→ CloudMagic

CloudMagic

I, like others, am a fairly passionate proponent of preserving digital memories and information for the future. I believe the amount of information we have today – tweets, blog posts, emails, or notes – needs a unified standard to ensure it won’t get lost – forever – decades from now.

From my review of Day One:

Where the human mind can’t get, I think software can help. In the connected and post-PC era we’re living in, I believe the devices and apps we use play an important role in enabling us to create memories. But just as relevant as “content creation” has become to this discussion, we have to ensure the memories we create today will be preserved digitally for the future.

And from my personal blog:

That’s why we, today, need to invest on open standards for data conservation, hardware interoperability, and cross-platform cloud storage. In my recent article for Read & Trust, I explained how, going forward, technology makers and trend-setters will have to figure out ways to preserve and standardize how information is archived online. On the same level, we need to make sure we are creating our memories on devices, apps, and services we know we’ll be able to operate a decade from now. I don’t want to end up with another dead Nokia phone in my drawer.

This is a long-term project, but we need to invest in tools to preserve our digital lives now. I think it starts with search: there should be a platform to automatically index and archive the data from services and apps we use every day. Earlier this year I started using Cue (née Greplin) and CloudMagic, two web services that try to do exactly this – indexing and searching your “digital life” for any sort of information.

Today’s CloudMagic update for iOS made me realize I never properly mentioned the app on MacStories. CloudMagic is a free service that can index (using OAuth) a variety of other services including Twitter, Gmail, Dropbox, and Evernote. They have a human privacy policy, a clean interface, and, fundamental for my workflow, a universal iOS app. They don’t have a premium product yet, which is too bad because I would pay even a monthly fee just to guarantee the long-term viability of their product.

CloudMagic is fast: it can search across thousands of indexed items in seconds, with results updating in real time. It is astonishingly accurate, even when it has to match a couple of words with, say, hundreds of tweets from last year or an Evernote PDF inside a nested notebook. I use CloudMagic on a daily basis to retrieve old tweets (as reference material), email messages, or notes; in fact, I would say the app has better search than Evernote’s iOS app. Which, by the way, is supported with an URL scheme – so you’ll be able to search notes and open them directly in the Evernote app.

The CloudMagic app isn’t perfect – for instance, it could use an URL scheme itself and I’d love to be able to save recurring searches or, generally, have faster access to Twitter and Email filters (there are, however, advanced search operators).

CloudMagic for iOS is free on the App Store.

Update: I’m told that CloudMagic does actually have a URL scheme to start new searches: cloudmagic://search?query=foo. Useful.

Posted by Federico Viticci on – ∞
Apr
20
2011

Qwiki iPad App Released, Lets You Explore 3 Million Topics

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Qwiki, the “information experience” winner of TechCrunch Disrupt last year, released its first official iPad app today, allowing users to visually explore more than 3 million topics including people, places and facts directly from the tablet. For those unfamiliar with Qwiki, the service has built an incredibly appealing and engaging technology that, upon entering a keyword for a topic you want to know more about, will start “talking” to you with a human voice, also including text, animated images, videos, slides, infographics. Qwiki is a unique, rich experience built on top of web technologies — try it out here using your web browser to get the idea.

The iPad app is equally impressive. Once you fire up Qwiki for iPad, you’ll be asked to share your location so the system can load the nearest points of interest, and display them on a Google Map. From the main page, you can view the “Qwiki of the day”, see daily qwikis and popular ones, explore places near you or simply search for a new topic. A bar at the bottom allows you to share a qwiki with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or via email. The interface design is clean and similar to the website, the app responsive and pretty fast overall. A qwiki takes a few seconds to load, and as soon as the voice starts speaking you’ll be able to tap on the images included in the slide to view them, tap on videos, hide the textual description. The app lets you swipe between slides, and quickly jump to related topics by tapping on a button in the toolbar. The results seem accurate, as they’re based on keywords and topics found in the qwiki you were playing. When you’re done browsing qwikis and related material, you can read more on a topic thanks to Wikipedia, Google, Fotopedia and Youtube integration.

Qwiki for iPad is a great visual experiment, and you can download it for free here. Check out more screenshots below. (more…)

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→ The Future Of Writing On Tablets

The Future Of Writing On Tablets

iPad is often described as a “lean-back” device, which is wrong. It’s a lean-back device, if you are in a lean-back situation where you read. But it also works as a lean-forward device. It works for writing if it’s optimized.

The lean-forward/lean-back change is hard on the iPad, but if you have a program that helps you just do one certain task, iPad can be useful. It’s that single-mode atmosphere that makes the iPad fun and strange at the same time.

Reading works well, but writing works well too if it’s just input and not editing.

The first wave of iPad apps was mostly made of bigger iPhone apps. The second wave saw Flipboard, Writer and OmniFocus coming to our tablets. The third wave is going to be real fun.

Posted by Federico Viticci on – ∞
Feb
25
2010

Organizing Files: The Librarian Syndrome

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But the more important conclusion is less obvious, which is that nearly everyone can benefit from the use of software that doesn’t require explicit file system management at all.

Instead of putting music files into a folder, all you had to do was put it into iTunes. Once you’ve added a song to iTunes you no longer need to worry about where it actually is in the file system

To argue that users should embrace manual file system management for every bit of data they wish to store is to argue against human nature.

This is not an argument that all software should abstract the file system by using the library paradigm, but just that more software should.

- John Gruber, The Untitled Document Syndrome -

It wasn’t long time ago, though I can’t remember very well. I’m talking about the day I realized I needed a better solution to store all my documents, as the Finder simply couldn’t do that anymore. Maybe it was some months ago, back in September / October, when I made up my mind and decided to give Yojimbo a second, in-depth spin. I fell in love with it, much like I did with Things from CulturedCode the second time I tested it. Guess there’s a second time for everything, right?

Problem is, I couldn’t use a hierarchical folder system anymore. With hundreds of documents to manage (be them .pdf files, spreadsheets, reports, casual but still important notes) and new pieces of text each day, the situation became unmanageable and yeah, Finder was slow and cluttered. So I started using Yojimbo which allowed me to enter any kind of information both manually and in other ways like the Quick Panel or the Drop Dock. Be sure to read my previous post about if you missed it. I still have Yojimbo in my dock, if you ask.

A few weeks ago I discovered and wrote about a new app, iDocument, which wants to be the ultimate solution for storing and retrieving documents on Mac OS X. iDocument lets you import documents, tag them, organize them in folders and smart collections.

If you work with your Mac, you need a powerful centralized solution to sort and archive files. In this post I and Cody will take a look at 4 different systems (Finder, Yojimbo, iDocument, Leap) and discuss how they actually work, in which cases. We’ll surely miss a lot of apps, but we wanted to focus on those we know and use on a regular base.

Enjoy.

(more…)

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