Personal Application Update: Tweetburner, Evernote, Remember The Milk, Backpack, Twine, Del.icio.us, Skitch, Flickr

I have been so crazy busy in recent weeks — principally with Workstreamr, but also with other projects and travels — that I have not done a very good job of relating my recent investigations of web appliances. Here’s the skinny, a foretaste of longing postings to come (I hope), from tactical to strategic:

• Tweetburner — I am switching from using TinyURL to Tweetburner, so that I might possibly be able to track what happens with links that I twitter. Might prove interesting.
• Evernote and Flickr — I have been using Flickr in the past months to store business cards. I have been snapping pictures of cards — sometimes immediately upon being handed them — and then uploading to a Flickr set, all private, called Business Cards. However, Flickr doesn’t really offer any great support for this sort of use. Evernote is a new solution with both a desktop client and a web archive, and one of the features is optical character recognition (OCR) within pictures. They also have a simple to use capture trick, based on making snapshots using the iSight webcam on my Mac. I have therefore moved all my business card pictures from Flickr. I have noticed a few glitches in the OCR, but overall, it’s been working very well.
  Evernote, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

  Note to Flickr: you may not be interested in this sideline, but trust me, the future of business cards is optical, and storing the data somewhere once captured by cell phone camera, scanner, or webcam is a really helpful service. Likewise, storing pictures of things you want to recall or find out more about, like wine labels, or restaurants passed while rambling around.

• Skitch and Flickr — For some time, I have been using Flickr as a repository for screenshots, which I often post to my blogs (as above). I tried using Skitch’s photo hosting instead of Flickr’s recently, when Flickr’s ‘post to typepad’ service inexplicably stopped working for a day or two. The capability that Flickr offer’s for styling the html and then automatically posting into Typepad is a time savings that I can’t resist, so I have gone back to Flickr for this, although I continue to use Skitch for capturing the screenshots in the first place, and posting to Flickr.
• Remember The Milk and Backpack — I have dropped trying to use Backpack as a tool for keeping track of things to do, and switched to Remember The Milk’s amazing integration with Gmail and Google Calendar. I plan to detail in a later post, but this is a great implementation of a solitary task manager. I have some thoughts on making it social, but leave that for the later post.

  I am still using Backpack for some specialized uses, like publishing songs I have written, and the composition of long technical reports, but as a personal task manager, I want better integration with my calendar.

• Twine and Del.icio.us — I have fooled with a look of social bookmark tools, and none is really what I want. In recent months, I have settled on Del.icio.us, principally so that I could automatically generate a daily posting of bookmarks to /Message. I think I will have jigger Twine to post to my Typepad daily through the email set-up, since they don’t seem to have any other means other than RSS at the present. More to follow about use of Twine and my perceptions on that: I have only started using it in the past few days.
  
  

It’s a shame that there is so much innovation going on just when I am least available to write about it all. Grrr.