Tech Tool Round-up
I have been much remiss on my new social web tool experimentation lately - I would chock it up to GRADUATE SCHOOL MANIA and ignoring Lifehacker, among with several discarded technology-related RSS feeds. Or maybe, the existing tools I have simply meet my needs. But recently I came across a whole flurry of gizmos - some I have not yet tried, but thought you might be interested in:
- Evernote. Okay, I have been playing with this one. Think Google Notebook (which has been evidently abandoned), updated with an entirely new interface. Unfortunately I find it a bit clunky and I am not a fan of the thumbnail view and lack of clear comment/annotation ability. I am still using it mostly because I have to, since Google Notebook now has a forceful window refresh action that drives me bananas. Let me know what you think in the comments if you have tried it!
- Feedly. I have also dabbled with this one - very interesting. This site acts as a replacement to your existing feedreader - a new way to read feeds but with one step integration with Google Reader so feeds you read on it are also updated as read in Google Reader. It presents an attractive alternative, but when I tried it I found that it required far too much clicking and arbitrary navigation aspects that are done away with in Google Reader’s simple left hand navigation system. I will only use Feedly for feed recommendations, since I really like that feature of feed readers. I am interested to know if any of you found it helpful.
- Eversave. Free! A desktop program for the mac that automatically saves your work in applications of your choice and when you choose to avoid loss of data. I will be trying this!
- Buzzup Docs (note: sub-section of Buzzup main site). Heads up grad students! Like Digg for documents - aggregates content from sites with voluntary document sharing such as Scribd and Slideshare, allowing the user to find documents according to a standard search. Have not used this much yet, but first impressions are that searches are not specific to the docs section, are a tad slow, and tend to come up with non-scholarly results. But I will certainly add it to my growing list of databases for my research.
Do you have any social web tools or mac programs you can’t do without? I sometimes get the impression I am writing from within a cave, so I will be asking more questions of you my readers from time to time. Please share any suggestions!
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