Digital pens ain’t there yet…

I love the idea of a digital pen that lets me jot down notes at a meeting using an unobtrusive pen and notepad, then uploads the notes, adds metadata (time, location, attendees) and indexes them for easy searching. And yes, I’m willing to pay for the special Anoto paper with the dots, if the digital pen is up to par.

But sadly, a quick scan of digital pens on the market shows that we’re not at the point of note-taking nirvana. What I’m looking for is the following:

• Upload notes via WiFi. Continuously. In the background. Over 802.11 b/g/n. For my home and office networks. If those are not available, find an open network to use.
• Upload securely, using firewall-friendly HTTPs posts.
• Upload to Evernote, which has great handwriting recognition and search, and is very reasonably priced.
• Inductive charging of the pen, a la Palm Pre. Don’t make me plug in, even to charge.
• Use the pen several hours without recharging. (Maybe the current pens can do this; I don’t know.)
• Isn’t oversized. (In a moment of weakness I once bought a Logitech io, and the pen was so big it distracted from the meeting at hand.)
• Can connect to my Outlook Exchange calendar and Google calendar, and use them to figure out where I was and who I was talking to when I was taking notes, and the meeting topic, and add this to the metadata for the note.
• Let me view notes by meeting attendee (“all notes from meetings with John Doe”) or date or subject (“weekly design review”).

The digital pens on the market don’t come close to this spec. You have to plug them in to a computer to upload and charge. Integrations, when they exist, are often to pricey Microsoft OneNote. There’s no intelligent use of calendars to add context.

Oh, and the voice recording feature in the LiveScribe? Creepy. And has legal ramifications, I think, here in California, where I’m pretty sure you have to inform someone that you’re recording them. But, legal issues aside, when people know you’re recording them, it kind of gets your meetings off to a bad start.

Maybe someday, someone will build a digital pen with the right feature set. Till then…

Evernote had a big update today. I just now tried out the new goods. Here’s a quick review:

Mac Desktop client:
+ I love, love, love the new “Merge Notes” feature. Great way to clean up a big notebook. Thank you Evernote!

• Unfortunately, there’s no way to export a merged note to anything other than an Evernote Archive. For instance, if you merge a bunch of jpeg images of scanned document, that you’ve brought into evernote, you cannot export them as one big jpeg image. Bummer.

~ I’m undecided whether the Growl notifications are nice or not. Maybe I’ll get used to them.

Safari web clipper:
+ It works with Safari 4 public beta (build 5528.16). What’s nice is that it takes the title of a web page and saves it as the title of the note. A small thing, but saves 15-30 seconds each time you clip, which adds up when you clip many times a day.

Firefox web clipper add-on:

• Does NOT grab the title of a web page, as the Safari web clipper does. Duh. I can’t tell what advantage the web clipper add-on provides over a bookmarklet. Uninstalling for now.

You using any of the new Evernote versions? If so, what do you think?

A short OS X new feature wish list

OS X has been great to work with. But like any piece of software, it can be improved. Here are seven features that would let me work more efficiently.

• Autocorrect typos in any text field, in any application. I use TextExpander to partially solve this problem. But it’s autocorrect algorithms don’t work as well as Microsoft Office, its dictionary is tiny (a few thousand words — sounds like a lot, but not nearly enough), and it has some frustrating bugs.
• Resize windows from any edge or corner, not just the lower right. Especially frustrating since Microsoft Windows has had this ability since at least 1991. Would let me resize windows faster, probably by a factor of five.
• Automatically consolidate duplicate dates. If there are two dates referring to the same event, combine their respective information. There’s an AppleScript to delete iCal duplicates, but since this isn’t the same as merging near-matches, it doesn’t fully solve the problem.
• Automatically consolidate duplicate contacts. Address Book has functionality that partially solves this problem, but still misses out on many contacts.
• Automatically augment contacts with directions to and from my home and office, and along with short URLs to corresponding Google Maps. I use Google Maps dozens of times a week, spending maybe half an hour a week at the site.
• Automatically fix red eyes in photos. (But save the original picture, just in case the red-eye fix didn’t quite work out.) iPhoto can manually fix red eyes, but when you have thousands of pictures, this is very time-consuming.
• Search for text within pictures. I use Evernote to do this for handwritten meeting notes that I’ve scanned in as jpegs. Their OCR works amazingly well, and Evernote is an incredibly useful way to keep track of what’s happened in meetings. But it’s awkward to fire up Evernote just to view a meeting note jpeg. I’d like to be able to do everything in the Finder and Preview.

One can  hope that Apple implements these sometime in the near future. And if they don’t, this provides an opening for Microsoft, Ubuntu, or some other OS.

Review of Evernote for Mac

I recently learned about Evernote for the Mac on the Lifehacker blog, and that I’d give it a try. Here’s my review of what I learned.

First, here’s why I thought of Evernote in the first place.

My main reason for trying Evernote is to archive meeting notes that I’ve written by hand onto a notepad. While I prefer to take notes directly into my laptop, this isn’t always possible — sometimes I don’t have my laptop, sometimes my laptop is tied up displaying a PowerPoint presentation, sometimes I can’t type in my laptop without the keyobard clicks annoying others on the conference call.

I’ve tried special pens that have a camera built in and require special paper. The problem is that this pens ar huge and basically make you look like a dork. Not the best thing when you’re trying to establish credibility during a customer presentation.

Given the challenges above, I’ve stuck with good old pen and paper. The problem is that retrieving information in notes from more than a couple of days in the past is a time-consuming, page turning exercise.

Evernote is a nice complement to pen and paper, handwritten notes. It archives them on both my laptop and the web, and most impressively, makes most of the actual handwritten text searchable. This is really amazing. My handwriting is not that great, yet Evernote indexes it, and makes it instantly searchable, a la Spotlight or Gmail.

So, Evernote is off to a good start, especially considering that they’re only on version one of their Mac client.

Here are some additional things I’d love to see in the product in future versions:

1. For the web version, support Firefox keyword searching. This way, I could type in the following into my FF address bar: "evernote <text to find>", and the Evernote Web site would return search results.

2. Better integration with HP scanners. (Mine is an OfficeJet 5780.) I’d love to be able to scan directly from the scanner to the Evernote OS X client. Should be technically feasible, since the HP scanner can today scan to Preview, iPhoto, Finder, etc.

3. Reduce the size of JPEGs of notebook pages that I’ve scanned in. The HP scanner by default makes them around 2.5 MB for an 8.5 x 11 page. This is overkill. Would be ideal if Evernote automatically crunched these down to a JPEG that’s around 300 MB. That provides enough information to be readable on a screen.

4. Let me use Evernote to quickly concatenate multiple scanned in images into a single image. This way I don’t need to have a bunch of separate JPEG files in Evernote, as in "Acme Corp meeting notes 1", "Acme Corp meeting notes 2", etc.

5. It would ideal if Evernote let me take pictures from the iSight camera built into the monitor. This means I would not have to open up Photo Booth, and would be a time saver.

6. Better still if Evernote provided a hook into QuickSilver, which let me take pictures from the iSight camera just using a keyboard command. Perhaps this could be implemented via a special utility app (or droplet) that Evernote provided, sort of a "gui-less" app that quickly starts up, takes a picture, and puts it into the Evernote database.

7. Spotlight integration. Right now, items in Evernote don’t seem to appear in Spotlight.

So, if you can live with the above shortcomings, Evernote is definitely worth a look.