Application reviews Using every day

Getting paper notes into your iPhone

My iPhone and Macbook go to every meeting with me. And as much as one tries to be all electronic, there are times in a hall conversation where you are faced with a pen and paper to get the facts recorded. At the end of the day you have a few paper notes that are not in with your digital, searchable, notes. And, they are trapped, you are unable to share with others without a copy machine.

I have an inexpensive HP printer/scanner/fax machine that has a simple feeder. When I get home in the evening, I put the day’s documents in the machine’s feeder and scan them into my notebook as PDFs. That has been great for organizing, sharing and reviewing later. With my iPhone always handy, why not have those notes in there too.

While I always print, OCR doesn’t get it right very often so I will be looking at having images of the text documents. This does present a problem with searching, so I will need access to the name of the file as well meta information.

After playing with many different application options, I decided to keep it simple. The apps it came down to was Annotator and OneDisk. Scanned PDFs are named with the date they were written and meeting title. Since I’m on a Mac, I use Preview to join all of the weeks notes into one larger PDF also for those times I need to scan the full conversation as they relate. Lastly, since they are hand written and not typed text scans, I have found 200 DPI Gray to view the best on the iPhone.

For Annotator, I point the scanner’s output to a folder on the desktop of my notebook. To use Annotator you need to install the iPhone/Touch application and a desktop app..

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For the Business user

For the Blogger that owns a iPhone

In my day job, I work with a small team that maintain many blogs on a large number of subjects. This site is my ‘fun’ side project for helping other iPhone and Touch owners that I do unrelated to ‘work’.

I carry a notebook computer with me for site set up, network interfacing and more advanced design work. Beyond that, once a person gets used to working on a screen that fits into your hand, you can get things done in the slow parts of your day. Oh, and a game on the iPhone to have fun during slow times is fine too… I’ll cover those in another post. I will also do a much deeper dive into each application listed in this post in the near future – here I will do a high level usage description for each. The images/screenshots are from the developers since mine would show actual sites and work load that I shouldn’t be showing everyone. Also, I have linked all of the applications so you can see the developer’s full description, clicking on the links will launch your iTunes and connect to Apple.

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Using every day

Keep things running longer, everyday

You may have noticed right off with your iPhone that you can not pull the battery out and put in another fully charged one. Apple chose to seal the battery inside like they have done on all of the iPod line.

There are a few fine tuning tips you can do to get more hours of usage between charges. Which ones you use will depend on how you uses your iPhone; Internet usage via Cell connection, lower quality cell signal areas, bluetooth headset, WiFi networks, music listening, brightly lit areas, and email checking. All of the tips on setting changes are easy to flip back and forth so you can tune as you needs change day to day.

Starting off with the adjustment tips, from the ‘Settings’ icon;

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Application reviews For the Business user Using every day

Faster ‘Free’ WiFi Internet

In an earlier posting, we ran through how you can get access to the Internet for Free at Starbucks via AT&T provided WiFi. You can jump to that that article here.

‘Free’ has come with a price, namely more than a dozen taps on the screen to jump through the hoops… remember? Select AT&T from the WiFi area, launch a web site, enter your phone number (ten taps right there), go to you SMS area… and so on. Once your connected, it is a really fast Internet connection so it’s worth the ‘work.

The folks at Devicescape, developers of Easy WiFi (quick login tool for many WiFi providers, $1.99), have expanded their line with “Easy WiFi for AT&T” (clicking link launches iTunes). This easy to use app allows you to use the Free Starbucks AT&T Internet in TWO TAPS.

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