Your iOS device is a killer pocketable computer; your desktop is more powerful with a bigger screen. They need to play better together. Here’s how to break down the barrier between the two and shuttle text, files, media, and more seamlessly between your desktop and iPhone. More »
It was previously impossible to easily synchronize your iPhone's notes between devices, but yesterday's iOS4 firmware update adds a feature capable of saving notes directly—and conveniently—to your Gmail account. More »
IPhone – iPhone 3G – Handhelds – Smartphones – Wallpapers and Themes
Windows/Mac/Linux: NoteSync is a lightweight application that allows you to manage notes easily, and offers two-way sync with Google Docs to keep your notes updated and always accessible. More »
Memonic is a free web-based tool that seeks to help you clip out just what you need from your web-based research and organize it in a personally meaningful and helpful way.
Memonic allows you to move away from the model of bookmarking sites that contain data you want and instead of snipping that data out of the page and saving it to your Memonic account. If you're doing research on a vacation for instance, you wouldn't bookmark every page you found with interesting content about that vacation. You would use Memonic to clip out the bits that were of interest to you—a specific restaurant review from a restaurant critic page, a landmark you found on the visitor's bureau site you want to visit, some photos of local street performers you'd like to keep an eye out for, and so on. All the things you clip end up in your Memonic inbox, seen below:
From there you can sort and organize your clips, edit the associated information, and share your clippings and organized portfolios with others. Memonic accounts are free and you can enter information into Memonic using a bookmarklet—see the top screenshot, the green box is the clipping border—or by emailing the information to your Memonic account or manually creating a new entry within Memonic. If you're curious to try out Memonic but hate signing up for new accounts, you can try out all the features of Memonic just by visiting the main page. If you like the service, you can create a free account to save the clippings you made during your trial run.
Have a favorite service for gathering web-based clippings and media together? Let’s hear about it in the comments. Thanks Mick!
Last week we asked you to share your favorite outlining tool and then we rounded up the top five nominations for a vote. Now we’re back to share the results.
Leading the pack was Microsoft OneNote with 30% of the vote. Although not a dedicated outlining application, its outlining functionality combined with ease of use and ease of capture made it a strong contender. Following OneNote was FreeMind (22%) a mind-mapping application many readers have repurposed for use as an outlining and organization tool. Rounding out the top three was Microsoft Word with 13%—not the most sophisticated outliner in the world, but it's on millions of computers and it gets the job done.
For more information on the winner and the runners up, check out the full Hive Five. Have a topic you’d love to see covered in the Hive Five? Fire off an email to tips@lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line.
Windows/Mac/Linux (with Adobe AIR): Note-taking application Scribbly lives in your system tray and lets you quickly write notes or reminders to yourself, and then will email them to you with a single click.
Once you've installed the application, you can simply click the system tray icon to bring up the single note-taking window, type in whatever note you'd like to send to yourself, and then send it off with the click of a button—you'll need to set your email address in the settings, of course. The notes persist even after you minimize the application to the tray, so you can use it to take little notes throughout the day, and then email them to yourself before you go home.
The application is very simple, but where it could be really useful is when you combine it with Gmail’s plus-addressing feature—just add something like username+notes@gmail.com to your email address in the settings, and then setup a Gmail filter to automatically put those notes into a separate label for storage. It's a useful feature that makes it worth a look, at least. Scribbly is a free download for all platforms with Adobe AIR.
Chalkboard paint is a childhood-recapturing tool and a great way to repurpose cruddy furniture. Finding it, and finding it in non-black colors, can be a challenge, so two different sites write up recipes for mixing your own.
Photo by Francis Bourgouin.
The Craft at Home blog has a recipe that makes any acrylic paint of your preference chalk-friendly, though darker colors are still more effective as an actual writing surface. That recipe requires powdered tile grout and glazing medium, which you can usually find at your local hardware store.
If the glazing medium is hard to get at, or you just want fewer steps, Martha Stewart's site explains how to make DIY chalkboard paint with just the tile grout. What's more, her site offers some seriously inspiring ideas on how to implement chalkboard paint in all sorts of spots around your home—we're staring somewhat jealously at the calendar-like pattern shown here.
Tell us how you’d implement custom-colored chalkboard paint, or show us pictures of how you already have, in the comments.
In our first Lifehacker Wishlist, we came up with five wanted features in Google Voice, including an easy way to record and transcribe notes for yourself. Mark Stout suggests a Voice settings tweak to fulfill that wish.
Stout’s method involves setting up a special group in Voice’s caller settings for yourself (dubbed “Special Transcription” in his case), adding your cell phone number as the only member, setting up a very short greeting for that group, then setting the “Direct access to voicemail” question to No. He calls his own Voice number, records a memo, and it’s transcribed and sent to him via email. If you rely on listening to your voicemail over your phone, this makes pressing the “#” key during your uber-short greeting somewhat tricky. Then again, if you’re cool with Voice’s mostly-okay transcription, you likely don’t listen to your voicemail all that often.
Hit the link for Mark’s full run-through, and leave your own methods for recording an audio note to self, with Google Voice or without, in the comments.
Not one to stop tweaking and improving, Zoho‘s integrated notebook tool recently added universal search, HTML import and export, and tools to move your notes around between notebooks and pages.
Search is the big new thing here, because without a reliable search tool, notebooks lose their ability to help you quickly recall things you once had a dash of inspiration to write. Zoho’s right-hand search bar grabs notes from particular notebooks or all of them, and clicking on any results opens that note in a new tab, so you can try a few different spots to find what you’re looking for.
The import/export tools make it easy to pull in notes from other web sources that support HTML formatting. Are you a Zoho fan, or a Notebook user in particular? Tell us how you use it, and what still needs adding, in the comments.
iPhone/iPod touch: Evernote, the brain-expanding memory and note tool, is making full use of the iPhone 3.0 features with a new version that makes reading, synchronizing, mapping, recording, photo-capturing, and landscape-viewing your notes easier, and promises app interactivity to come.
All of the Evernote 3.0 app’s features are available to all iPhone and iPod touch owners, as the majority involve code optimizations and fixes for convenience. There’s no more concern about “pending” notes, or having to hit the “Load 25 More” placeholder when scrolling through, for instance. Evernote 3.0 instantly synchronizes info and thumbnails about your notes, leaving the full load for when you pull them up.
The app also removes a few of the button taps necessary to capture and tag an image or record an audio memo. Turn any device sideways, and you get a landscape timeline view for browsing through everything you’ve recorded lately to your web brain. If you’ve got notes spread over an entire city, or maybe a state or country, Evernote offers a built-in mashup showing your captures across the land.
There’s a lot more explained at the Evernote blog linked below, and in this brief video explainer:
Evernote 3.0 is a free download for iPhones and iPod touch models running the 3.0 software. If you’re an Evernote fan who’s digging on the new features, tell us how you use them to your memory-expanding advantage in the comments.
