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Daily Update for December 7, 2011
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Evernote Hello for iPhone records faces and contacts
Evernote introduced a new app called Hello that'll help you manage your contacts. Instead of a static list of names and addresses, Hello lets you add context to each person in your contact list. Like Evernote points out, you don't remember a person's name; you remember where you met them and what they said or did. Evernote Hello helps you remember these little details by letting you add an image to each contact's name. You can also add encounter information, which includes the place where you met and other notes that'll jog your memory. The app links contacts with similar information, so you can easily find the contacts you met at the conference last week and discover who might be there next time. It's tied into the Evernote family of apps and will let you search, share and sync this information across a variety of desktop and mobile platforms. The Evernote Hello app is available for free in the App Store. Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments.
Kodak's Document Print app means never visiting the girl from the Xerox place
Printing on the road usually leaves you at the mercy of your local Kinkos FedEx Office, but as long as you've got one of Kodak's cloud-print enabled Hero printers, you can avoid getting gouged. The company's just released an Android app that lets you print nearly everything, even webpages as long as they're accessed from the baked-in browser -- provided that you've left your home printer switched on. You can pull it down for free from the Android market from today and if you're interested, head on past the break for an unusually terse press release from the company.
Doxie Go portable scanner creates searchable PDFs without a PC, syncs to almost anything
As far as scanners go, Doxie makes some of the more interesting products on the market. There's one problem though... the bright trail of hot pint hearts splashed across the front. Thankfully, the upcoming Doxie Go dons a more conservative shell that will look just as at home in a CEO's office as it would in a 16-year-old girl's bedroom. The Go is a portable scanner with built-in memory for up to 6,000 pages, and you can even add on more storage through the USB port or SD slot. All scans are automatically fed through OCR software and turned into searchable PDFs. To get the scans on your PC you actually sync the Doxie Go to your Mac or Windows machine. You can also sync with your iPhone, iPad or send your documents straight to Dropbox, Evernote or Google Docs from the Doxie 2.0 desktop app. You can pre-order the Go now for $199 and it'll start shipping in late November. Check out the gallery below and PR after the break. %Gallery-136890%
Daily Mac App: Clarify
We're unabashed fans of the folks at Blue Mango Learning Systems; in fact, we did a video introduction to their flagship product, ScreenSteps, after we met with them at Macworld Expo 2008. ScreenSteps has saved countless hours of effort in quickly developing software documentation, but the Blue Mango team realized that it may be overkill for streamlined communications aimed at reducing the frequency of roundtrip email exchanges. That's the origin story of the new Clarify, a simplified take on screenshot-driven document creation that's meant to help everyone deliver clear and easy-to-understand instructions with a minimum of effort. The app is about as simple as can be: take a screenshot or series of screenshots as you walk through your process, then document them with as little or as much detail as you need. You can export to PDF with a single click, save your instructions to Dropbox for third-party review, or upload to the free Clarify-It web service. If you're already a ScreenSteps user, you'll be pretty comfortable with Clarify. It adds a few niceties (a menu-bar screenshot tool, highlight and border controls) while dispensing with the document library and workgroup editing features. It also drops the automatic capture of clipboard screenshots, which I regret; that's one of my favorite ScreenSteps tricks. Still, the Clarify UI is nice and clean, and it's easy to create solid documents in very short order. You can copy and paste your instructions as RTF for use with Word, Evernote or other destinations. If you need to include real-world images (versus screenshots) in your instructions -- say, to help rental tenants find climate controls or light switches in an apartment -- drag the pictures from the Finder, iPhoto or Aperture right into your Clarify document. Clarify is available as a 14-day trial and can be purchased direct or via the Mac App Store. Normal pricing is $29.99 for a single-platform license (Mac or PC), $39.99 for both platforms; however, through October 19 there's a $10 discount offer available. It's true, you could certainly make similar screenshot-driven instructions with Word or Pages, but if you spend any substantial fraction of your time describing tasks step-by-step you can save yourself aggravation and effort by giving Clarify a shot. If you think you need the power of ScreenSteps instead, the base license is $39.95.
Kokuyo's CamiApp brings paper back to note-taking (video)
Between Samsung's Galaxy Note and the Boogie Board Rip, a mini-trend emerged at IFA last week with companies attempting to bridge the gap between paper notebooks and digital devices. Japanese office supply manufacturer Kokuyo is looking to get in on the action, utilizing devices that consumers already own. In August, the company's CamiApp was released for iOS, with an Android version coming later this month. The app scans and digitizes handwritten text, letting users edit, highlight, email, tag and share the information with apps like Evernote and Dropbox. The apps are specially designed to work with forthcoming "smartphone-friendly" paper notepads from the company. According to Kokuyo, the notebooks have "special features" that make digital capture easier. Eight different notebooks will be made available tomorrow. The company is also working on making the CamiApp notebooks available overseas.
Evernote iOS app update offers rich text support, shared notebooks, more
The folks at Evernote rolled out a pretty significant update to its iOS app today that includes rich text support, shared notebooks, a redesigned iPad interface and more. Andrew Sinkov said on Evernote's blog that implementing rich text was "a doozy." Users can stylize text, add highlights and URLs, create headers and make lists. This also involved overhauling a bit of the iPhone app to work in the features. In addition to creating new rich-text messages, existing ones can be edited. However, you still can't create checkboxes without using the desktop version of Evernote. The feature I've looked forward to most is accessing any notebook that's shared with you from any iOS device. When the shared notebooks are accessed, they also are stored locally. Users can now search within a particular note as well. Other additions include: Slideshow view that allows viewing of only images attached to a particular note. They can be saved into the iDevice's camera roll or be copied to the clipboard. A redesign of the iPad interface Updates to the All Notes view, which now displays notes as snippets. Premium Evernote users can add a passcode to the app. The Evernote update is available now via the App Store.
Evernote Trunk Conference reveals Skitch acquisition, new Mac, iOS clients and more
I'm here at Evernote's first conference, a 1-day affair featuring news, a panel and several sessions for developers. This morning Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, kicked off the conference with some stats on Evernote usage. While Evernote has been featured in Apple Stores and is highly recommended, they haven't really spent any money on ads or marketing. As a result, the usage and growth is quite extraordinary. Here at TUAW, we're all big fans of Evernote (it's even integrated into our iPhone app). According to Libin, today Evernote can boast 12.5 million registered users. A year ago that number was 3.9 million. But how many regular users are there? Currently there are over 4 million "30 day active users" up 271% from last year. Even more incredible is that a year ago there were less than 100,000 paid users, and now there are over half a million. The incredible part, aside from outstanding growth, is that people are finding value in Evernote's premium offering even though the service puts very few restrictions on free accounts. As Libin said later, "It's more important that you stay than you pay." Imagine if Flickr said that. Another juicy data point: nearly 1/3 of all Evernote users are in Japan. Most are in the US, but the Japanese user base is a very close second. The bigger news, especially for longtime Mac users, is that Evernote has acquired Skitch and is making it free. There will be some integration on the Evernote side as well, although the details of that were not revealed. I'm hoping we see better annotations for images and perhaps support for some of the other goodies mentioned today. Either way, Evernote is very happy with the deal and aims to make Skitch a "household name with everyone that wants to draw, sketch, annotate, doodle, sign or highlight something." So, Skitch fans, don't worry. Those "other goodies" involve the next release of Evernote clients and a more forward-looking features yet to be rolled out. Evernote considers the next release their "most requested features" release -- the features you'll see soon will be things Evernote fans have been begging for. One I can identify with: Rich text support. The next version of Evernote should support bold, italics and all the fun stuff you can do with rich text. Also useful will be a completely revamped iPad edition, with a better viewing experience which makes use of the entire iPad screen (like large thumbnails for notes). Plus, a feature which was curiously absent from iOS editions of Evernote will finally make a debut: Shared notebooks. This becomes a big deal when we consider the far-flung vision of Evernote. But first, the Mac version will also be revamped for Lion. Fullscreen support will look a lot like the iPad version, with those large thumbnails. Also, the favorites bar up top can be customized with everything from notes to saved searches. You'll also finally be able to close the left-hand panel. Oh, and yes, there will be new extensions for Chrome and Firefox and Safari. In the medium-term timeframe, Evernote is aiming to boost the connectedness of your notes, taking data and pulling other data to make that stuff make sense. In a demo, we saw map integration with your notes in the form of a widget. These widgets will be developed through a couple of developer-centric events in the next couple of months, with the full catalog available to the public this December. By working with partners, Evernote is building a powerful platform that not only collects data, but pulls in live data and provides much more context for your notes. I can see a lot of amazing applications of this over time as even more widgets are developed. Any company who currently offers a shared notes solution would do well to keep an eye on what Evernote is building here, as it is just the beginning. The longer view for Evernote is an interesting play. Libin revealed that he'd like Evernote to last at least 100 years. When you're talking about saving memories, that is indeed a noble goal. No one wants to lose their memories, and what happens to your notes over time? Libin and Evernote believe that the more you use their product, the more you'll like it, and the more likely you'll be to pay for the premium service. In fact, Evernote wants to be as ubiquitous in productivity as Zynga is with wasting time on Facebook. Here's to that!
Evernote hits Windows Phone 7, marches steadily toward complete device domination
Evernote this week announced that its eponymous note-taking software has finally hit Windows Phone 7, the latest in a long line of platforms that includes everything from webOS to Google Wave. Like the dozen or so other versions, the app is all about saving ideas and syncing them across compatible devices. This one, however, was built around WP7's UI, with pivoting panels devoted to Notes, Notebooks, Tags, and Recent Notes. The app is available now for free from the App Hub, so take note -- by writing the information on your hand or something.
iPad 2 + Smart Cover = study aid with Evernote Peek
We tend to kvell about Evernote quite a bit around here, it's true; we've even interviewed CEO Phil Libin on at least four separate occasions. If only the company would stop doing cool things so we could quit harping on them! No luck on that score, at least not today. Evernote claims to have introduced the "first iPad Smart Cover app" with Evernote Peek, a study aid and test prep app. It's a fantastically simple idea, so much so that it's surprising nobody has done it until now. Here's the deal: populate an Evernote notebook with your clues/questions (in the note subject) and brief answers (the note body, including pictures if you want), or use one of the preformatted notebooks from Evernote and StudyBlue. Then, run Peek and peek under the first flap of the Smart Cover to expose the question; unfold the rest of the way to see if you got the answer right. Check off correct/incorrect so you can retest yourself on the ones you got wrong. It's ingenious, and it works -- although the app instructions suggest turning off Auto-Lock for the Smart Cover, on my iPad that actually prevented the peeks from registering; it worked better with Auto-Lock left active. I can't think of an easier (or cheaper) way to build out quick, effective iPad flash cards for any topic under the sun. Since Evernote supports shared notebooks, it's simple for teachers or tutors to give students access to class-specific materials. Prepare yourself for libraries and classrooms filled with the distinctive 'kerp' sound of Smart Cover front edges hitting iPad screens. You'll be hearing it a lot.
Evernote offering developer competition, conference
Evernote has announced two big events for its developer community coming up later this year. First, the company is holding a competition with over $100,000 in prizes available to win. To enter, all developers need to do is build an app, service, or device that works with the Evernote system by July 15. The submissions will be judged over the subsequent week or two, and then in August, Evernote will announce six finalists. Some of those finalists will win some money, with a chance at a grand prize of $50,000. That's a nice payday for anyone willing to put some development time into extending Evernote out even further. To help developers put their apps and services together, Evernote has also announced the first-ever Evernote Trunk Conference, going on August 18 in San Francisco. The conference will offer a day of workshops and sessions designed to help developers hook their own apps up to Evernote, and learn how to parse the API, make use of best practices, and lots more. This same conference is where the winners will be announced for the developer competition, so if you're hoping to be in the running, you should plan on being there. Both of these are just for developers, of course, but if you're an Evernote user, you hopefully can look forward to all kinds of ingenious additions to the service and its extended universe, which is what both of these events are of course intended to bring about.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me transfer Evernote data without the internet
Dear Aunt TUAW, I love Evernote and use it regularly on my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. Lately, though, I'm finding myself in places with both devices, but the MacBook doesn't have an internet connection and is therefore unable to transfer data from one device to the other without attaching a cable. Since both devices have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, it seems like there should be an easy solution to wirelessly transfer files that I would typically use Evernote for. Do you have any suggestions? Your loving nephew, Bill G.
Engadget app for iPhone and iPod touch updated to 2.2.0, get it now!
Hey there fellow iOS users, just thought we'd let you know that the Engadget app for iPhone and iPod touch has now been updated to version 2.2. What's new, you ask? Well, on top of a stash of performance tweaks, there's now a handy landscape viewing mode along with much improved sharing features; or if you prefer saving the goodies for yourself, then you'll also like our new "save for later" options for Evernote, Instapaper, and Read It Later. Head over to the App Store to nab the fresh update now. Oh, don't worry, we haven't forgotten our buddies on the Windows Phone boat. We can assure you that our devs are hard at work at cooking up an Engadget app for Windows Phone 7 just as we speak, so stay tuned for an announcement soon.
Evernote for Mac 2.1 update boasts social sharing, audio, speed
Users of the popular Evernote app for Mac are going to love the new 2.1 update released today. To start with, the new app has greatly sped up searching your documents. As Evernote mentioned, it's not uncommon for a user to now have several thousand notes, and the search times with Evernote for Mac were quite slow. Search speeds have been dramatically improved, so you can keep taking notes without worrying about waiting forever for search results. Next, Evernote now has the ability to share individual notes through Facebook, Twitter, email and any other way you can think of. There's now a Share button in the menu bar of the Mac app. You just need to select the note you want to share, click the Share button, then select the way you want to share the information. There's also a new way to record a meeting and write notes about it at the same time, all archived for posterity in Evernote. To record an audio note, you just click on the microphone icon and start recording by clicking the Record button. When you're done recording the audio, you can add text or files, then share it with others. The length of recordings depends on whether you're a free or premium user -- free users can do a single audio note with a maximum size of 25 MB, while premium users get 50 MB (about 4 hours) per note. The update is available from Evernote, or you can select the "Check for Updates" link in the Mac app to receive your update. If you've installed the app through the Mac App Store, Evernote assures us that the update will be available "very soon."
World Backup Day: Ad-hoc backups to the cloud & more giveaways
Happy World Backup Day! The only safe way forward is to back up; that's why we've joined the cause for data saving with tips, techniques and giveaways all day today. As Steve mentioned earlier today, there are lots of cloud-based backup services eager to help you protect your data while solving the onsite/offsite conundrum. A backup of uncertain status in a single location isn't much better than no backup at all -- for one thing, it gives you a sense of confidence that your data is protected when it might not be. Getting your data tucked away with Dolly Drive, Backjack, Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite or CrashPlan may not be the fastest or cheapest approach, but sooner or later it may save your bacon. Compare and contrast plans here. (Lifehacker has a full rundown on how CrashPlan can help you sleep soundly at night, knowing your backups are solid.) Even if you're not up for a full-on cloud backup solution (whether due to bandwidth or budget constraints), there are still some surprisingly easy ways to back up your key files in the cloud, and do it for cheap or free. All of these approaches require a bit more thinking than the automated tools above, but if you're the sort of person who makes copies of your bank statements or saves your dry cleaning receipts, then you can probably get into these habits, too.
ScanDrop comes to Mac: makes scanning to cloud services simple
I've been a fan of a paperless workflow for a couple of years now, and I rely heavily on Evernote for organizing everything scannable that crosses my desk. One of the tools I've found invaluable for speeding up the scan and filing process is ScanDrop, as it allows me to scan a document and do basic image editing. I can also send a PDF to Evernote with a name, tags, and the appropriate Notebook setup without having to juggle files between multiple applications. Unfortunately, this has also kept my scanning leashed to Windows, since ScanDrop didn't exist for Mac OS X. I was delighted to find out that OfficeDrop has debuted a Mac OS X version on the Mac App Store at the bargain launch price of US$1.99. If you aren't an Evernote user, ScanDrop also works directly with Google Docs and OfficeDrop's own commercial cloud service, or you can scan files to any location on your drive, enabling you to sync documents to Dropbox, iDisk or similar solutions. The only downside is ScanDrop depends on the service to do optical character recognition (OCR), so you'll need to be an Evernote Premium user, a subscriber to OfficeDrop, or put up with the limitations with Google Docs' OCR. If you're saving to your drive, you may need to find an additional tool for OCR or live without searchable text documents. Make sure to read over the details about scanner support to make sure ScanDrop will work with your hardware before you click purchase.
Evernote 4 iPhone / iPod touch app starts with a clean slate
With most of the iOS app updates that we see here at TUAW, UI changes are minor, and the feature changes are usually evolutionary in nature. That's why we were sort of surprised with the changes in the iPhone / iPod touch client for Evernote that were just announced. Evernote 4 started with a clean slate and totally changes the way the program looks and operates. The original app was launched on the same day as the App Store itself, making Evernote one of the oldest iPhone apps around. According to a blog post on the Evernote site, which details the changes that were made to the app, the team learned over the years that users wanted several things: faster access, easier creation of notes, better browsing and more ways of finding what they've stored in Evernote. The new app appears to fit all of these user requirements. To start with, Evernote 4 opens by displaying your notes list in Snippet View (at right); if a note is text-only, you just see the title and a bit of the text. If it contains an image, you'll get a slice of the image to view. Not surprisingly, if it contains a mix of text and images, you'll see the title, some text and a thumbnail image.
Lessons from early days on the Mac App Store with Evernote
Evernote's Phil Libin has posted an article over at our fellow AOL site TechCrunch talking about the app's first week on the Mac App Store and how it all stacked up (he also did a quick hit in the first few days over on the Evernote blog). He says he's learned some pretty astounding things from Evernote's experience so far in the Mac App Store, and probably first among these is a conclusion that I expect a lot of developers to come to in the next few months. While many devs have believed, due to their success on the iOS App Store, that mobile apps were the wave of the future, Libin boils it down: "It isn't mobile that's overwhelmingly important, it's the app store." That's quite a conclusion right there, but sure enough, as you can see in the chart above, the stats stack up. Evernote saw 320,000 downloads through the Mac App Store last week, 120,000 of which were brand new users. That's half of the new accounts created last week, and it's enough to push the Mac OS to the biggest platform on the service. Again, Libin puts it strikingly powerfully: "The presence of a well-formed app store is the single most important factor for the viability of a platform for third party developers." Libin provided additional detail in a recent email to TUAW, saying that he forecasts 95% of all downloads of the Mac client to be straight from the App Store, eventually. According to him, "desktop is viable again," all thanks to the Mac App Store (and hopefully, he muses, a similar platform for Windows someday). He noted that there was quite a bit of effort involved: "Getting into the store for launch day was non-trivial. We declared that this was the most important priority for our Mac team about six weeks [prior to launch] and pulled a few all-nighters between then and now, but it was clearly worth it. Many of the under-the-hood changes that we had to make to get approved were good code hygiene anyway, and we're better off for having made them." That doesn't mean the direct-download version is going away, Libin explains: "primarily because the App Store doesn't let us have an automatic beta track, which has become pretty important to our release engineering," they will be keeping the conventional version available. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Lucida Grande'} The whole article is well worth reading, and if indeed Evernote's experience on the Mac App Store becomes representative of many featured independent developers, the opportunities offered there in terms of discovery and ease-of-use will have an enormous impact on how desktop software is bought and sold.
Mac App Store pricing of featured apps
Now that the Mac App Store is available, we've taken a look at pricing of some of the top apps (all links will open the Mac App Store). Here's a quick look at some apps we've been anticipating, including a very steep discount. Pixelmator 1.6.4, the image editing app billed as a light weight Photoshop alternative, is US$29.99.That's a huge discount over the price at the Pixelmator website, which is $59. As you see in the graphic above, there are other deals to be had. Aperture is selling for $79, which is a steep drop from is former price of $199, and Apple Remote Desktop has fallen to $79.99 for unknown seats. Meanwhile, Things from Cultured Code, the popular project management software, is selling for $49.99 (up four cents from Cultured Code's web price). Meanwhile, Delicious Library 2 from Delicious Monster is $39.99, the same as its web price. There are several free apps as well. Twitter for Mac (formerly Tweetie 2) is indeed in the store as we expected from yesterday's leak, and is free. In fact, it's currently listed as the top free app. Additionally, Evernote and one of my favorites, Alfred, are also available at no cost. We'll have much more on the Mac App Store as the day progresses. Stay tuned.
