Archive for ‘Tech’ Category
From Paper to the Cloud: Ampad Shot Note
For a while, Paper Doll kept getting asked the same question: Paper or Digital? Nowadays, that’s the wrong question. More and more, it’s not a question at all, because the answer is paper and digital. Hybrid solutions are becoming more common because people need to organize their information in multiple ways.
Last year, we looked at the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine. On the outside, it was a cool paper notebook, designed for writing or sketching and helping you look like a hipster, but on the inside, it was magically connected to cyberspace. With the Smart Notebook, you added little stickers next to whatever you created, used your digital device to align and snap a photo, and the picture landed safely in your preferred Evernote folder, tagged appropriately because of each sticker’s flavor of magic fairy dust.
Today’s entry into the paper/cloud hybrid notebook arena, Esselte’s Ampad Shot Note, with the motto “From Handwritten to Handheld,” is a little less hipster than Moleskine and a little more corporate/classroom.
The Basics: Shot Note comes in seven varieties. Four are band-bound at the top, like a typical legal pad. The 5″ x 8″ writing pads are available in wide rule and dot graph formats (suitable for to-do lists and quick thoughts); the 8 1/2″ x 11 3/4″ writing pads also come in wide rule and dot graph (appropriate for class and meeting notes). All pads have a rigid 60 pt chipboard backing and 40 micro-perforated 22 lb. paper sheets. (The pages are not lined or dot-gridded on the reverse sides, unlike with traditional notepads.)
Two of the Shot Notes are spiral-bound for easy flipping of pages, but are also micro-perforated. The 9″ x 12″ blank sketch pad has an extra-sturdy 80 pt chipboard backing so the artist in you can be nimble. Each pad has 40 sheets of 50 lb. paper. The 9 1/2″ x 7 3/4″ writing notebook is medium ruled, with 40 sheets of 22 lb. paper and a rigid 60 pt chipboard backing. The sketch pad has the spiral at the top; the notebook is spiral-bound on the left side.
For a larger canvas to display your brilliance, there’s a 23 1/4″ x by 31″ blank easel pad with 25 perforated, self-adhesive, repositionable sheets of bleed-free 20 lb. paper.
All of the Shot Note varieties have corner markers to help you align the pages (of which, more later). Note, the corner markers are only on the “front” pages, so if you write on the reverse of the sheets, it’s no different from writing on a standard notepad.
Each of the writing pads has markings in the upper right corner so that you can date your notes. (The sketch pads are undated.)
How Shot Note Works:
- Download the free Ampad Shot Note app for iOS or Android.
- Use the notebooks. Write notes, letters, sonnets. Doodle your name and your sweetie’s, or sketch the next architectural wonder.
- Snap a photo of your creation using the Ampad Shot Note app, aligning the four corners of the page with the app’s doohickey for recognizing the corners. This uploads your page to the app.
Name your file. Add a description and tags. The app will create a date- and time-stamp for you.- Access and view the items you’ve captured. Search by name, tag or date/time-stamp.
Share your items via email, Evernote, Dropbox, Twitter or message from your camera roll.
Why You Might Use the Shot Note Pads and App
You, like Paper Doll, may have a really shaky hand when it comes to snapping documents and pictures with a tablet. While an increasing number of digital devices have grid lines built into the camera apps to make it easier to shoot “straight,” some are easier to manage than others.
Your creativity only bursts forth when you set pen (or pencil) to paper. Maybe you get tongue-tied (finger-tied?) when you type, but really need to have a digital copy of what you create so can share with collaborators or clients.
Maybe you want to share a personal message for a love note or “good luck” blurb, and don’t want to sacrifice handwriting and personal doodles just to be able to have it received immediately.
What other things could you do with the Shot Note?
- Archive your children’s school projects and drawings.
- Share notes from class with your study group.
- Snap your grocery list and share it with your family so two (or more) of you can divide up zones of the supermarket and finish faster.
- Keep your originals safe at home (or at the office) when you’re traveling.
For more on how the Shot Note works, check out the spiffy little video.
Paper Doll‘s Thoughts: I was intrigued by the Shot Note when it debuted at the 2013 NAPO Conference last spring. I still think it’s neato, in the abstract, but there are some practical concerns. First, price. Available at Amazon, Staples and other office supply stores, the Shot Note regular pads lists between $6 and $10, which is pretty pricey for so few pages per pad, though Amazon carries them at a significant discount (a more reasonable $2-$4). The easel pad, listing from $70-$90 (yes, really!) and discounted at about half of that, is pretty darned expensive for 25 monster-sized sticky notes.
Beyond price, it’s not clear what the Shot Note can do that’s really special. Right now, it’s a camera app that nicely lines up the pages of utilitarian-looking notepads, and it’s decently integrated with the major productivity tools. But it strikes me that Evernote seems to have gotten much farther with integrating its camera app, and can even search handwriting as if it were text. Then again, Ampad is in the business of paper, not digital manipulation, so maybe it’s not fair to hold the two to the same standards.
I had one other thought. The Shot Note focuses on the written and the visually artistic, but Ampad could create a Shot Note side-spiral notebook of blank sheet music. I suspect that there are suitable apps for taking the uploaded, snapped, handwritten notes and allowing the paper and apps to make beautiful music together. (No charge for the idea, Ampad. Enjoy!)
Paper Doll Post:
Understanding Evernote: What, Why, and How
Don’t you hate falling behind the curve? You may hear a term (like net neutrality, or twerking, or whatever) once or twice and dismiss it, but then it seems like you wake up one day and everyone knows the intricate details of a subject except for you. Technology is the worst, because you get the sense that everyone knows the secret password for a new productivity clubhouse and you’re left out in the cold.
Nobody likes feeling left out, so I’d like to share the basics of Evernote, my favorite online notebook system. I’m by no means an expert, or even an ambassador. But I am a user, and it has helped me be more organized for my blogging, writing and presentations. So, if you’re feeling fuzzy on “What’s the what-what?” re: Evernote, or if you can “sort of” use it but don’t know how to explain it to someone else, this might be a good place to start.
Evernote: The Basics
Evernote is a suite of digital products designed to help you collect, curate, find and keep track of all the information for your life and business.
The main Evernote app, Trunk (because an elephant never forgets), is designed for creating and “clipping” notes, just like you’d clip articles from the newspaper. Related notes can be grouped into notebooks. (Trunk is only one of many Evernote products designed to organize and master your information. For example, Evernote Hello is for contacts and integrates with Facebook and LinkedIn. Skitch lets you draw on photos and annotate notes. Penultimate is a handwriting app that enables you to devise mind maps, sketch, and create searchable written items.)
Evernote is free for up to 100,000 notes, 250 synchronized notebooks, 10,000 tags and 100 saved searches, and you can upload up to 60 MB of data per month at no charge. For $3.99/month or $34.99/year, a Plus account allows 1 GB of uploads per month; a Premium subscription for $7.99/month or $69.99 annually gives you 10GB/month in uploads. The paid versions provide offline access, an extra mobile security key, and searchable PDFs. Evernote Business is $14.99/user/month and has a wide variety of offerings for extensive collaboration and complex archiving. [Editor’s note: pricing and features change periodically; check Evernote’s Getting Started page for a full rundown of features and pricing.]
So What Constitutes a Note?
A note can be:
- clipped from an external source, like an entire web page or just an excerpt (like a sidebar or a caption), a photo or other captured image.
- formatted text that you create from inside the app. (Notes can have attachments appended to them, too.)
- recorded using your device’s built-in microphone and transcribed into text.
Evernote is available for: Windows, Mac, IOS (iPhone, iPad, etc.), Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry and Web OS. Everything you create can be synced and backed-up across all of your devices and in the cloud. Type it here, see it there.
Maybe you’re thinking, “But I already have bookmarks or favorites in my browser. And I already have Word or Google Drive. Why would I want Evernote?” It’s because Evernote is greater than the sum of its parts.
What Evernote Works Like
Bookmarks, but with superpowers: you can tag (label) notes, group them into notebooks, embed notes you’ve clipped into other notes you create and search by tags. The “clipper” is available for specific web browsers; if you don’t specify what you want clipped, it will clip the entire page. It also clips the URL, but with Evernote, even if the web page subsequently gets changed or deleted, you have a permanent record of what was there.
Notetaking software: You can type directly into a new or existing note as if it were a Word document, format it with bullets, bolding, italics, justification, etc. and then add photos, videos or whatever. Then, when it’s fully baked, turn your document into a blog post, a contract, a poster/flyer, client instructions, etc.
An extra, super-organized brain: Record voice memos. Take pictures with your phone or tablet and then edit or annotate them with other elements of the Evernote suite, like Skitch. Add geolocation tags to notes so you know where you were when you created them (so later, even if you don’t remember any tags, you can find everything you created while on vacation or at a conference). Send an email (or Tweet from Twitter) directly to your Evernote account. Imagine working on a project — instead of having a handful of status emails in your inbox, a dozen tweets, multiple drafts on your computer and in the cloud, and a final version on your desktop, Evernote keeps everything in one place.
Google Drive or similar collaborative space. You can collaborate with others to create and update documents jointly.
So, instead of having everything you need in dark little pockets of your universe, Evernote brings them all together.
Get Started with Evernote
1) Create an account. This link will give you a free month at the Premium level, but the free account should suffice for most beginners. I suggest starting out on your computer, then moving to your mobile device. It’s easier to get the big picture on a big screen.
2) Download the software appropriate for your computer, and then download the app for your flavor of phone, tablet, etc.
3) Install the Evernote “clipper” in your computer’s browser – a bookmarklet that goes in your browser’s bookmark bar. When you’re on a page that you want to clip, click the elephant icon in your browser bar. (The log-in screen will pop up the first time.) If you only want to clip a portion of a page, highlight it. Evernote will save the page or portion, save the URL, let you add tags or comments, and prompt you to save the new note to your default folder or any specific folder you prefer.
4) Install a paid clipper icon on your phone or tablet, like EverClip. Or, you can install a free clipper in your mobile browser using these instructions to install a free clipper in your Safari bookmark bar (for IOS products).
For some reason, Evernote hasn’t yet created its own free mobile web clipper tool. However, if you’re willing to use the Dolphin Browser instead of on your iPad, iPhone or Android phone, you can try Dolphin’s free built-in web clipper.
[Editor’s Note, 1/25/2015: Android and iOS8+ device users can now share directly from their browsers to their Evernote accounts following the instructions on the Evernote blog, at How to Clip Web Content Into Evernote Using Android and iOS Devices.]
5) Start clipping and/or creating notes. Organize them. Retrieve them.
- Create a note as a clipping by using the web clipper.
- Create a note as text. Click “new note” (or the + sign, when mobile). Start typing, then format, add check boxes to make a checklist, insert whatever you want, and go wild.
- Create a note by snapping a photo. (We’ll cover more on this in an upcoming post on the cool relationship between Evernote and Post-it.)
- Create an audio note by clicking the microphone icon. Talk. (Lifehack‘s Steve Dotto explained the audio functions well in his recent My Five Favorite Evernote Features video.)
- Email a note to your personalized Evernote email address. (To find yours, log into your account and find your Account Info page. Evernote will show you “Email notes to:” and your default Evernote address. To send to a specific notebook, type an @ sign in front of the notebook’s name, like @BlogNotes. Add tags to emailed notes by typing a hashtag (#) in front of a tag you’ve previously created, like #paperorganizing in the email’s subject line. To do both, the subject line would be @BlogNotes #paperorganizing.
- Tweet a note to @myEN from the Twitter account associated with your Evernote account. (You do have to follow @myEN for it to work.)
- Drag and drop documents (to create notes) from your desktop to specific notebooks (in Safari, Chrome and various other browsers).
- Share a note or a notebook. Hover over the notebook and click on the down-arrow to see your sharing options.
- Geotag your notes. Click on the Atlas, and Evernote will show you what notes you’ve taken where. (Didn’t do a great job of labeling the receipt photos you snapped on your business trip to Duluth? Evernote will find them for you geographimagically!)
- Create shortcuts so notes you use all the time are easily and quickly accessible.
Evernote has a wide variety of other features. You can post links to notes in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, turn your Evernote window into a full-screen presentation display (in the Premium version) mark up entire notes as PDFs and even create timed reminders related to your notes so you can maintain your productivity.
Now that you know the what, why and how, give Evernote a whirl, and be sure to check out the Evernote blog and Getting Started videos for a more thorough education. Welcome to the clubhouse!
Paper Doll Post:
Max Headroom Meets John Hancock: Digital Signatures Series: SignEasy
Your business partner just realized he needs your signature on an important client contract that will impress the venture capitalist he’s meeting in two hours. Unfortunately, you just headed off on a well-deserved vacation to a remote mountain cabin. And let’s imagine everyone involved is the buttoned-up type who needs more than a handshake and a promise. Do you really want to divert yourself through one tiny town after another until you can find a random stranger willing to let you use her printer and fax machine so you can send the document on its way?
Or, closer to home, let’s say you forgot to sign your middle schooler’s permission slip to attend an important field trip, and said kid is pretty miffed at you. What do you do?
Use it as a chance to build up the tough love and teach your kid that “tsk, stuff happens” and get back to what you were doing? Feel guilt-tripped enough to excuse yourself from work, and then drive halfway across town in crazy traffic to sign the permission slip under the gaze of a disapproving school secretary?
What if there were a better way? There is! You can use a digital signature!
Electronic signatures are legally binding in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, throughout the European Union and elsewhere, per the Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN), the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and European Directive (EC/1999/93).
Major players in the digital signature field include Docusign and Echosign. This is just the first in a series of ongoing posts on innovative ways to sign-and-send, without needing an envelope, stamp, fax machine or courier service. Watch this space for more on this topic.
SignEasy just turned three this summer, but this company has some pretty advanced features for a toddler.
Start by downloading the SignEasy app, and then create an account with a valid email address. Next, you’ll log in to create your signature and save it. From there, it’s just three easy steps: import, sign and send!
IMPORT
No matter where it lives, you just import the document in any of a few easy ways:
If someone emails you a document, just tap on the attachment and select SignEasy as the Open In option. (You know, like “Open in Safari” or “Open in Microsoft Word.”)
You can also forward it to add@getsigneasy.com from the email address set as your SignEasy username.
Or, if you want to import the document from Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Box or some other file storage app/accounts, just open it, select the option of “Send to” or “Export to” and then tap on SignEasy.
No matter how you import it, the document will appear in the “My Documents” section of your SignEasy app.
SignEasy supports PDFs as well as all the Microsoft Office (DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT), Apple Pages and OpenOffice formats, images (JPG, BMP, PNG, TIFF), Text, HTML, RTF, and CSV. With the most recent release, SignEasy can handle importing filenames containing native alphabets or scripts in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew.
SIGN
Once you’ve got your “paperwork” in front of you on your phone, tablet or other gadget, sign the document using a stylus or your finger. (Don’t turn this into a blonde joke; don’t use a real pen.) I suggest using a narrow-tipped stylus so that your signature will look more “real” and reflect the types of signatures on other documents you’ve signed, just in case there are any legal questions later on.
The app will let you adjust the color and size of your signature to your preferences, either on an ad hoc basis or to create a default. You can also use the security settings to password-protect your signature so nobody can steal your John or Jane Hancock.
Complete your document, as necessary, with your initials, the date, any additional text, your company logo and more. You can also insert buttons and checkmarks on the iPhone/iPad version (but not on the Android or Blackberry versions, so far).
Any given document can be signed by up to three signers, including the account holder. If you’ve got a whole board or committee needing to sign off, there’s a slightly kludgy work-around where you get the initial three signatures, and then you reimport the finalized document back to SignEasy and repeat the process.
Offline signing is supported, so you can sign multiple documents and save them as drafts until you’re able and/or ready to send them.
Signatures created with SignEasy are only stored on the mobile device where they are created, never on the server. Signatures “pass through” the server, along with all the rest of a document’s contents, only when users generate the final signed document.
SEND
Email the signed document to whomever needs it, CC it to yourself, or tuck it away in your digital filing cabinet (Dropbox, Evernote, yadda yadda).
PRICING
SignEasy is a free app, and is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. You can sign up to three documents for free each month, too. If you want to sign unlimited documents each month or have cloud storage integration, there’s an annual fee of $29.99 per year for the premium package — about the cost of 65 First Class postage stamps or one or two overnight deliveries. Less frequent users can purchase pay-as-you-go document credits, where $4.99 gets you ten sign-and-sent documents. These plans are designed for individuals/single professionals only, so if you’ve got a whole staff looking to use this, there’s a volume licensing schedule for business and enterprise level usage.
Do you use an electronic signature program or app? Do you have a favorite? Please share your thoughts and concerns in the comments section, below.
Paper Doll Post:
Tech Planning on Paper: From Old-Fashioned to Cutting Edge
Are you techie? Or do you have a loved one (a geeky grandkid, a web-designing date, a TechCrunch crush) whom you want to impress with a gift that shows you really get it? Last December, Paper Doll‘s 2012 Holiday Gift List: A Compendium of Practical Delights referenced an item that I thought would be a fun little gift for web-designing pals.
It was a short reference to UI Stencils’ Browser Dry-Erase Board. I didn’t even review the 9″ x 12″ twenty-pixel grid browser template — I’d merely mentioned that it “bridges the gap between brainstorming and web design with a page-organizing tool that can be revised with the swipe of a dry-eraser. It’s $26.95 and no batteries or chargers are necessary!” And I put up a photo.
It turns out that I’d stumbled onto an area of paper organizing that I didn’t even know existed. It’s called paper prototyping, and my tech peeps tell me that even in this modern world of apps, the best way to start brainstorming and designing a user-facing digital experience is on paper. Who knew?
The above photo excerpt is taken from Paper Prototyping for Tiny Fingers, a 1994 article from the Practical Programmer column in Communications of the ACM, a computer and IT industry journal/site. I had no idea how much this concept would appeal to my tech peeps (and their loved ones, who were able to cross the perfect stocking stuffer off their shopping lists) until the mail (and tweets) started pouring in. Since then, two other nifty paper-based tech planning tools have come my way.
Sticky Jots is the brainchild of two grad students from the School of the Visual Arts in New York City, Pam Jue and Rae Milne, who really love and believe in the power of sticky notes. In their own words, “When designers go straight to the computer instead of starting out with pen and paper, they get caught up in the details instead of seeing the bigger picture. Not thinking systemically can lead to miscommunication or, worse, unintended consequences and inappropriate design choices.” (For more, read, “So Why Sticky Jots?”) Of course, by starting with paper, these gals are warming Paper Doll‘s heart.
Sticky jots start with two basic elements: a pad of sticky note templates and a clipboard-esque base. Both are designed to scale to reflect the size and shape of a smartphone and/or tablet so the designer (or you, wearing your “Look at me, I’m a designer” hat) can get a sense of the big-picture approach to designing the app interface in a less abstract, more systematic way. Start with your initial image, and then sketch out different approaches, switch elements until you get the look and flow you want, and you never have to erase (or even create) a line of code until it’s all looking the way you envision.
Sticky Jots come in kits and individual elements, including:
- Everything Kit ($50) — One mobile template base, two mobile template sticky pads, one tablet template base, two tablet template sticky pads, and two storyboard (of which, more later) template sticky pads
- Mobile Kit ($24) — One mobile template base, two mobile template sticky pads and one storyboard sticky pad
- Tablet Kit ($24) — One tablet template base, two tablet template sticky pads and one storyboard sticky pad
- Storyboard template sticky pads, set of six ($12)
- Mobile template sticky pads, set of six ($8)
- Tablet template sticky pads, set of six ($24)
Each sticky pad includes 50 template sheets. The mobile and tablet pads have dot grid patterns to enable easier and more precise sketching. To aid in the design process, Sticky Jots provides a downloadable workflow template.
(Sticky Jots aren’t just for budding tech-heads. Maybe you’re a novelist, filmmaker, or some other narrative wunderkind. If so, you can use Sticky Jots to create and modify storyboards in a visual way. Left-brainers like Paper Doll think of narratives as bulleted or numbered plot points in outline form. But those of you creative types who are at home in your right-brained thinking can move dialogue from the introduction to the denouement or switch the action sequence in Act II for the love scene in Act III with a quick flip of some sticky notes…without that ever-present fear that you’ll accidentally delete something. Lift, move, stick. Done!)
App Seed, which like Sticky Jots, got its start on Kickstarter, reminds me a little of the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine, which we’ve discussed previously, in terms of the interactivity between the paper and the digital. The Canadian team is led by Greg Goralski.
App Seed has two parts: a sketchbook and an app. (There are also whiteboard stickers because, well…because stickers are cool.) Basically, you start with the printed paper template and start drawing the elements of your user-interface design. But then the tech part gets added. As the creative team explains the concept:
AppSeed lets you take your sketches and make them into functioning prototypes, bridging the gap between pen/paper and digital, through computer vision. It allows you to sketch your designs as you normally would and then manipulate your sketches directly on your phone. Unlike similar products, the use of computer vision speeds up the process and understands your sketches. AppSeed can identify an enclosed space in your sketch, allowing you to make it into a button, input text, map, or another UI element. Making your sketch into a functioning prototype running on your phone.
In other words, it’s magic. See how it works:
So, you sketch your designs and then capture them, using your smartphone or tablet’s camera. Then, App Seed uses “computer vision” (which sounds like a superpower to Paper Doll) in order to automatically crop your paper design to the right space. Then it isolates each element that you drew — separately — so that you can manipulate and interact with those elements — for real!
For some perspective, with Sticky Jots, you create the vision of what you’d like to have your technology do, but eventually you have to seek out someone (or some way) to make it happen. With App Seed, once you upload your design into the “computer vision,” you can then actually make the elements work in the user interface you’re designing. It takes the big picture and makes it come alive. (Try to tell me that’s not magic!)
Actually, these magicians are willing to share their secrets, as they explain,
“The secret sauce behind AppSeed is the use of computer vision to search your sketch and isolate individual elements. Specifically, we use the wonderful OpenCV (an open source computer vision code library: opencv.org) to isolate lines and drawn shapes within your sketches. We then use our own algorithms to identify the UI elements.”
The OpenCV takes your elements and creates buttons, maps, street views, form inputs and more, and then lets you run and share an HTML5 prototype with others on your team (or, y’know, someone who actually understands what you’re trying to accomplish).
From this point, you can export and edit the elements “in Photoshop through PS Connection. This creates a Photoshop document that has all your drawn elements on their own layers, giving you the pixel perfect control to move your design into the next stages of production,” per App Seed.
App Seed’s Kickstarter campaign just hit its funding goal this week, so it’s not available quite yet. Per the Kickstarter page, it should be up and running by January 2014.
Whether these paper prototype templates seem nifty because you’d use it for your own tech design, or neato because you have absolutely no idea what any of it means but it sounds like Sci-Fi, they’re nonetheless a fascinating set of examples of the intersection of paper and technology and how the two can be combined to better organize our world.
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