Tag Archives: dropbox

Genius Scan

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Genius ScanI found a very cool program for my iPhone called Genius Scan. It comes in a free version and a ‘plus’ version, for $2.99, called Genius Scan+. Both versions allow you to

  • Scan a picture with the camera or pick one from the library.
  • Crop and straighten your page thanks to Genius Scan frame autodetection and perspective correction.
  • Enhance your document. Genius Scan turns your grayish documents into real black and white. And it makes color documents look more vivid.
  • Group pages together to easily create PDF documents.
  • Quickly copy documents to your computer via Wifi sharing
  • Share your documents by email or export them to iBooks

The ‘plus’ version allows you to export your documents to Dropbox, Evernote or Google Docs.
I decided to upgrade to the ‘plus’ version since I use Dropbox and Evernote a lot.

 

Evernote

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I’ve been using Evernote for a while now, so much so that I’m surprised I haven’t written about it yet. The beauty of Evernote is that it can help you remember anything. You can type a text note, clip a web page, snap a photo or grab a screenshot. It’s all searchable too!! Premium users get priority image recognition, though. I’ve been using Evernote recently to keep track of different jewelers my girlfriend and I have visited and engagement rings we’ve looked at. I took photos of the business cards of the associates who assisted us. On the back of the cards are the specifications about the ring(s) my girlfriend liked. I can go back and search for keywords in the specs and view the entire card. I don’t have to keep track of the original card. As long as I have an Internet connection, I can also view the notes on my iPhone. If I mark a note as a favorite, I can view it even if I don’t have Internet access.
Premium accounts can upload 500MB/month (free users only get 40MB/month) and notes up to 50MB in size (free users can only upload notes <25MB). One nice feature about Evernote is it can be configured to monitor selected folders for importing files. I have mine set to monitor my Dropbox folder on my home PC. I wish Evernote offered a referral system, similar to Dropbox, and would grant additional upload capacity (10MB?) per month for each referral.

 

ReQall v. Remember The Milk

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For a while now, I’ve been using ReQall to remember tasks that needed to get done. I tried using Remember The Milk but didn’t like that the iPhone app wasn’t free (you had to sign up for a Pro account). Now, RTM has decided to offer the iPhone app for use with free accounts but limited the functionality. The limits imposed on the free accounts are very similar to what you get for free from ReQall.
One thing I do like about ReQall (should I ever upgrade to Pro) is the integration with Evernote. I can add items to ReQall either by voice or text. I can follow my ReQall calendar in Google Calendar using the iCal URL. I can add items using the official Firefox plugin; RTM doesn’t have an official plugin.
One of the features I like about RTM is that I can tell it that an item repeats however often, in plain text, and it’ll recognize the time frame; ReQall only gives you a dropdown menu to choose from. RTM has a tighter integration with Google Calendar but I like being able to turn the calendar on/off when a day/week gets too crowded with appointments/tasks. RTM allows you to tag an item with a location, regardless of the account type; this feature is only available to ReQall Pro users. The free version of RTM only syncs once a day, whereas ReQall Standard syncs constantly.
They both offer something that the other only includes in the pay version, so I’m going to keep using both until I can decide on one over the other. If I ever do pay for one, right now I would pay for ReQall Pro.

 

Web-based File Storage Services

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Lately, there has been a lot of talk about cloud computing, where most of the work is done on the Internet. One of the first uses of cloud computing has been web-based file storage services like Dropbox and FilesAnywhere. There are three main choices, that I know about right now, when it comes to online file storage (if you don’t count typical FTP/SFTP file servers, etc) – Box.net, Dropbox and FilesAnywhere.
Box.net offers 1GB of storage for free with a 25MB file size limit. For $10/month, you can upgrade to 5GB of storage, and a 1GB file size limit. You also have the ability to view the previous five versions of a file, with the paid membership. Right now, unfortunately, Box.net doesn’t have a utility to upload/sync files to their storage from a Windows, Mac or Linux computer, but they do have an iPhone app.
Dropbox offers 2GB of storage for free. Files uploaded to Dropbox via the desktop application have no file size limit. There is, however, a 300MB cap on files transferred via the website. For $10/month, you can upgrade to 50GB of storage; or for $20/month, you can upgrade to 100GB of storage. Dropbox keeps snapshots of every saved change in your Dropbox folder over the last 30 days. If you upgrade to one of their paid versions, they offer a service called Pack-Rat, which keeps an unlimited amount of previous versions and deleted files. Dropbox also offers an iPhone app.
FilesAnywhere offers 1GB of storage for free, and doesn’t appear to have a file size limit for uploading, but free accounts have download limits of 10MB per-file and 25 downloads/day.
I have an account with all three services, but if I had to choose only one, I would choose Dropbox. They even offer a way to get up to 3GB8GB of storage for free by getting other people to sign up. They add an extra 250MB of storage to both my account and the person who signed up, when they use a referral link.