Tag Archives: productivity

A little help from…

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It’s been some time since I wanted to write about my little computer helpers. Thus, without further ado I present (in alphabetical order):

Caffeine

During a seminar my colleague Bob Reuter and I gave, he switched on this little program to avoid having his Mac fall asleep. As I had 15 3-hour workshops during the past month, I came to value Caffeine. Previously, I had to make sure that my screensaver was disabled or the computer screen didn’t go into sleep mode (which I frequently forgot). Now I just activate Caffeine and the screen stays on and on and on, and the projector does not have to look for its input source or switches off entirely.

Evernote

Well, this is actually not just a little helper, but a big one. Many people have already written about Evernote lately, e.g. also Alan Levine in “More than notes in Evernote”. You can copy text from a website, use the browser plugin to convert it into a note for which the source URL is saved immediately, you can tag the note and put it into a folder in Evernote. The great thing is that you can sync your notes with the Evernote server and get all your stuff on the iPhone as well.

I usually use Evernote to take notes during an online event or while reading a text. Occasionally, I send a tweet to my Evernote account for save keeping or take a photo if I don’t want to copy the text.

Currently, a bit of a bummer are two things for me, but I guess, the Evernote team will get to them some time:

  • You cannot edit a note on the iPhone when it includes rich text like bullet points, bold, italics etc.
  • Shared notebooks don’t show up under “Notebooks”. You have to hunt for them.

Jumpcut

This little software is marvelous. As I do a lot of “copy & paste”, I depend on Jumpcut a lot. I can copy as much as I want (currently, I let the program remember 40 copied items), and then start pasting the text where I want to have it. Beware: as every text is copied, if you copy passwords, they also appear in the history. However, you can always clear the history.

Skitch

It is already easy to take screenshots on a Mac with the built-in snapshot functionality, but Skitch has some added value.

  • You can decide where you want to have your screenshots saved -> no more moving of files to the final folder.
  • The file format can be changed for each image.
  • The files can get individual names after grabbing (a portion of) the screen.
  • You can drag & drop your images wherever you need them.
  • The images you saved on the computer are also placed in a history from where they can be recalled for further editing later on.
  • You can add text, shapes, arrows etc. to your image before saving it.
  • The image can be saved on your computer, the Skitch server, MobileMe, FTP, WebDAV or flickr account.
  • You can take timed snapshots. They are particularly necessary when you want to show a dropdown menu.

Except for Evernote, my little helpers are exclusively for Mac.

ZZ are going to be top: First look at the Zotz plug-in for Zotero

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Thanks to my Twitter network, I learn about interesting, funny, stunning, awesome, academic things to do, to read, to view, to reflect upon, and to wonder about.

Last night, I saw @zotero‘s latest post on a new plugin that would allow Zotero users to export library collections to the web. As I am a happy Zotero user as it facilitates the process of taking bibliographic notes, I needed to check this plug-in out with which one can upload connections to the internet.

Mike Wesch wrote a blog post on “The Digital Ethnographer’s Notebook: Diigo vs. Evernote vs. Tiddlywiki” In the comment section, Zotero was introduced to the discussion and with the just released plug-in Zotz, got points for moving into the online world.

Zotz allos users to publish collections from their Zotero library to Citeline of MIT. After a collection is uploaded to Citeline, one can change the appearance, title and what others would be allowed to see. The thus created page can be downloaded as an html file to be used on an intranet for example. Furthermore, the references can be saved as files to be imported in bibliographic manager software for further use.

That is a great start to share a (part of a) Zotero library with others. I assume that the development on Citeline will continue. There is a lot of potential because right now it is rather static beyond the basic editing options and thus there is space to grow:

  • The link to the exhibit (Citeline’s word for what Zotero calls collection) can be shared through an URL and the exhibit can be downloaded for use somewhere else. However, there is no way for me to tell Citeline whether I would like to keep the URL private or public.
  • You can only delete an entire library, but not individual entries.
  • You cannot add items to an already existing exhibit.
  • People with whom you share your Citeline exhibit cannot make comments.
  • Special characters are a slight problem. They got messed up during the upload.
  • You cannot update an entry on Citeline. This is not good esp. in light of the previous point. You would have to correct the letter to its English equivalent in Zotero and upload the entire collection again but to a new exhibit and re-do all the fine-tuning on Citeline.
  • You cannot search across of exhibits of one person.
  • Other “social networking” features could be helpful, e.g. adding people to your network to keep track of their exhibits. Saving exhibits of other people, being alerted when they created a new exhibit.

Despite this list of it-would-be-great-to-have-that features, and I can think of some more easily, I already like this plug-in because it allows me to share references with others in an easy way and let them know about some of my favorite funny YouTube videos.

Citeline

Citeline