Evernote, Jott, ScheduleWorld, and Chrome

At TiER1 we are always looking for great tools that help us do our job better with higher quality. This week I was introduced to four tools that I’ve been testing and expect will be beneficial for me and my colleagues so I wanted to share them with you.

Evernote

Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) is an note capturing application for your PC, your phone and the web. With this tool you can capture your notes, sync them to your web-based Evernote account and have access to your notes from any computer that has Internet access.  But the best thing abuot Evernote is its search capability. Not only can you attach tags to help you categorize and find your notes, Evernote also indexes your notes, even images, allowing you to find relevent information quickly.

 

For example, you can make a sketch on a piece of paper, take a photo with your cell phone and sync that image as a note in your Evernote account. For this example, let’s assume the sketch is a map with 3 locations labeled: home, work and Joe’s Pizza. If you search your Evernote notes for the word pizza, the search utiliity will recognize the word pizza in your image and return that image as part of your search results.  

Jott

 

Jott (http://www.jott.com) is another notetaking tool that uses your phone as well. But Jott is entirely different. With Jott, you make a phone call, speak your ideas, thoughts, notes, etc. and Jott will transcribe those for you and leave the text in your Jott account. With the free service you can view, copy, paste your notes from the Jott account into another tool. But with the paid service (inexpensive) you can also tell Jott to email your notes to you or to a group of people after you record them.

 

For example, after an important meeting you may want to give your project team an update but there’s no time to login to your laptop, find an Internet connection and type the upate before your flight. With a Jott account, simply make a phone call and Jott will transcribe your notes and send the email for you.

 

It gets better.

 

Brad Isaac shows you how to integrate Jott and Evernote at http://lifehacker.com/373815/jott-your-way-to-evernote-bliss.

 

ScheduleWorld

ScheduleWorld (http://www.scheduleworld.com) allows you to share calendar and contact lists with your friends. One of the best features is that as you share contacts with your group, if any one in your group updates the contact information, your list is automatically updated. And you can sync this to your phone or PDA or PC-based application (i.e. Thunderbird, Outlook).

 

For me the best part of this application is that I can now use my smart phone and Palm-based PDA again. A few months ago my laptop overheated and stopped working. When I purchased a new one I bought one with 64-bit Windows Vista not knowing that Palm would not be providing software to sync my Palm TX to a 64-bit OS. While I was very disappointed but Palm was clear that there would not be an option. I also have a Windows Mobile Smartphone (Blackjack) and while I don’t like the apps as much as the Palm apps, I began using the calendar in the Blackjack. But the Blackjack has to be upgraded in order to sync to Vista and the upgrade can only be installed using Windows XP. But the upgrade also removes all of your information and it has to be reloaded. Which if you can sync before you do an upgrade is not terrible but if you can’t sync you lose all of your data. That was not an option. So until I found ScheduleWorld I was stranded with a PDA, a smartphone and a PC that could not communicate with one another.

Chrome

 

By now you’ve probably heard of Google’s new browser called Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome). But even if you are not typically an early adopter of new technolgy, this browser is worth test driving. It is substantially faster than Microsoft IE. So much faster, you’ll be left wondering what IE is doing that takes so long. After just a couple of days with Chrome, I’ve grown weary of waiting for IE to respond.

 

This morning while using Chrome on Facebook I did notice that when I clicked the link to clear my status, the link didn’t work. But that’s the only issue I’ve run across so far. I’m sure there will be others, there always are with new technology. But Chrome is worth checking out.