The NEW Evernote 4.0 for the iPhone – Incredibly great!

I use Evernote, I use it everyday. That said, I have long been a fan of the Mac version, happy with the PC version, use the iPad version a lot and have just put up with the iPhone version.

Then, the Evernote folks introduced 4.0 for the iPhone. It has all of the feature I had hoped for but honestly hadn’t thought they would do.

I should go back and ask the obvious. Do you know what Evernote is? It is a cloud note service, that is free. There is a Web interface, a PC version, a Mac version, iOS version, and even a version of their tools for the Blackberry… all free. Any of the software options allow you to create rich content notes and then sync up to the cloud so you can access and edit with another computing device. You can also share folders of documents with others so it’s a great way of many people collecting notes for a project.

Like I started with, the only copy of the Evernote software I have not been happy using was the iPhone version. Now, Evernote 4.0 lets me get to my information they I need to, and very quickly.

The Evernote 4.0 app has several list views not previously available. One is for the folders of notes and the other are for tags assigned to notes. It used to be you had to scroll through the complete list of notes in order of the folder they were in. There had been no way to collapse the folders down so when I had to look up a note there was a lot of scrolling involved. Not the case anymore!

There is also a view of notes divided by media added to the notes. It used to be only the desktop app allowed for media to be attached to notes. It is now possible to add multiple images and up to 90 minutes of audio to any note.

For the serious users like myself, there is a Evernote ‘pro’ service (buy one updates the services across all of the devices your using). This version doesn’t have any quantity of notes synced a month limits, removes all ads from the desktop version of the software and allows for folders to be created of notes that you can save locally to your device to use/read offline.

Excited, you bet! Here is a nice little video that the folks at Evernote did about their version 4.0 for the iPhone:

Stop worrying about dropping or being rough with your iPhone!

I saw an ad for the Griffin Survivor case and thought that the case looked like it could really take a beating.

Then, looking around I found they had some pretty impressive numbers for dropping, rain, vibration and sand.

Looking at the specs, you would think that this may be one of the toughest iPhone 4 cases… but what about the iPhone 4 inside of the case. Looking around a bit more, I found this video… the Griffin group put their Survivor case through some fun tests… ready for a chuckle?

Griffin has you covered if your not ready for a camo green or black case, when I went to the Griffin Survivor page, they offer the case in white and pink too.

While I have never considered a heavy duty case, this one looks like one I have to try. They pulled me in with their video. I went for the black one… will do my own review when it gets here.


Comic Book like images created with the iPhone

I have been seeing a lot of folks filtering their iPhone images that downgrade them to look like old cameras and film, even pin hole cameras. The iPhone camera gets higher and higher resolution so now we have more to work with to make them look bad rather than just blaming on having the lens set wrong.

An app a friend recommended that does more than just downgrade the quality is called ‘HalfTone’. The app allows you to be creative with a new image taken within the app, grab one from your photos area or paste in one that you copied from elsewhere. The image is immediately converted to look like an old newspaper HalfTone image.

The choices across the bottom is for taking or importing the imagine, the background, the framing and text boxes and finally the Fonts and text sizing. There are 9 options for the text box locations to use with your image in the HalfTone app.

The background does not always have to the ‘newspaper’, there are 9 choices to choose from. Interesting, there is no setting for the dots per inch of the actual image though.

When you have your HalfTone image done, you can save it to the Photos area of your iPhone. There is also the option to post to Facebook or include in an email directly from the HalfTone app.

 

 

iPhone camera users, dump the cables

With my taking of so many images with my iPhone camera, I rarely wait till I can sync to my desktop/iPhoto to gain access to those images. My normal method of moving the images off of my iPhone is via DropBox. Using the free DropBox app, I choose each image in my iPhone’s photo area and move them to the cloud. Sadly, this does take a little time since it is an image at a time.

A new app I found, DropPhox, gets me a lot closer to getting rid of the need to hook up my iPhone via a cable to move a lot of images without extra effort. DropPhox has as many good features as it does have limitations. It works with images taken through the app, it acts as a replacement to the iPhone camera app. It does not work with images in the iPhone’s photo area.

Once you set up the DropPhox with your DropBox login, any images you take with the app will automatically sync up to a folder on your free DropBox cloud location. Initially, the folder is called DropPhox but you can change that later.