Evernote Links

I’m a big fan of Evernote, and after a very impressive display by a colleague in Japan, I even became a Premium member. Someday I will get around to posting about how I use it, but in the meantime, I’ve collected links to a lot of sites that provide advice. As is often the case, especially with the iPad, it is difficult to see how useful an application is until you play around with it and/or see some actual use cases.

GENERAL USE

• Ron’s Evernote Tips (Ron is an Evernote employee) is a great place to get started.
• The Evernote Blog is probably one of the most useful resources out there, especially for exploring use cases.
• The Evernote User Forum, like most Internet forums, contains bits and pieces of rubbish posted by trolls and ranters, but searches will turn up excellent ideas by long-time users about how to get the most out of this product.
• Evernote.info is no longer updated, but this page contains 100 uses for Evernote. If you are wondering what you can do with it, then you’ll surely be able to find some ideas here.
• Brett Kelly’s ebook contains a lot of information, and is clearly written, but at $25 dollars I consider it to be priced a little too high. To be honest, I find it difficult to justify spending any money on a book to figure out something that is free, but it is also only 95 pages. If you can read Japanese, then you’ll find a whole slew of books for a fraction of the price (even considering the yen’s purchasing power these days).
• Michael Hyatt has several blog posts about working with Evernote. He includes lots of screenshots to illustrate his points.

STUDENTS

• Ryan Kessler shared on the Evernote blog how Evernote helped him in High School.
• Ron Toledo (Evernote employee) posted on the Evernote blog with some tips for students.
• Philippos Savvides wrote a blog post on how to use Evernote with a literature review. His method is similar to the one I followed in my first three years of the PhD program to prepare for my general exams (I experimented with Evernote, bLADE Wiki, and OneNote). I have continued the process well into my dissertation writing stage, and I think I will probably continue using Evernote this way as long as the program is around!

KEEPING A JOURNAL

• Jamie Rubin has a blog post about keeping a journal in real time.

CONDUCTING RESEARCH

• Nicomachus.net has four tips for using computers in your research.
• Ask MetaFilter has a wide-ranging discussion about useful software.

Know of any other any links that ought to be here?

Getting PDFs into the iPad

I have two files in the hard drive on my computer. I have a NOTES folder for handwritten notes, pamphlets, handouts, and so forth. I have a TEXTS folder for books, articles, and other materials written by others. If you have your PDFs in lots of folders, like I used to, then transferring might be a pain, and you’ll probably want to use GoodReader.

1. Perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on your PDF. This will straighten up the pages, flip them if necessary, and prepare them for being searched. I use Adobe Acrobat Pro. It handles English and foreign language OCR well.
2. Transfer the files using iTunes. I recommend using iAnnotate to read your PDFs, because it is the only app I know of that can perform a global search on all of them. If you have your files in a lot of different folders, and you want to maintain your file structure, you can download GoodReader USB (OSX) into your computer and easily drag and drop using it. Of course, this means you will need to use the GoodReader app (iOS).
3. Syncing can work really well with PDFs. In this case, you don’t need iTunes or GoodReader USB. Using Dropbox or Sugarsync you can link the files to your iPad app of choice. Any of the notes or annotations will be synced, so this can be a great way to organize files in your iPad. Currently, I am using Sugarsync, but I chose that before I started using the iPad. I would recommend Dropbox over it, because Dropbox is really well-integrated into other iPad apps. I haven’t tried iCloud yet, but that may be the wave of the future.

How do you get PDFs into your iPad?

Naming PDFs for the iPad

Coming up with a naming policy is the first step to getting organized. I organize my PDFs by giving them two kinds of titles, depending on the type of file.

• For handwritten notes, pamphlets, or handouts (scanned using ScanSnap) I use the date plus some kind of descriptive term. For example, “111024 organizing pdf handout”.
• For works created by someone else, I use the author’s name plus the date. For example, “mayochristopher2011”.
• For PDFs that are especially large I sometimes optimize them to save space and/or make sure they open without trouble in the iPad. This requires software like Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is useful to have if you are planning to go paperless. In these cases, I make sure to save the file separately with the identifying suffix “opt”. For example, “mayochristopher2011-opt”.

iPad Use Case: Reading a PDF

1. Converting to PDF. If the file is not in PDF form, use PDF PROvider to convert it. This will enable you to take full advantage of features found in PDF reading apps.
2. Reading. I recommend reading PDFs with iAnnotate. I like GoodReader a lot, and have used it for a long while now, but it lacks the ability to search through all of your files simultaneously. If I want to search for a name or word in the sources I have put into PDF form, it only takes a few seconds in iAnnotate, but can take several minutes in GoodReader (opening each file individually). Unfortunately, informal tests of OCR’d files suggest that searches of Chinese characters in texts don’t catch everything. English language searches seem to fare better, but I will need to spend some more time testing this.
3. Annotating. All three of the PDF readers I use (iAnnotate, GoodReader, and PDF Expert) do a good job with annotations. The really exciting part of this is that you can export all of the annotations you have made, so you can read all of the notes you took on a book separately. This is really great for graduate students studying for general exams.

iPad Use Case: Taking Notes at a Meeting, Lecture, or Presentation

1. Typing. If you have a table, then you can set up the bluetooth keyboard and type. This is probably the fastest method. However, like a computer, it can be aurally and visually obtrusive.
2. Handwriting. I like taking notes by hand. If you want to write quickly and/or in a foreign language, I recommend Note Taker HD. Input is very responsive, it is easy to use, and the notes export beautifully as PDFs. Of course, it takes some practice, but using the zoom feature (essential) and paying attention to how the capacitive screen of the iPad interprets the strokes, you’ll get the hang of it in no time. If you can afford to write slowly and you are writing in English, 7notesHD Prem does a great job of converting handwriting to printed text. This feature makes it ideal for notes that you want to make available later in searches.
3. Recording. If you want to record the event, use Recorder Pro. It is made for the iPod/iPhone, so it is not optimized for the iPad, but it is the only free app available (that I know of) which will run in the background and allow for easy export (I prefer the WAV recording format).
4. Organizing. If you go paperless, how do you deal with the onslaught of files? I am a long-time fan of Evernote. Evernote is basically a virtual junk drawer. Books have been written about how to use it (see Brett Kelly’s, for example), but basically you will want to master the art of tagging and searching. Happily, I have managed to give up folders and I find it very easy now to go through all of the notes and PDFs I have collected from as far back as 2001. Having all of these available anytime, anywhere is truly liberating, especially when traveling overseas.

iPad Hardware and Software for Research

The two lists below contain the hardware and software that I have found useful for making the iPad productive in an educational setting (university classroom, library, archives, etc.). These are not meant to be exhaustive, but if you do know of any apps that you think work better than the ones I have listed, then please let me know.

Due to the nature of the Apple app ecosystem, things change at a rapid rate. Innovative newcomers push the iPad to do new things, old apps get wonderful updates, and others fall by the wayside because developers stop working on them. All of the apps below and their developers have strong track records, and I consider them to be relatively safe investments.

• Hardware: iPad 2, Apple Wireless Keyboard, Incase Origami Workstation, stylus (Targus, Griffin, or Bamboo), and a Fujitsu ScanSnap
• Software: Dropbox, Sugarsync, Evernote, GoodReader, iAnnotate, PDF Expert, PDF PROvider, Elements, Note Taker HD, 7notes HD Prem, VoodooPad, Kotoba!, iSwifter, GFlash Pro, Cab Mobile, Pages

Be Prepared with the iPad

Whenever I leave the house these days, I’m prepared for my iPad to fail me in some way. It’s not that there is anything wrong with it. However, things don’t always work out the way I have planned.

Once I went on a trip to photograph documents in an archive, uploaded the photos, and discovered later that the settings automatically compressed the images. This made them completely unusable. Fortunately, I had not erased the original files from my camera yet, and I also had the pictures backed up in Sugarsync.

I think you also need to prepare before you even leave the house. I have tried to open files on my iPad and they crashed the app because they contained images that somehow made them incompatible (either the images contained unreadable elements or the RAM memory was insufficient in my iPad 1). Now I make a separate, optimized copy of my PDFs that have images. Not only does this guarantee that they will open, but it also saves a lot of space.

Embrace Redundancy with the iPad

I thought I could get by just purchasing a handful of super apps, and some of the blogs and forums on the Internet provided glowing reviews of products and suggestions for how to accomplish this. I’m not saying it isn’t possible. Rather, I think you’ll get a lot more out of it if you don’t try and make one app carry the whole load.

For example, I use four PDF applications. For a long time I stuck with GoodReader. However, it didn’t have a global search feature, so I got iAnnotate. When I wanted to grade student papers, I didn’t like how either app worked, so I used PDF Expert. Finally, because some students sent in their papers in Word format, I tried PDF PROvider so that I could convert them into PDF form. The developers are constantly changing and improving their apps, so I can imagine a day when when one app can do it all, but not for a while.

In addition, apps occasionally become unstable after an update, or crash unexpectedly. It happens a lot less nowadays, but it is still a concern, and it never hurts to have another app available with overlapping functions.

Be Flexible with the iPad

When I stopped treating my iPad like a traditional computer and adapted my workflow to fit its design, I became a lot more productive.

• Instead of whining about the lack of a mouse, I learned keyboard shortcuts and actually found it easier to navigate my writing.
• Instead of trying to save everything inside the iPad, I moved it onto the cloud and took advantage of services like Dropbox, Sugarsync, etc.
• Instead of doing all of my notetaking, writing, revising, formatting, and proofreading all at once, I split up my work.
• Instead of expecting it to work like a fully functional application in OSX, I accepted its limitations, and saved some of the work for my Macbook Pro, because I could do it a lot more quickly there.

Thinking Strategically with the iPad

I originally bought my iPad in order to consume content. In my case, I mainly wanted to read PDFs. Then, I decided I wanted to use it to create content. That is when the trouble began. I have been pleasantly surprised, though, to find that I can do the vast majority of my work (maybe 90%) on it by following three strategies:

• Be flexible
• Be redundant
• Be prepared