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.

Due to an unfortunate bug in iTunes I had to restore my iPhone from a backup the other day. Everything went well, except the order of my app icons. They were now all in alphabetical order. I try to arrange my app icons based on usage, i.e. the ones I use more often come first, starting with the first screen. Since all icons where back in alphabetical order this really made me wish there would be a feature which shows you the app usage. This could simply be shown in the “app wiggle mode”.

As we all know, when you press and hold an app icon, all icons start to wiggle and you can move them around or delete them. In this mode every icon could simply show how many times you pressed/used it in the last week, month or so. I made a quick mockup below to illustrate the idea. I think this feature, apart from grouping, which is supposed to be possible with v3.0, would be really helpful to organize your apps. What do you think? Or maybe I missed something and this is already planned?

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.

I just installed The Filter which claims to make “great playlists quickly and easily from your music collection”. My first impression: It does a damn good job! They probably use some clever matching algorithms like last.fm and then create playlists based on selected songs in your iTunes or Windows Mediaplayer library. It also has an auto-suggest feature which looks at your most popular songs and then creates a playlist based on that.

Creating such good playlists manually would probably take me hours and if you’re in charge of music at work a fresh mix is always welcome. So if you want to give your music collection an new spin why don’t you give The Filter a try.

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

A comment I hear quite often is “my spam filter is really good, so I only check the spam-folder once a week or so”. What´s the point of having a spam-filter, when you´re still looking through all those unwanted emails? Sure, you don´t do that every day, but then it just means in a week´s time there will be even more spam e-mails to browse through. But to be honest, I was the same. Once a week I´d quickly scan through thousands of new e-mails in my spam folder. That was quite annoying and at the speed I was doing it, I probably missed a few e-mails which clearly weren´t spam. As you can see, it was pretty pointless. But they are still out there: E-mail users who are happy, because they have such a good spam filter, so they only have to go through their spam folder “briefly” every now and then.

A few months ago I decided not to look at my spam folder anymore. From that point on I tried to improve the reliability of my spam filters more and more. In the Thunderbird spam-filter there are not that many settings but with the right training you can minimize the error rate to a decent level. Some important e-mails still find their way into the spam-folder, so I thought about what I could do to filter out those important e-mails as easy as possilbe. That is when I discovered the Saved Search feature in Thunderbird. This feature has been in there since version 1.0, but I never really thought about using it. I don´t want to discuss every detail here of how Saved Search works. If you want to know more about it I recommend this page here. Saved Search basically allows you to save your search as a virtual folder. In this folder it automatically displays only the messages which match the criterias you´ve defined earlier. This is how I set up my spam-search-folder:

First, open the Search Messages window in Thunderbird by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F. Then you select your spam-folder in the drop-down-menu at the top. Now try to think of some real e-mails that got caught in your spam-folder. Do they have certain characteristics, like sender address, a certain word in the subject line? If yes, just enter them as a search criteria. In the screenshot below you can see some examples from my spam-search-folder. I get a lot of e-mails from New Zealand, so I added “.co.nz”. The other two filters are checking the subject line for “alex3d.de” and “twitter” because I missed a few important e-mails recently which matched those criterias.

When you´re done here, just click on “Save as Search Folder” at the bottom right. In the next screen you can name the virtual folder, move it into the right place and you´re done. The new folder should now appear in the Thunderbird folders pane on the left. When you click on it, it will display only the e-mails in your spam-folder which match the criterias you´ve defined earlier. I´m constantly adding new search criterias to my “Spamsearch” folder. For that you just need to right-click on the folder and select Properties.

Every day, when I´m done with my regular e-mails, I click on the “Spamsearch” folder and it only shows me a few e-mails which could be relevant as opposed hundreds or thousands like before.

You could say now that a similar result could be archived with a properly maintained black and white list, but if your e-mail provider doesn´t have something like that or you don´t even know what it is, why not just use the built-in Thunderbird features like Saved Search? If you have any comments, feedback or improvements, please let me know.