Software History

Today Evernote released the 3.5.4 update of the Windows client.  Evernote’s blog post on the release covers many of the new features, but there was one notable absence of one of the new features that also reminded me of another obscure feature of Evernote I discovered a while back.

The migration of my blogs to thoughtasylum.com was about a month ago now, so I figured I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the move away from several split Wordpress blogs onto this consolidated SquareSpace driven platform.

Today I took my final ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) module assessment. ECDL is a syllabus that has seven modules of assessment on what many people might consider to be the day to day forms of IT literacy in a typical workplace.  In my role as an IT professional (Head of ICT), with a masters degree in Computer Science, and a decade of IT industry experience, why did I decide to do this course?

WWDC 2010 is taking place tomorrow and the Internet is awash with rumours of what Apple might be announcing.  After dominating the tech news in the last few months with the iPad, iPhone OS 4 preview, the leaked iPhone and the release of the new MacBook Pro devices (though admittedly this was a little quieter than the others), what will Apple be covering?

All of the rumours are that the latest iPhone from Apple is imminent. It’ll be running the new Apple iPhone OS 4 for sure, but what will the fourth generation iPhone have in store in terms of hardware features?  Well I’ve put together a list of ten things - five near certainties and five “wouldn’t it be cool if…” things.

A couple of months back Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) did another public Q&A session on the Evernote blog.  During the course of this session he set out a range of updates that would be carried out in the Evernote-sphere over the course of the rest of the year.  I’ve finally managed to get a few hours to filter the whole question-response set and categorise them into mini-road maps of what’s coming for Evernote users.

Whilst working on another Evernote related post today I came across a suggestion from someone that I thought I could help with.  Would you like to be able to colour code your notes in Evernote?

Over the weekend, Evernote have announced that they have a secret to share on July 14 2010 at 10 AM.  So I guess the big question is what is the secret and are elephant’s good at keeping them?

A rat is a small mammal with a bad reputation. The R.A.T. however is a fighting system that has a similar reputation in that it has been used to train US Navy Seals amongst others. It is a system that is focussed on survival in dire circumstances and certainly isn’t something I’d recommend to someone working the doors as a way to safely escort people form the premises. Last weekend I had the opportunity to give it a go at a seminar in Catterick.

A chance look on Twitter today lead me to discover what I can only describe as a quaint partnership with Evernote in Japan. I had thought that everything was digital in Japan these days and Evernote has certainly taken off in a big way this year.  However I was surprised to discover that abrAsus seem to have released what I assume is a notepad holder for use with Evernote.

The latest release of Evernote for the iPhone is 3.3.5 and it includes an elegant yet simple solution for what was previously a frustrating oversight around taking photos.

The big day finally arrived for Evernote today. They revealed the second phase of the big Evernote plan and revealed the secret they’d been keeping up their trunk.

I recently had a technological Wizard of Oz moment where I was having a problem with a piece of video equipment. That is I had a black and white image from a web camera where there had previously been glorious technicolour. Given the amount of time I invested in resolving the issue I thought I’d perhaps share it in case anyone else comes across the same problem.

I’ve been working with colleagues in our finance department recently to streamline and automate some of their processes. An interesting little technical problem that cropped up was taking some output from the accounts system and pushing it into an Excel spreadsheet. The problem was that the formatting was done with varying numbers of tabs and spaces. My solution was a little bit of VBScript.

Earlier today I posted about some VBScript that deals with variable positional formatting of tabs within strings. This was related to a system I was working with where the information needed to be copied from the screen. In an attempt to make things simpler for the user my overall script worked with the Windows clipboard as the data source rather than having the user paste it into a text file and then import that into the script. In case you haven’t come across this technique before, here’s how I did it.

HootSuite is an iPhone/iPod touch social media dashboard app. It originally appeared as a mobile Twitter client but has expanded to incorporate links to other social networks. HootSuite also have their own URL shortening service Ow.ly, and in version 1.1.5.1 they introduced the option to prefix a URL in mobile Safari and have HootSuite launch with an Ow.ly’fied URL prepopulated into your message. I’m not one for remembering the details for things like this that I won’t use every day so I chose instead to create a simple little bookmarklet.

We have a number of iPhone users in our office and I was asked a couple of days ago to have a look at something a few users had recently noticed - the appearance of a new calendar called Birthdays. Whilst the users had a variety of iPhone models 3G through to iPhone 4 (both work and personal), I quickly noted that each of the phones was running iOS4. So my instincts were that this was probably gong to be related to a new iOS4 feature or maybe something to do with a new version of iTunes choosing to sync a non-existent MobileMe calendar.

It’s been some time since I had a phone upgrade but yesterday I finally got a new phone. In fact this phone is very new for me as it is running an operating system I’ve had no prior experience with - Android.

Today I’ve started a new project that’s going to take me a year and will need some creativity, a steady hand and my new phone.

Evernote is one of my favourite applications on any platform and I use it on several for a huge variety of things. The nature of Evernote is to provide a system that can hold any information and be accessed anywhere. This lends itself to storing just about everything in it. I certainly try to keep as much as possible in it, but this innate power and flexibility also makes Evernote potentially dangerous to use and so I thought I’d write something about securing Evernote. This won’t necessarily be a definitive guide of making your Evernote account into Fort Knox, but it will hopefully give you some options to consider in terms of how you use and access Evernote.

Offline access to notes in Evernote is a must for me.  Whilst much of my time is spent in areas with a good enough reception for my phone or with access to a WiFi network, there are occasions where getting online and connected is not so easy if not impossible as anyone who travels the UK rail network will attest to for example.  Now whilst the Mac and Windows clients have offline access by default, the mobile clients are not so fortunate.

A little while back, Evernote launched a new feature known as the trunk.  It is a platform through which Evernote promoted partnerships and integrations with the Evernote system.  Whilst it is a new system I have three ideas on how to make it even better.

I’ve been doing a lot of spring cleaning recently and came across quite a few old computers that I’d stashed away at the back of a wardrobe.  Not exactly noteworthy, but I thought I’d share a couple of things I’ve done to clear the space and retain my archives.

Do you suffer from finger prints on any of your touch screen devices?  Do you ever forget things and wish that you had a photographic memory? Well maybe Evernote has the solution…

For ten or so months now I’ve been clipping web pages from Safari on my iOS devices into Evernote using a one touch bookmarklet. Whilst Evernote’s own bookmarklet works for this activity, you have to enter some details for the note, maybe even login. For me this was just too much to be concerned with when I’m browsing on the move. My solution simply pushed the whole page into my default Evernote notebook for dealing with later.

So for some time now Evernote users have been clamouring for a way to work with rich text (e.g. bold, italics, fonts) on their iOS device (iPhone/iPod/iPad).  The issue has been that iOS at a base level does not functionally support rich text editing.  To implement this sort of function would require the Evernote iOS developers to develop an entirely new text editing interface and given the complexity/flexibility of the note format this could be quite challenging (and there are lots of other pulls on their time for develpments such as access to shared notebooks in the client (… which they did say would be this year and there’s only a month left).

One of the things I like most about my Mac is the automation and control I can have without having to fight the operating system.  Don’t get me wrong I really like Windows and many other operating systems (I very much like the right tool for the right job approach), but the Mac along with some little helper apps makes this quite straight forward.  Today I thought I’d share a couple of the utilities I use to keep my Mac awake and to send it to sleep.

I’ve frequently found myself needing to pad text strings with other text when putting together VBScripts. Typically this is with regards to time related outputs (pre-fixing with zeroes), or numeric outputs for things like filenames (again prefixing with zeroes). Occasionally I need to do more advanced padding and so I created a set of code to add to my code library to cover a wider set of padding circumstances including not only pre-fixing, but also post-fixing variable length strings … and even bo

It’s time for my annual review of what’s been most popular on my past year’s foray into the blogosphere. This year has been all change as I consolidated my blogs into a new site on a new platform and as you may be able to tell from how quiet I’ve been for the last few months I’ve been quite busy with a few other things that have been changing my life in more than a few ways. Anyway, on with the show as they say.