User:Anthony Salvagno/Notebook/Research/2010/03/25/Online Notes and Other Goodies

Adobe After Effects
I came across some video this morning that specifically said they use AE to add special effects to movies. I then thought "Do I have AE?" Turns out we do. I spent a small portion of the morning learning about the awesome software and I can't wait to get into it and develop some serious skills. I think it could be valuable not just for adding effects, but it has some nifty easy animation tools that would be useful. I tried it out on my dsDNA unzipping image and I was able to make the DNA move fluidly.

It has the ability to import Photoshop (.psd) and Illustrator (.ai) files and keep your layers intact so you can just animate individual layers which I thought was pretty sweet. This would be a quick and easy method of animation over Flash which is a bit daunting right now. I would have to figure out how to incorporate Premier Pro into it. I'm guessing I make my little movie file in AE and then import that into Premier Pro. I can also take a movie file and add effects to that, so I can make a movie in Premier Pro, import that into AE, add my effects and animations, and then import that back into PP for final cuts and stuff.

Online Notes
Between Evernote, FriendFeed, and OWW it is getting hard to maintain each separate note page. If I want to have efficient and clean notes, I could do images and live notes in Evernote and then have friendfeed update my feed with my evernotes. Then I would have FF embedded in OWW to compile all my notes and add final thoughts or something to my OWW notebook.

The other method would be to make a brand new notebook for each note taking day in evernote. Then make a friendfeed room that only collects the RSS of that one notebook. Then put that into my OWW. I tried embedding the new EN notebook into OWW (see Mon) and that was pretty crappy.

Is there anything better out there? Day-by-Day notes, I think, are a thing of the past. I just realized that whenever I search for something I look at the titles I make or how I've tagged pages. When I blog its ordered (time wise) in a list of headings. Sure they are ordered from most recent to oldest but the dates don't really play a factor outside of that. I compile notes on here by relevance. I have category listings and in each notebook page I will compile various information from friendfeed, youtube, etc. based on how similar it is to what I discuss in my notebook. Aaaahhh I think I'm rambling now...

Ok long story short, I'm not sold on Evernote and embedding iframes every day is annoying. Plus say I just used friendfeed, how would I embed a google doc? With a link? Please... that's retarded. OWW and friendfeed are both close to what I want, for different reasons. Hopefully soon one or the other (or both) will improve to the point where it's all automated. Maybe friendfeed would be the best if I could RSS my google docs that I make public.

Anyways this whole thing started because I came across an Android Market app that supposedly is better than Evernote by lots of people. The app was called 3banana and run by Snaptic. I downloaded it and tried it out during class. I will document the pros and cons of both applications below.

Snaptic
I came across their app 3banana on Android Market. It's easy to use. You can upload photos. You can add categories anywhere by #tagging anywhere in your note. Apparently you can use HTML too. I haven't tried it much though.

Evernote
Also on Android market. Some nice features:
 * taking pictures automatically goes to notes
 * make different notebooks
 * audio notes
 * add labels

Google Notebook
I just came across this, literally just now while researching differences between 3banana and Evernote. I will have to spend some time checking it out. Never mind, looks like Google ceased development of the project a year ago. Zoho apparently has a notebook.

Zoho Notebook
Woah, this looks really good. Check this out! It looks pretty easy to upload images, include spreadsheets, embed videos, include html, and RSS's into a notebook. You can publish a notebook or a page or an object. And once you publish it looks like you can embed that somewhere else.

I made a notebook here or see this:  There are lots of awesome things here. That is the published version of my notebook so just reading abilities for general audience. But there is a comments section, so general audience can leave comments and feedback about what they see in my notebook. I can also allow certain users to have access to edit my notebook (ie any members of the lab). So Koch could leave his Comment:SJK easily anywhere on my page!

I'll have to fuck around tomorrow.
 * Steve Koch 03:15, 26 March 2010 (EDT): Zoho notebook looks very cool. Every zoho app I have ever tried out is really good.  But for some reason I still don't use it and nobody else talks about it.  What the hell is with that?
 * Anthony Salvagno 10:47, 26 March 2010 (EDT):From what I read last night and saw, Zoho is designed for businesses and they charge for it which is why it kicks more ass than Google's stuff. (Although I learned yesterday that Google charges for their services too when you want them all together.)  Their apps are free for personal use and some of their business oriented apps are free in limited form.  Maybe this is why no one talks about them?