Use Case: Household Maintenance Information

As a homeowner, there are a number of things I have to do infrequently.  When we switch from our heating to our cooling system in the early summer, for instance, I have to replace some parts in our cooling system that only last a season.  Light bulbs burn out.  Boards in our fence have to be replaced sometimes.  Our water filters need to be replaced.  Slowly the water facet strainers need to be replaced.

When I go to the hardware store, I have hundreds of choices for each part.  And I buy those parts infrequently enough that I can't remember between purchases which size/type/brand parts that I need.  I've started recording in Evernote what those part attributes are.

A recent entry in the official Evernote blog discusses creating a light bulb database.  It might look a little odd going around taking pictures of all the different light bulbs in your house, but it really is a good way to deal with y our household small data problem.

Upcoming Evernote Announcement

It looks like something new is pending from Evernote.  I'm not sure what this is about, but it seems interesting.

JotNot - Turn your iPhone into a document scanner

I hate paper, especially for documents that I have to keep long term.  Electronic versions of documents have several advantages:

• They don't take up any space
• They can be easily copied
• They can be filed in more than one "folder" at a time, especially with the use of tags.  So I might, for example, have some car repair receipt filed away both with receipts and as part of a car repair log.
• With OCR, they can be made searchable so that you don't have to remember where you put it.

Scanners that are quite good for this kind of purpose are cheap and can be purchased at local electronics and office supply stores, often as part of an "all in one" scanner/printer/fax combo.  

These devices can be quite useful, but usually require that you be sitting down to a computer with the software open into which you want to scan the document.  This makes it difficult do scan documents in "on the fly" when you run across them.  So either you don't scan them in, or they get piled into a "scan later" pile which is more or less a paper filing system you were trying to eliminate in the first place.  It's a great example of the small data problem.

This is where JotNot Scanner Pro comes in.  JotNot Scanner Pro is an iPhone application available in the app store ($1.99 at the time of this writing).  After you take a picture of a document, JotNot analyzes the picture, and cleans up the "document" part so that it looks cleaner and becomes a fax quality or better PDF.  The documents analyzed by JotNot are then ready for OCR.

For example, let's say that I want to scan in a document.  In honor of Independence Day (here in the US), I'm using the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, taken from the Gutenberg Project (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16780/16780-h/16780-h.html).  For convenience, I copied the first part out to a Word document and then printed it.

The first step in using JotNot is to take a picture of the document using your iPhone.  JotNot can let you take a picture with your camera directly or load a picture that you've already taken.  The following image is the one I took of the document.

Then JotNot analyzes the document and tries to find the boundaries.  In a good situation with clean boundaries and not any clutter in the background, it does a pretty good job.  In practice, I've noticed that it misses quite a bit.  But when it does, you can specify the real document boundaries.  The image below shows JotNot having automatically found the boundaries.

When you hit the process button, it analyzes the part of the document that is highlighted, stretching and cleaning it up and putting it into a PDF document that it generates. 

From here you can do several things.  You can email the document or upload it directly into one of several online services: Evernote, iDisk, Google Docs, Dropbox, or Box.net.

A screenshot of the document transferred to a desktop computer and opened is shown below:

The quality of the document is about that of a fax.  Not as good as the original, but still quite good and sufficient for many purposes including OCR.

Using JotNot Scanner Pro in conjunction with a service like Evernote or DropBox means that you can scan in a document and upload it so that it is available to you the next time you log into your computer.  If you use Evernote, Evernote will perform OCR so that the document is also searchable.  JotNot Scanner Pro can thus your iPhone into a handheld document scanner.

Use Case: Using Evernote to Create a Personal Search Engine

I'm currently doing some research and preparing a class on early creeds of the Christian church. Translations of most of these creeds are available on the web and have a copyright such that you can copy them freely. By copying them into Evernote and giving each creed a specific tag or putting all of them into a separate notebook, you can effectively create a personal search engine over all the documents that you can now access from all your Evernote enabled devices. Also, you can include the URL of the page where you found the text originally so that you can return to the site later.

I'm doing this for religious creeds, but you could do this for whatever topic you are researching. Other sources of text include sites like Wikipedia. This is great for things like school research. Assuming that the copyright of the texts you are copying permit it, you could even share the notebook (and if you are a premium user, grant write permission) with others for collaborative creation of a shared search engine.

Use Case: Using Evernote to Share Background Research

A friend calls you and has an idea.  You say that you'll help her develop the idea a bit by doing some background research on the web and sharing what you find.

Evernote is a great way to do this.

• Create a new notebook and share it with your friend.  This link will show you how to share a notebook.  You can choose to make the notebook public to the world (probably not what you want for this use case) or just share it with your friend.  If you are a premium user, you can also choose to let your friend modify the notebook too, which is good if you are both going to collect information and share it.  You can also optionally require that the person be logged into evernote.  Finally, you can revoke that user's access to the notebook as well, so giving access doesn't have to be permanent.
• Do the research, storing the pages back in Evernote.  Using the bookmarklet (see link here for how to set that up), you can clip parts of a webpage or entire web pages into your evernote account.  Make sure you choose to add the items in the new shared notebook that you created.

This is much better than just collecting a set of links for a number of reasons.  Using Evernote lets you store whole or partial web pages which lets your friend peruse the items you found before following the link.  Using Evernote also lets you search through the items later by terms included.  You can modify the notes later or add new ones without making it confusing which links are new and which ones are old.  Finally, even though your friend only gets to see the items in your shared notebook, the notes are also mixed in with all your other notes from your perspective.

Evernote is an effective way for dealing with the small data problem for this use case.

iPhone 4 Lower Left Corner Receptivity Issue

I just got the new iPhone 4.  So far I love it.  Evernote and Jot not are so much fast on it that it is stunning.  And the improved camera is such that JotNot is producing much better scans than on my previous model.  Comparisons, discussion, etc. will come in future posts.

That having been said, I am definitely experiencing the receptivity problem when I'm covering the lower left hand corner of the phone.  The effect is striking (going from full bars down to one bar).  The issue is discussed here (among many other places).  The "just don't hold it that way" and "every phone's receptivity can be affected by holding it in certain ways" arguments just don't work for those of us who are left handed.  It's not just that I can come up with some contrived way to reduce the phone's receptivity.  It's that the most natural way to hold it kills the receptivity.

Dropbox

http://www.dropbox.com

Dropbox is another building block in what you build to solve your small data problem, and an increasingly important one as more and more devices and applications support it.

The idea behind Dropbox is even simpler than the one behind evernote.  It's a place to store files "in the cloud" that you can then access from multiple computers of a wide variety of platforms.  But it gets better than that.  Many apps on mobile platforms support Dropbox.  That means that Dropbox can be an effective way to synchronize data across your mobile devices and desktops.

Users get 2GB of space for free and there are paid options for getting 50GB and 100GB of storage space.  As files change, users can retrieve older versions for up to 30 days and for an additional fee, can retrieve older versions of files indefinitely.

Users can also share directories and files so that they can collaborate with others.

There are a wide variety of ways to interact with Dropbox.  The web interface is the most basic and lets a person browse their directories, download and upload files.  A tab also displays recent file modifications, so you can see what was uploaded and downloaded.

The desktop clients are where Dropbox really starts to get interesting.  There are clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux that sync your files with the Dropbox server seamlessly.  In Windows, when you install the client, a new directory is created (by default called Dropbox, but you can customize this).  Any file in this directory and in subdirectories get synchronized with the server as you change the files.  So, from your perspective, you are just creating/saving/deleting files and Dropbox takes care of all of the rest in the background.  One other nice feature is that it only synchronizes the parts of the file that change.  So if you have a large file that takes a long time to transfer, but only change parts of the file, the synchronizing is still quick.  This last feature opens up a variety of different uses that we'll discuss in the future.

Dropbox is becoming increasingly valuable for mobile devices.  On the iPad, for example, many applications will allow you to create content, but you can't copy back and forth easily.  This is where Dropbox comes in.  Many apps now support Dropbox so you can create your content on your mobile device and send it to your Dropbox.  Then when you log into your computer later, it synchronizes, pulling that content down to your computer.  And this works in both directions.  If you create a file on your computer and put it in your Dropbox, you can access it from the Dropbox enabled application on your mobile device.

As with all "cloud-based" services, your data is being stored on a third party server, so you have to think through carefully what kinds of data you are willing to upload.  Your data is protected behind a login name and password, but anyone guessing that name and password can get at your data.  There are some ways to make Dropbox more secure and we'll be talking about those in the future.

In summary, Dropbox is an important and valuable building block for building your solution to the small data problem.  It is simple, easy to understand, and you can use it in many different ways.  We'll be discussing in the future different creative things you can do with it.