Quick, grab your ice skates: we’re going for a spin on the frosted lakes of Hell. Yes, that Hell. Why? Because the App Store just recommended me an app that’s actually good. It’s called Specifics HD, and it’s a note-taking task manager.
Evernote has today rolled out a new Reminders service to its clients on the Mac, iOS, and the web. The new service rolls three of Evernote’s most-requested features into one, delivering in-app and email alarms, quick note-based to-do lists, and the ability to pin notes to the top of your note list.
LinkedIn has launched a new iPhone app today called LinkedIn Contacts, which promises to make it easier to stay in touch with your most important relationships. It brings all of your contacts together in one place, then provides you with alerts for birthdays, job changes, and more.
When you think about it, it seems absurd that there’s no way to add the currently highlighted text on your Mac to your notes. The Notes app, which is the spiritual successor to Stickies, with the advantage of a) not clogging up your screen with yellow squares and b) syncing with your iPhone and iPad, is pretty great. But it lacks, inexplicably, a way to quickly clip the selected text.
This little System Service, which runs an Applescript, will fix that for you.
Ever been driving along when inspiration strikes? When the perfect line for that song you’ve been writing appears in your head and you just have to write it down? How about when you’re listening to the radio and you want to remind yourself to look up a book you’re hearing about on NPR?
You could pull over and rummage around your glove box for a pen that works and some paper, or pull out the Moliskine notebook you carry around everywhere (you hipster). Or, you can just have Siri create a Note about it on your iPhone. You can even have Siri add stuff to Notes you’ve already made. That way, you can just make a note of it, using your voice and the power of Apple’s personal assistant, and it will sync to iCloud (if you have it enabled), ready for action when you get home, or back to your Mac.
Bookmarks are a great way to return to the websites you’re most often interested in. However, there are a ton of times when you just want to remember a specific website once, maybe to show to another person or do some research with. There are a ton of online bookmarking services, like Delicio.us and Pinterest, but they have a whole social networking layer that maybe you just want to skip.
If you want to save the URL of any website in an iCloud-synched app, look no further than Apple’s own Notes app.
iCloud is a pretty neat system, working in the background across a ton of different apps without much input needed from us users, except our login name and password. It lets you sync Notes, Reminders, save documents, keep game saved-states, and even manage your music collection
I’ve been a big fan of Apple’s Stickies app since way back in System 7.5. It’s great to be able to have a little floating place to type notes and keep track of things right on the Mac, without having to resort to anything as mundane as an actual, paper-based sticky note.
The one thing Stickies doesn’t do well is synchronize across devices. With OS X Mountain Lion, however, you can make this happen using Notes and iCloud.
I use Evernote for almost everything these days, including clipping websites to research these daily OS X Tips, writing grocery lists on my Mac and then using my iPhone at the store, and scanning important printed documents to organize digitally.
Did you know, however, that Evernote will also allow you to share notes? It’s fairly easy, and here’s how.
Did you know you can search your iPhone’s notes using Siri? Neither did I. But according to Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger, you can not only get Siri to flip through your notes for you, you can even find notes from a particular day.
Notes on Mac OS X is like Notes on iOS: a basic, skeuomorphic note taking app that lets you type notes, format text, and add images from either operating system, and have them sync up if you’re using iCloud. There’s nothing super tricky about the app on OS X, but the default font size might be a bit too small for you.
If you want to change the size of the text that appears when you just start typing in Notes, here’s what to do.
Use Simplenote to take and search notes on your iPhone or iPad? Love Evernote? Then you’re going to be totally stoked about Simple-For-Ever, a service which syncs the two accounts.
Skeuomorphism, or the tendency to deliberately make something new look like something old and familiar. Some people love it, some people hate it and think it’s tacky.
No matter how you feel, his love for skeuomorphism is one of many reasons that former iOS chief Scott Forstall was fired yesterday. Replacing him is Apple’s Senior VP of Design, Jonathan Ive, who will lead a new Human Interface Group in Apple… and whom reportedly loathes skeuomorphism with every fiber of his being.
All that fake leather stitching, those hideous textures, those bizarre font choices in iOS’s stock apps? If Ive gets his way — and we think he will — they’re all about to change.
Here are the eight skeuomorphic apps in iOS 6 we hope Jony Ive is going to change in iOS 7, along with some third-party apps we hope he takes inspiration from.
Evernote has become an important go-to app on my Mac, my various iOS devices, and on the web when I’m away from all of them (which, I do admit, is rare). The ability to take a note on my Mac and then open it up on my iPhone when at the store or meeting has become an invaluable part of keeping my life organized.
The Evernote team announced today, then, a whole new version of Evernote, the beta for which will show up next week. It’s going to have over 100 new features to make using Evernote on the Mac that much faster, easier, and useful.
Squarespace, the slick website hosting company, has come up with an interesting take on Drafts-style fast note-taking apps. It’s called Squarespace Note, and it is pretty nice looking.
While most of Apple’s stock iOS apps are pretty handy, there are a few that the large majority of us probably never open. I’m talking about apps like Stocks, Voice Memos, and Weather (which always seems to be inaccurate in the U.K.). Unfortunately, the Cupertino company doesn’t allow us to remove these, so the only way to do it was to jailbreak. Until now.
Thanks to a nifty new web app, you can temporarily remove stock iOS icons from your device without jailbreaking. Here’s how.
iNote is an app with one single purpose. And that purpose is such a good one that as soon as I tell you what it is, and how well it works, you’ll be off to the store to drop your $2 on it: iNote syncs your iOS notes with Evernote.
That’s right. Just tell Siri anything you want to remember and — moments later — it’ll be in your Evernote, filed under a new iNotes stack.
Looks like iCloud.com, Apple’s website for its cloud-based computing service, is no longer a beta. In addition to adding the Reminders and Notes apps that sync with iCloud to your iPhone and iPad, iCloud.com has made some improvements to the Find my iPhone app and added VIP mail to the Mail app.
Nuance has today announced Dragon Dictate for Mac 3, the latest version of its popular dictation software. In addition to being faster and more accurate than the previous Dragon Dictate 2.5, this release also boasts “more features than ever before,” including new Smart Format Rules, wideband Bluetooth support, new correction capabilities, and more.
Evernote’s Smart Notebook might cost $25 – double the price of the almost identical 3.5 x 5.5-inch Moleskine version – but it will likely sell by the pallet-load. Why? Because it is a genuine paper Moleskine which integrates with Evernote itself.
The Smart Notebook has special paper which – in combination with a new update to the Evernote iOS app – makes scanning and tagging easier than ever.
I have to admit, I’ve been a big fan of the Stickies app that Apple has included with its operating system since way back in System 7.5. It’s fantastic to be able to have a little floating place to type notes and keep track of things right on the Mac, without having to resort to anything as mundane as an actual sticky note.
The one thing Stickies hasn’t had was a good way to access those notes when away from the computer. With OS X Mountain Lion, however, you can make this happen using Notes and iCloud.
If you’re a fan of the new Notes app in OS X Mountain Lion as I am, you’re probably annoyed by the sparse list of three default fonts included with the app, just like in iOS. Sure, you can choose a different, note-specific font with a little work, but until now, there’s been no easy way to set a good default font for all of your notes.
Thanks to the easy little workaround I’ll show you in this video, you’ll finally be able to ditch Marker Felt once and for all, and choose the font of your choice within Notes.
Popular and useful note-taking and synchronization app Evernote has just updated its Mac app to version 3.30. The new version adds new keyboard commands, a new premium user account, new user controls and LinkedIn support, which is also now available in the web-cased Evernote client. In addition, Evernote sports a handy slideshow option for notes that involve pictures. This will look really nice using Evernote’s new Retina display support.
Here’s something cool you may not have noticed yet. With its new Keynote update, released alongside Pages and Numbers yesterday, Apple replaced the unique icon that features the somewhat depressing lyrics to The Bitch of the Living by Spirit Awakening with a new 2012 icon that displays a famous quote from the company’s Think Different commercial. The same quote now appears on several of Apple’s Mac OS X icons.
Despite releasing OS X Mountain Lion and a whole host of app compatibility updates this morning, Apple has finished delivering new software. The Cupertino company just rolled out iTunes U version 1.2, which adds note-taking, and new search and sharing features.
