Portland Macintosh Users Group

Mac Discoveries by Allen Watson

Evernote, Better Information Capture
Capture. Sync. Find. And remember everything.That?s the motto on the Evernote Beta website. I?ve been using this on an experimental basis and I like it a lot! What?s really intriguing to me is that Evernote will even scan images for text and will index that text, so that you can search for the image using the text it contains. For instance, you can take a snapshot of a sign (suppose it says, ?Mount Hood Jazz Festival? on it) with your iPhone, e-mail the image to Evernote, and later search in Evernote for ?jazz? and locate the picture of the shirt! You can scan a page from a book, and Evernote will index all the text. Drag and drop files onto Evernote in the Dock; it recognizes txt, html, doc, jpeg, gif, and png. (wav support coming soon). Big drawback; it does not yet recognize PDF files! (Yojimbo does; see below.)Think of all the ways this could be used. Use your cell phone camera to snap a pic of someone?s business card, and send it to your Evernote account: Bingo! You?ve captured all the information into Evernote. Snap a pic of the page of a book when you are researching and you have a searchable copy of that page. (Searchable but not editable; Evernote does not allow you to copy and paste text out of images.)Evernote gives you a javascript bookmarklet you can paste into your browser bookmarks that, when selected, will capture whatever web page you are viewing, or the selected text on that page. With Evernote you not only get a desktop application, you also get a web repository that syncs with your desktop application. So you can access your Evernote data from any computer with web access; you just log in. Capture data on your desktop, it syncs to the web; capture data on the web, and it syncs to your desktop! Text, images, even audio can be saved. And if you wish to, you can share some of your clips with other Evernote users.I have been using Bare Bones? Yojimbo for saving clippings since it came out, and I still like it a lot. I still find its keyboard shortcut method of clipping text, combined with an AppleScript I downloaded from (I think) Daring Fireball that lets me assign tags as I clip, is easier for clipping just text. And I like being able to ?print? a PDF of anything directly into Yojimbo. But Evernote is making me think twice about which is best.Give Evernote a try; it?s free while in beta.

Megabytes

Portland Gay Symphonic Band performs 5:00 PM Concert, Sat. April 12, 2008
You can hear our exciting performance at 5pm and attend the Red Dress Party at 9pm. We intentionally set our event earlier to not conflict with Red Dress.

Mac Love, Not War

Macworld 2008 San Francisco
Every culture has its holidays: the oscars, fashion week, March madness or the world series. For Mac lovers, each December brings a frenzy of rumored speculation about our Superbowl, the Macworld Conference and Expo which takes place each January in San Francisco's Moscone Center. This year's conference takes place from...

Geeks R Us » Macintosh

Sad state of PDF Forms on the Mac
While trying to fill out a voter registration form, I ran into this sad state of affairs: Preview works with the check boxes and radio buttons, but the text fields are only 2 characters wide. SmileOnMyMac’s PDFpen application doesn’t work at all. Radio buttons are displayed randomly on the page, the text fields are not editable at all. Adobe’s own reader works for editing, but they don’t let you save the document! To make matters even more insulting, they have gone out of their way to disable OS X’s “Save as PDF” from the Print Dialog! So you get this comical, yet infuriating sequence: 3a. “You cannot save this form, instead print it for your records” 3b. “Save as PDF has been disabled. Use File->Save instead” ROFL. Stupid Adobe. Another company going down in flames, just like Microsoft, slowly but surely. Maybe this is some maneuver to push people to buy their distiller product or some other software? Edit: Found this hack on the Apple forums: Adobe Reader and Preview can’t save filled-in PDFs, only print them. You can install CUPS-PDF http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx to create a virtual printer. When you print to that printer, it will create a PDF file of the filled-in form

Charles DeVore's Weblog

For those of you using a MacBook Pro and a second monitor attached keep this in mind. There is a known bug that when you close the lid of the MacBook Pro it forgets about the monitor on your computer. Now this only effects people using an external keyboard and mouse with the lid closed while using the external monitor. When you open the lid back up it will not light up again until you go to the monitors control panel on the external monitor and tell it to look for other monitors (detect displays). At that point the internal monitor will light up and you will be able to use it again. This happens under 10.5.2 according to Apple, but I have seen it under 10.5.1 also «details»

Gary Pool SEO

Internet Strategy Forum Summit 2008
There will be a world-class set of presenters at the 5th annual Internet Strategy Forum Summit, July 17 & 18 in Portland, Oregon. The Internet Strategy Forum Summit features 8 keynote presenters, 1 panel, a catered lunch and all-attendee reception on Thursday, plus plenty of networking time. I’ll see you there. Make sure to register and book [...]