearing into the distance, rather like that shown in the picture to the left.

No problem I thought. I know how to rotate an image around the x & y axis so this is just rotating around the z axis, this must be possible and a quick Google would turn up the answer. Many searches later and I was till none the wiser. No amount of “3d rotate image” type searches turned up anything like what I was looking for.

Frustrated I resorted to phoning a friend who immediately said you can do that in Photoshop with the “perspective” tool. Bingo! Another search showed that not only could this be done in Photoshop (which I don’t have) but also can be done in GIMP and Paint Shop Pro. In fact, not only can it be done in Paint Shop Pro it has been there since at least version 5 which is over ten years old now.

So the moral of this story is that it is all very well having the worlds information at hand just a simple search away but if you don’t know how to describe what it is that you are looking for in a way that a machine can understand then you are lost.

I suspect that just as new forms of searching are emerging, such as searching by images, techniques will be developed to better understand the input that we enter and allow searchers to find what they are looking for when they don’t know what to call it.

I had intended to try and go completely Mac to the extent that I bought a copy of Office for Mac to ease that transition but there was one program that I found there was no equal for on Mac and that I simply couldn’t live without and that is Windows Live Writer. So as I stare at the screen in front of me I can see Windows Live Writer but if I point my mouse to the bottom of the screen up pops the Mac dock. I have installed VirtualBox and Windows XP on my MacBook simply to run Windows Live Writer and I wish I didn’t have to but I like to blog and WLW just makes it so easy.

So now I am considering whether I should go a step further and get a copy of Parallels which seems to offer a more integrated Mac experience when running Windows, albeit at a higher price.

Virtualisation is simply amazing. We use it extensively at work and I am using it more and more at home for various tasks and simply to reduce the number of machine at home. I can certainly recommend VirtualBox on the experience so far but it does also seem an unnecessary step.

Anyone else using virtualisation on a Mac? What are you running it for?