New Evernote Widgit for Android

Making the most of Androids customisability Evernote have revamped their widgit for even greater functionality to the home screen. Previously the widgit has been a separate app, now it is baked into the Evernote App streamlining it’s functionality.

The widget comes in three flavours…

• Action widget (1×1) – Quick access to a note, camera or search.
• Action bar (4×1) – Choose from 11 different actions to be displayed
• List Widgit (4×2) – Shortcuts to  key actions and a list of notes.

For more information read the post on the Evernote blog here.

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Google Voice Typing

For a while now Google has been perfecting voice recognition. You can now dictate instead of typing into any Google Doc from either a desktop or mobile device.

Voice typing supports 40 languages and to use this feature, open any document from Google Docs in the Chrome browser. Go to Tools and select Voice typing. Then click on the microphone and start speaking, Google will transcribe what you say.

Type with your voice (Guide)

 

Using Voice on Android

Google Voice Typing on Your Android Phone

 

Evernote Web Clipper now works better with Gmail, Youtube and Amazon

We have mentioned Evernote’s Web Clipper several times on this site. Along with the Evernote Clearly app for making web page’s it’s probably one of my most often used applications and an invaluable part of my daily Knowledge Managment routine.

The Evernote Clipper now works better with applications such as Gmail, Youtube and amazon allowing you to clip and save exactly the content that you want. Evernote Web Clipper even allows you to Clip email attachments from Gmail.

 

6 Ways Evernote Embraces Handwriting

Evernote can recognise handwriting whether converting an image of text into a text document (OCR) or directly by recognising handwriting via a touch screen or stylus/tablet input device. This post from the Evernote blog talks about a few ways that this can be done in Evernote.

Chrome for Android Can Instantly Search Any Text You Highlight on Google (from Lifehacker)

Chrome for Android now allows you to search on highlighted text from documents and web pages. See this article by Whitson Gordon on lifehacker.com.

Chrome for Android Can Instantly Search Any Text You Highlight on Google

Printing PDF documents with Comments

PDF documents are a very popular document format for everything from Assignment submissions, papers, to minutes from meetings. Just like word documents comments can be added to PDF documents for example feedback on your essay submission.

A common problem faced is when the document is printed out. For example, students like to be able to see both their submission text and the comments made on the same page this guide shows what preferences you need to have in Adobe Reader and print settings selected at the point you send the document to print to be able to achieve this.

Printing PDF documents with Comments Guide (HTML)

Young people ‘prefer to read on screen’ (BBC News)

An interesting article from the BBC commenting on a recent survey by the National Literary Trust on peoples reading habits. In short it appears the young people ‘prefer to read on screen’!

With the ubiquitous status of mobile devices such as smart-phones and tablets also with computers and other devices we are more likely to engage with written material through a digital medium, 52% express a preference to reading on screen as a posed to 32% preferring printed material.

 

See the full article here.

Open Dyslexic- Open source dyslexia friendly font

On the back of our recent shameless promotion the suggestions for resources which we might find useful have begun rolling in, this one here came from Luiza (Thanks loads) over in the universities Chemistry department. I have to admit I had never come across a dyslexic friendly font before but like all good ideas it seems such a simple and obvious concept now.

Well I’ve installed it and given it a quick trial run (writing this post) and have to admit it is easy on the eyes and I find that my gaze doesn’t jitter around the page anywhere near as much as it usually does.

I would recommend though that you have your line spacing (and possibly character spacing) a little more than you would normally as I found it looked just a little too cramped for my liking. An optical illusion created by the bolder base to each character.

Here is the link: http://opendyslexic.org/

Have a go and please let us know in the comments bellow, I sure others would like to hear your thoughts.

Getting at your Kindle Notes (and Highlights)

I have been looking through some of the feedback we have received from the site there are a few messages indicating that they were unable to find a solution to their particular problem. Well as promised where we haven’t covered a particular topic we will look into finding a solution for you and post it here. So if you do leave us some feedback in the form, please check back, if it’s in the remit of the site we will try our hardest to write something.

In this instance we will look at exporting notes (annotations) from the Kindle application so that you can make use of them elsewhere.

The way that the Kindle app on mobile devices works regarding Highlights and Notes is a little convoluted. To access your Notes so that you can transfer them to another application you will need to go online to the Kindle website.

Screenshot of the Amazon Kindle ‘Your Highlights’ page

1. As you read through a book in the Kindle app you highlight passages and make notes. These get uploaded to your online profile with Amazon at the point that you exit the book in your Kindle application.
2. Go to http://kindle.amazon.com and log in.
3. Click on the ‘Your Highlights’ link in the main menu. Here you will see all your highlights and notes
4. From here you could simply copy and past into another document such as Word or if you are using Evernote (or similar service), you could select and clip the text you want straight to Evernote.

I’ve also looked at the Kindle desktop application on windows (I assume that the same would apply to a Mac) and the process is identical. You mark-up the text as you require and on leaving the book in the application those are uploaded to the cloud where you can access them via the http://kindle.amazon.com website (see steps 3 and 4 above). You can’t access this process through the main Amazon website, you have to go to the dedicated Kindle site.

Useful e-Learning Resource (Recommended)

As online resources go for e-Learning, they don’t come more comprehensive than this one. Paul Andrews is an e-Learning manager in the education sector and has developed an award winning website and online resource which you will find useful and goes way beyond the remit of this site.

I recommend that you take a look as I’m sure that you will find a lot of information that will be of interest to you.

Link

Paul’s E-Learning Resources – www.paulselearning.com