When I´m on the road (and I mean that literally) I simply record a voice note in Evernote on my iPhone and then tag it with @todo. I try to get into the habit of checking this tag for notes every morning when I open Evernote and then take actions, like turning it into a to do in Remember the Milk or write down the note. Evernote already has an excellent OCR feature. Now I wish it would have the same for voice or music and sound in general. Imagine Evernote would recognise not just words but also music, like the Shazam app on the iPhone.

First of all, if you don´t know what Evernote (EN) is, you´ve really missed something. Evernote is a cross platform notetaking tool which acts like your external brain. You can add pretty much every information to Evernote: Text, images, webpages, files like PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, or photos, scanned documents or e-mails. You can store them online and access them through the website, desktop clients (Mac and Windows) or mobile phone (iPhone or Windows Mobile). All those platforms are always synchronized automatically. This all is topped off by a smart and fast search function and tagging system. If this sounds interesting to you, I recommend you go to Evernote´s website or watch their CEO Phil Libin explaining Evernote in less than a minute.

Breaking the habits

As you can probably guess by now Evernote is one of my favourite applications and I´ve been using it for about two years or so. But just in the last few months and especially with the launch of the iPhone app I´ve started using it every day and everywhere. It takes some time until you first though becomes “Hey, I should put that quickly into Evernote!”. Also it took me a while to make Evernote my first stop for looking up some information.

How do I use it everyday?

I´m always curious to find out how other people use the applications that I use. It helps to come up with new ideas or to optimize my user habits. But when you try to find examples of other Evernote users most of the time those example are very vague or general, like “I use it for recipes” or “all my business cards go in there”. Since this is not very helpful or wouldn´t completely sell Evernote to me, I want to share with you some every day examples of how I use Evernote:

1. Movie ticket booking number

I booked movie tickets online the other day. When the website displayed the booking number I just selected this bit and added it to EN with website clipper for Firefox. Since we hadn´t been at this Cinema before I also went to their contacts page and clipped the address to EN. On Saturday night we jumped into the car and I opened EN on my iPhone to get the address of the cinema, which I then entered into Google Maps for navigation. When we arrived at the cinema I pulled out my iPhone to get the booking number for the tickets.

2. Preparing a fax for the office

I had to cancel my old mobile phone contract which you can only do by fax. Since I don´t have a fax machine at home, I downloaded the Word form and dragged it into the EN Windows desktop client. Then I entered all my details. Next morning at work I opened EN and printed out the form and faxed it. The good thing is that you can even change a document after(!) you´ve added it to EN. You just double click on a Word doc in EN for example, make the changes and save it again – done.

3. Camera research

When I did the research for my new DSLR camera a few weeks ago, EN came in really handy. I just created a tag called “DSLR research” and whenever I came across a review or good bargain of cameras I was interested in I clipped and tagged it in EN. I even added snapshots of camera magazine reviews to EN. After I´d bought the new camera (a Canon 450D/Rebel XSi, btw), I was looking for a bag. So I went around camera shops, tried bags and took photos of them (especially the price tags). Back at home I compared my findings and searched for the lowest price etc. Since EN features an excellent character recognition I could simply search my notes for certain camera bag brands like Lowe or Crumpler. EN had indexed all the brand and models names on the price tags on my photos.

4. Remembering shopping hours

This may sound a bit silly, but I keep forgetting the shopping hours of my local supermarket or drugstore, especially the ones on Saturday. So I just pulled up EN on my iPhone, took a photo of the opening hours displayed at the shop entrance and added the name of the shop to the note.

5. E-ticket information for your flight

When I booked a flight for my next holidays the other day, I just added the e-ticket to EN which comes in handy when you arrive at the airport. No more paper print outs.

These are only a few examples of how I use Evernote. I will definitely add more of this in the future. But what about you? Are you using Evernote already? If yes, then please share some examples with us.

Since I got an additional data plan for my Windows Mobile PDA/cell phone a few weeks ago, I’ve started using more and more online-services while I’m on the go. Apart from now being able to read my mail or RSS feeds on my mobile without having to fear a horrendously high bill at the end of the month, I was also looking for a to-do list service which I can use from anywhere. I’ve tried a few but now I’m totally sold to Remember the Milk (RTM) for all my lists of things to do. RTM offers pretty much everything you can imagine or expect from a to-do list service. Just to name a few features: You can add tasks through the website, e-mail, SMS or browse the mobile version of RTM to manage your lists. You can even send yourself reminders via SMS or e-mail for free. There’s also tagging, priorities, Google Calendar/Maps integration and even a collaboration feature so that you can share tasks with other RTM users. And the best thing – it’s free. If you’re curious, you might want to check out the tour first, then simply sign up and give it a go. Happy to-do-listing! Let me know what you think.

> Remember the Milk

For me, one of the most annoying things when working on a computer is trying to find the right folder. Even though the network at my office and my computer at home are pretty well organized, it can take quite a lot of mouse-clicks to find what you’re looking for, just because of the sheer number of folders. Sure, you can create shortcuts to your most used folders on the desktop. This is a method I used for a while until I found ac’tivAid and Dirkey. Now I can’t really think of an easier and faster way to find the folder I’m looking for, than with these two tools:

ac’tivAid

This collection of tools is being developed by my favourite German computer magazine c´t. It contains more than 30 different tools ranging from an application launcher, recent directory pop-up to other various tool that make your work in Windows much easier. Although, most of the tools are really useful, it´s the QuickChangeDir tool which stands out.

My job as a Graphic Designer/Account Manager quite often requires me to find folders and files really quickly on our servers. It´s not that we haven´t organized our folders, it´s more that there are so many and even if you click your way through the folder structure it always takes a few moments until you find the file you want. So for years now I´ve been looking for a tool which I can activate in every file requester or explorer window, type in part of the name of the project folder I´m after and then you just hit return and you´re there. This is exactly what QuickChangeDir does. And it does this job very fast and very quick by indexing all the folders on your (network) drives on a regular basis. Just to be clear, this is not a file search programme like Google Desktop. It only works with folders but since I keep my files pretty organised anyway, this is all I need.

I´ll give you another example so you can see what makes this tool quite unique, at least as far as I know. Let´s say you´ve just created a Photoshop file which will be used in the Christmas flyer you´re working on. You hit Ctrl-S in Photoshop and the save file dialog pops up. If this is a new project, chances are pretty small, that you´re already in the right folder where you want to save this file. But with QuickChangeDir all you need to do is hit Windows Key + – and type “Christmas” or whatever part of the project folder name you remember. Next, you´ll get a list with all the folders containing “Christmas”. Just choose the one you need and hit enter. Even though this might have saved you only a few seconds, if you, like me, work on many different projects during the day it can save you a lot of time.

The only problem with ac’tivAid is that the website is only in German, so is the read-me file. But at least the whole interface is available in English. And since most features are self-explanationary this is actually all you need. On http://www.heise.de/ct/activaid/ just download”activaid_v111.exe”, which has all the installation files in one package. If you encounter any German bits you don´t understand, you can ask me anytime.

http://www.heise.de/ct/activaid/

Dirkey

Just like QuickChangeDir above, Dirkey is a real time saver if you need to get around your folders as fast as possible. You could describe the programme as a folder bookmarking tool. There are quite a few tools like this out there, but it is the integration with Windows, which makes Dirkey special. No matter if you´re in explorer or any Windows file-requester, just right-click on the red close icon in the current window and Dirkey appears. Now you can add the current folder to your favourites or select a previously boomarked folder from the list. I always bookmark all the folder of my current projects, so that I can access them from anywhere in Windows with just two mouse clicks. Unfortunately, the author of Dirkey doesn´t develop the software any further and has sold the source code to another company. But the good thing is that´s been working without any problems on my Windows XP machine at home and several PCs at work for the last few years.

http://www.protonfx.com/dirkey/

Apart from ac’tivAid and Dirkey there are a few more tools which I use every day to make my computer work easier, but those two are definitely the biggest time savers. If you know of any other must have tools like these, please let me know. Of course, any other comments or questions are also welcome.