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The Advantages Of Journal Writing On Penzu.com

Bakari Chavanu — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:00:46 +0000

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to maintain a year-long journal with the goal of completing at least 250 entries. I started journal writing back in the early eighties when I was in college, but haven’t really put personal thoughts to paper in the last fifteen years.

After thinking long and hard about what medium I wanted to use to keep my journal, I chose Penzu.com because it offers advantages over traditional paper notebooks and even popular blog sites like WordPress and Tumblr.

We have written about Penzu before, but it has grown since then. However, many of the features and tips I share about journal writing with Penzu can be applied in one or another to other similar online writing application sites.

Why Journal Writing?

I have a box of over a dozen journal notebooks I filled up over a ten year period, and I learned that journal writing was and is a great way to reflect upon one’s life choices, aspirations, fears, important experiences, and the like.

Though journal writing can indeed be a literary endeavor in which your life’s experiences my well be published to the world, like the Dairy of Anne Frank, that should not be the initial goal of journal writing. Instead, the journal should be a secret place to share thoughts and insights with yourself. Your journal might go way beyond what you post on Twitter or Facebook, so in this regard Penzu offers some advantages that you might consider in keeping a journal.

Privacy

Because journal writing is often for your most private thoughts, Penzu provides password protection (for both your journal and individual entries) that you might not get with paper journals or some blog sites. In order to really let loose and write in journal, you should make most of what you write private so you can really say what’s on your mind.

However, in the age of the Internet there will be times when you want to share what you’ve written. With Penzu you can selectively share entries from your online journal via email or public link. You also get the option to share anonymously, and any edits you make to your entry will appear in the public version. You can also go back and click “Make Private” and the link will be deleted.

Multi-platform Writing

Because Penzu is an online writing application, entries can be written anywhere you have an online connection. This means you don’t have to worry about keeping a paper journal with you everywhere you go.

Writing can also be done in the Penzu iPhone, iPad, and Android apps, though the writing features of the mobile program are limited compared to the online version. And you must have a Penzu pro account to sync entries between the mobile app and your online account.

Writing online or the mobile app in the long run can be so much better than pen and paper because it offers great opportunities for editing, revising, and exporting writing into different formats.

Even though Penzu provides instant backup of your journal entries, it wouldn’t hurt to export and backup your journal entries in say PDF format for safe keeping in an online locker and/or an external drive.

Journal Writing Tips

Whether your journal takes the form of a daily dairy, a collection of your deepest and most intimate thoughts, or a travel, food, spiritual or idea journal, Penzu includes some features that will come in handy for making better use of your written entries.

In her book, Leaving a Trace: On Journal Entries, Alexandra Johnson talks about the importance of revisiting the entries you write, to gain insight from your past entries, to see what themes emerge, or what topics you seem to keep coming back to.

Penzu includes what it calls a Look Glass feature which if you turn it on will email you snippets of the entries you have written. Penzu says Looking Glass is “an algorithm that chooses an entry from the past…Depending on how often you write (or have been writing), you could be receiving emails of past entries every day or a few times a month. For entries that are locked or in locked journals, we only send a link to the entry so your private writing isn’t exposed.”

Johnson also suggests in her book that journal entries be indexed as you write—keeping a list of topics, names of people, places, dreams, illnesses, stories, etc with corresponding page numbers. Well, with Penzu you can use the tagging feature which will be a lot more efficient than an index list.

In Penzu you can filter entries by tags as yet another way to go back and read and reflect on various topics and themes. It’s even useful to write new entries based on what you wrote in the past.

In addition, Penzu has an Add Comment feature that can be used like post-it notes for later coming back and making observational notes on selected entries. It would be great if Penzu included a bookmarking or flagging feature which might be useful for revisiting important entries.

Pro Features

The free version of Penzu includes unlimited entries, the ability to embed images from your computer and Flickr, autosaving, printing and sharing via email and public link, commenting on shared entries, searching, and Looking Glass. The free features should be sufficient to get started, and may be all you need for keeping a basic journal.

Penzu’s pro level ($20 per year) features include rich text formatting, custom avatar, customized paper styles and writing backgrounds, multiple journals, the ability to export journals to PDF, XML, and TXT files, and lots more. The price of a pro account is a little heavy and I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re keeping a journal for the first time. If you get into a serious journal writing habit and you see that you need the extra features, then consider the upgrade.

Let us know what you think of Penzu and what other features you would like to see added to the service.

3 Ways To Keep A Journal Using Your Mac

Nancy Messieh — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:30:47 +0000

If you want to keep a journal on your Mac, there are several free options available for users, depending on the extent of features you want, and how you plan to use your journal.

Three of the best free Mac journal software apps offer very different experiences when it comes to the journaling experience.

viJournal Lite is an elaborate app, with features including text formatting, adding images, and multiple journals. Thoughtback is a microblogging app with both local and online support. MotoDiary is a minimalist app whose primary focus is on the writing itself rather than features.

Each of the apps address essential features needed when keeping a journal, such as password protecting your diary, because let’s face it, who wants your family or friends rifling through your personal thoughts?

viJournal Lite

viJournal Lite is a simple, no frills app which allows you to create two separate journals. This feature is particularly useful if you want to keep, for example a spending and an athletic diary, or any two kinds of journals. The paid version of the app allows you create as many separate journals as you want, post directly to Blogger or LiveJournal, amongst other features.

The free version serves as a private local diary, and entries themselves can consist of text, where you can change the font, font size and color, add images, tables and even checkboxes if you want to keep a to-do list in your diary.

Another interesting feature is the ability to add side-notes to your journal in a slide out drawer, if there are extra items of information that you want to keep separate from your main journal entry.

You can add a password to your journal in viJournal’s preferences, that makes it necessary for a password to be entered when the app is first launched.

iPad owners can also sync the Mac app with a mobile version and update their journal on the go, but the app will set you back $7.99

Thoughtback

Available in the Mac App Store, Thoughtback [App store link] takes a slightly different approach to keeping a journal. To use the app, you have to sign up for a free Thoughtback account, which you can do upon launching the app for the first time.

Once you’ve logged in, you can create small journal entries by clicking on the Thoughtback icon in your menubar. These thoughts are then saved in your online account, and cannot be accessed on your computer at all.

Using the Mac app isn’t the only way to add thoughts to your private online journal. You can also do so directly through the web interface, so Windows and Linux users can use the site if they want.

Using hashtags in your entries is a convenient way to keep yourself organised, but if you’re looking for a date-oriented journal app, Thoughtback isn’t the right choice for you.

iPhone users can download the free app [iTunes link] and save their micro-journal entries on the go.

MotoDiary

MotoDiary is free Mac journal software that will appeal to minimalist fans. The distraction free app consists of a simple, plain white window where you can write the entry for that day, and scroll back and forth between your entries.

Signing up for a free account allows you to access your journal from anywhere using the web interface, including on iOS and Android devices, as well as allowing you to sync your entries between the app and the web.

Like viJournal Lite, you can password protect your journal, and lock it, even when leaving the app open. Be sure to lock it before you quit the app, otherwise it will not be password protected when next opened.

If we had any requests to make of MotoDiary, it would be to include a calendar, making it easy to jump to specific diary dates.

What’s your favorite free Mac journal software? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Post The Highlights Of Your Day Onine With Epihu

Nancy Messieh — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 17:30:21 +0000

Epihu is a new Russian-based social network, available both in English and Russian, where you can post daily updates, or slides, consisting of a short paragraph of text and an image. So why would you choose to use a site like Epihu if you’re already very active on other dominant social networks like Facebook or Twitter?

Epihu’s success to a certain extent depends on social interaction, and at the moment, as a relatively new service, it definitely needs more members. That said, it could become a convenient means of keeping a brief diary of sorts to remind yourself of the highlights of your day.

If you keep your updates completely private, it becomes another quick and easy way to keep a personal diary online. That said, because Epihu doesn’t claim to be an alternative to Twitter, nor does it attempt to replace it, it is a microblogging service, that can be used alongside the popular social network, much in the same way that Dailybooth is used.

Signing up for an Epihu account can be done one of two ways. You can either login through Twitter, or if you prefer, you can create a new account. It’s worth mentioning, however, connecting Epihu to Twitter resulted in auto-following Epihu’s account, and receiving reminder DMs when an update was not posted for any given day.

After you’ve finished the signup process, the first thing you can do is create your first post, or slide. Determine the section it belongs to – life, films, music, book or games, determine your mood, add tags, include an image, and set the privacy level.

A great feature that Epihu provides is the ability to selectively set the privacy of each update – from visible to all, visible only to friends, or visible to no one. The status update itself is limited to 250 characters. If we had one request as far as updates are concerned, it would be to be able to add our own entries for moods and sections, rather than be limited to what the site offers.

Your profile page features your profile information, specifically name and city, as well as your updates. Updates can be displayed one of two ways. Either as a Grid:

Or as a List:

Your latest updates can also be filtered by year or month.

Opening up a slide will display your update, and other users can leave you comments. Unfortunately, one of the main drawbacks of being able to leave comments is having to log into your Facebook account to do so.

Public slides are visible on the homepage, where you can also see the most used moods and tags.

You can also browse the latest slides posted into each category or section.

If you see someone’s slides that you find interesting, and want to keep up with them, you can do so by clicking the ‘Watch Slides’ link that accompanies each of their updates.

You can only create one slide per day, but if you miss a day, you can always go back and post your update, and assign it to the specific date. This feature is what really sets Epihu apart from all other social networks like Twitter and the less successful Plurk, Identica and so forth.

Have you given Epihu a try? What do you think of the microblogging service? Would you use it alongside Twitter or Facebook? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock

5 Ways To Use Twitter As An Online Private Diary

Nancy Messieh — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:31:48 +0000

While Twitter is all about social networking, conversations and sharing your thoughts with your followers, it can also be a great way to document what you’re doing throughout the day. That said, you don’t want to bore your followers with every detail of your day, and one of the first rules anyone will tell you about Twitter is not to tweet about what you eat. But if you want to keep track of your eating habits, your errands, or just about anything that happens to you throughout the day, there’s a service that will let you do just that using Twitter – but privately.

Below are 5 suggestions on how you can use Twitter as a diary. These are ways you can use Twitter or use Twitter-like services to keep a private microblog, saving your thoughts, or daily experiences online for posterity.

Tweet What You Eat!

Tweet What You Eat! (TWYE) is a free service that allows you to keep a food diary. Whether you’re on a diet, counting calories, or simply want to keep track of your eating habits. TWYE has you covered.

Signing up for a free account can be done by registering for a free account or you can register using your Facebook login.

You will then need to link your TWYE account to your Twitter account, which will also automatically follow the TWYE Twitter account.

Once you’re logged in, you can begin to keep track of what you eat and your weight. Each food entry is accompanied by a description, the number of calories, date eaten and time. You also have the option of posting it to Facebook.

Weight entries are accompanied by the date, time, weight and comments. While weight entries are technically in pounds, there’s no reason you can’t enter them in kilograms.

If you’re wondering where the Twitter part is, you can add items on the go through Twitter, by DM’ing the information to the TWYE Twitter account. If you want to include the calorie count, be sure to use the following format:

Slice of Pizza:240

As you continue to add items to your log, TWYE will calculate the total number of calories per day, your average weight, and more.

While your entries are not made public on your Twitter profile, they are public on TWYE, on the “Recently Tweaten List”.

Tweet What You Spend

If you want to use Twitter as a spending diary, from the same people behind TWYE, comes Tweet What You Spend (TWYS).

To register, you have to create a new account. Unlike TWYE you can’t register using your Facebook account, and for privacy issues that’s definitely better.

The next step is to link your TWYS account with your Twitter account.

You can then begin to keep track of your spending habits using TWYS. Information included with entries include date, time, item description and the amount spent.

After you’ve added the item, you can drag and drop the item into the categories listed on the left-hand side of the screen, a list that is entirely editable.

TWYS will also keep track of your average daily spending and you can export your spending journal to a CSV file.

Like TWYE, you can DM your expenses making it easy to make entries on the go. TWYS provides a guide on how to formulate your entries. For example, if you want to include the amount, description and category use the following format:

Taxi 20 Transportation

If for any reason, TWYE or TWYS doesn’t auto-follow you once you’ve registered, you won’t be able to DM them, just mention it to them on Twitter and it should be resolved quickly.

Tweet Private

With TweetPrivate, you can keep a private online diary of just about anything you want. You don’t have to register for a new account, just connect it to your Twitter account.

You can then store private thoughts in your Tweet Private account.

Not only can you store your private thoughts, you can also upload photos that will be kept private.

To use Tweet Private on the go, log in from your phone on the mobile site and you can enter your rants and thoughts from anywhere. In addition to storing your thoughts, you can also check in on the online map. On your TweetPhoto account you can browse your personal tweets by date.

Current

If you’d rather keep Twitter and your diary separate, Current offers an interesting alternative. It limits you to Twitter’s 140 character count, making it an ideal private microblog. Signing up for a new account requires a username, email address, password and time zone.

You can then write one short diary entry entry per day.

All entries will be displayed on your home page and are visible only to you.

Private Twitter Account

Without a doubt, the easiest way to pull this off is to use a private Twitter account. With lots of third party Twitter apps, both mobile and desktop, supporting multiple accounts, all it takes to keep a private microblog is to open a new Twitter account.

Would you use Twitter to keep a private online journal? Do you have any tips or suggestions on how to use Twitter as a diary?

5 Ways To Document Your Life In Pictures Online

Tina Sieber — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:31:59 +0000

Gone are the days when people would write fancy diaries, documenting their lives for a lucky finder to explore. Or are they? In fact, with the rise of social networks and microblogging, sharing your life has become something of a trend.

Now writing a diary seems like a time intensive project that takes a lot of discipline. But it doesn’t have to be. No one expects you to write a novel about each day of your life. Most times a picture and a few words are all it takes to make a day memorable forever. In this article I will share 5 tools to conveniently document your life online in a photo blog style.

ShutterCal

ShutterCal is a photo calendar. Using the free plan you can upload a picture for each day of the month and connect with your friends on the site. Each photo can receive a caption, which can be used like a microblogging diary.

Clicking on an image will load the respective calendar day, showing the picture and its caption. Through this page you can edit the photo, share it, email it, or click to see the previous or next day and thus browse your online photo diary.

DailyBooth

DailyBooth follows the same principle as ShutterCal, except that there is no calendar and in addition to uploading photos you can also take webcam shots. The latter has a cool ’3-2-1′ button, which gives you enough time to jump into the picture of your webcam in case you want to give it a unique view. As on ShutterCal, you can perform basic edits and browse the pictures like a photo blog.

DailyBooth integrates a lot of community features. Not only can you connect with friends, you can also send photo comments and all your activity, such as your booth (photos), comments, likes, follows, or material shared with you is accessible through your DailyBooth homepage.

Plurk

What I like about the Twitter clone Plurk is that your updates (aka plurks) are organized horizontally, including time stamps at the bottom. This setup allows you to scroll through your timeline and it’s great if you want to go back and see what you were thinking, feeling, or experiencing at some point in your life. Karma is another great feature because it encourages you to plurk on a regular basis.

Now, Plurk also makes it very easy to add pictures to your updates. You can either upload a photo from your computer or take a webcam picutre. That’s a great tool to get a shot of yourself each and every day. Naturally, you can also add a comment, as long as it stays within the limit of 140 characters including the image URL.

If you care to find out more about Plurk, check out these articles:

280daily

Technically, 280daily is a microblogging diary. However, as of recently it also supports photo uploads. This makes it a prime candidate for a photo and text diary combination since it allows about twice the characters compared to competitive services, yet not too many to become tempting for novel writing.

loggel

Do you feel limited by all the restrictions of the other services? If you’re craving to write more than the usual character limit and add audio, video and geotags on top of pictures, you should check out loggel. It comes loaded with features and gives you all the freedom you need to prepare a full-fledged life log.

You can choose between the classic timeline / calendar view or the geoview, which shows you when each entry was made. The latter is perfect for a travel journal.

Interested in old-fashioned style journaling without the paper waste? Check out Saikat’s article on 5 Quick & Simple Ways To Write Your Life Logs With These Minimalist Online Journals.

Did you ever keep a record of your life or wanted to and what was your motivation?

Image credit : mart

RedNotebook Rocks As A Full-Featured Private Journal Tool

Jessica Cam Wong — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:31:43 +0000

It seems like everyone owns a blog or microblog, with the advent of Twitter and increasingly simple blogging platforms like Tumblr and Posterous. And why not? You can showcase your talents in writing, spread the word on a cause you care about, and document your whereabouts. But when you simply want a place with no distracting comments to type your thoughts in, and don’t want to store them on someone else’s server, desktop journaling software might be a solution.

There are many note-taking software that would probably suffice for journaling, including Zim, QuotePad, Tomboy Notes, CintaNotes, etc. FOSS RedNotebook is, however, geared exactly for journaling and is available as a portable application so you can easily try it on Windows and Linux (you can try building it on OS X with the links on the Downloads page). Here are some of RedNotebook’s best features.

WYSIWYG Editor

RedNotebook is a Wiki-style journal, which allows you to easily format text, as well as include links, embed images, attach files, etc, by using a simplified markup language (in a way, like HTML). RedNotebook has the feel of a WYSIWYG text editor as you’ll have buttons to insert media (pictures on your hard drive or direct image URLs) and links, as well as attach files and format the text (e.g. make bold, underlined, etc) easily even if you don’t know all the different syntax.

You also have one-click previewing of your styled entry, which would equal Save on Wiki-style websites.

Even if you’re not familiar with wikis at all, you’ll be guided with instructions from the default template upon loading the program for the first time. Templates can be useful if you’re planning on adding similar entries (e.g. notes or journal entries) on a regular basis so you don’t have to style the text every time.

Calendar Feature

Each entry can be added to a category and/or tagged and will be loaded every time you click on a date in the calendar on the left pane. There’s a lot of potential uses for an application that can link to calendar dates; in fact, Ryan discussed using iDailyDiary, a similar journaling tool that also features a calendar, to create to-do lists that you can see upon clicking a date in that built-in calendar. If you use Remember The Milk, you’ll notice that even the weekly planner sheet the site offers you to print does not list the tasks in a calendar view, so this kind of calendar feature can prove more useful for the visual learner.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Another thing worth mentioning would be the fact that you can use keyboard shortcuts to quicken your way around RedNotebook. Some of the less obvious ones (the more obvious ones being the universal Ctrl + F to find a keyword, and Ctrl + N to add a new category) would be Ctrl + P to toggle preview mode, Ctrl + PageDown or Up to see the entry from a day back or forward in the calendar, Ctrl + L to insert links and Ctrl + T to add tags. You can see these on the menus and on the program’s Help section.

Exporting data

Your entries, which you can see all listed by typing a space (” “) in the search box, are saved on regular intervals, and they’ll also be saved when you quit the program, but if you ever wish to try another journaling platform (e.g. blogging), you can export your entries in plain text, HTML, PDF or LaTeX formats. You can also backup your entries in TXT format in a zip file.

If you’re looking to password-protect your entries, however, you’ll have to use something like TrueCrypt, or even take each of the entries (each stored as a TXT file) and zip them up yourself in a password-protected file with 7-zip.

These are the major features that make it a keeper (at least, for me), but one downside of using this tool would be that there’s no direct and easy way to media other than pictures, so YouTube videos are out. Also, I don’t know what was up with the grey interface that you see here (I got the same for both the install and the portable versions), as the screenshots of the program from the official website (and other reviews from Lifehacker and GHacks) look really great. Overall, this would a great tool if you want to find an alternative to blogging.

Do you prefer blogging or keeping a private journal? If you do the latter, what method do you use?

5 Quick & Simple Ways To Write Your Life Logs With These Minimalist Online Journals

Saikat Basu — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:31:44 +0000

In the digital world, the difference between a journal, a diary, and a blog is fuzzy. A blog is meant to be shared with those around you. An online or offline journal is more personal. You can of course, remove the padlock and share it with the world but I guess most would like to keep it closer to the chest. My two penny opinion says that the difference mainly boils down to the degree of laziness. A blog needs more upkeep; an online personal journal can be used to record random and disjointed thoughts. But let’s look at it this way, the web gives us so many ways to connect with others and also with ourselves.

Writing a journal is like having a conversation with one’s own self. Treat a journal like a ‘digital wall’ to vent your feelings on or just use it as a ‘digital cupboard’ to store memories. In both cases, a journal is a priceless companion. Here are seven free online journals for your thoughts.

OhLife

OhLife makes journal keeping dead easy by not asking you to come to their site every day. It simply sends you an email every night at 8pm asking you about your day. From the comfort of your inbox, you can type in your thoughts and send it forth like a regular email. That’s it! The easy-to-use and easy-to-keep philosophy tries to promote the habit of journal writing by dressing it up as an email activity.

You can choose to go to the site and read all your past entries when you feel like it. The posts get listed in chronological order and when it’s time for nostalgia, you can read them out to yourself.

I really like the minimalism of this free online journal and the ease with which I can keep up the journaling habit by not forcing myself to visit one more site at the end of a tiring day.

Memiary

Memiary will make you believe that if you have had five interesting experiences the whole day, it has been a day worth recording for keeps. Memiary calls itself the weightless pocket diary. It is really that as all you have to is sign up and put down five thoughts for each day. You can even do it on the go if you have an iPhone. The five points a day really add up and you can keep them organized with tags (just add a #before any word and it turns into a tag).

It takes just about ten seconds to jot down five thoughts and the tag organization should really help when you add up all the memories. (See Directory mention)

MotoDiary

MotoDiary is another simple journaling tool without any frills. It uses some HTML5 features for storage so it’s still not compatible with Firefox. It runs on Chrome, Safari, and IE. As you can see from the screenshot above, the interface is only about your words. MotoDiary is a highly secure application. The FAQ says that the encrypted key is stored locally and not sent to the server. The app auto-saves entries to the hard disk and uploads it to the server when online.

MotoDiary displays the potential of HTML5 in a utilitarian interface. (See Directory mention)

TweetPrivate

Some people consider Twitter to be the closest thing to an instant free online journal. Why not? Twitter has become the medium for channeling all your rants and raves. TweetPrivate takes your Twitter habit and turns it inside out. Log in with your Twitter account, log your thoughts in 140 characters or less, but instead of tweeting it out, store it here and keep it private. These tweets can include pictures too. Later, you might choose to release these tweets and post them to Twitter’s public stream. By using TweetPrivate as your personal diary, you can archive your tweets and search them by date.

TweetPrivate is a cool application if you have fallen prey to Twitter (or SMS) and evolved into using only 140 characters or less.

Penzu

Penzu comes with a few decorative features like an interface which resembles a lined notebook. The free account is limited but it serves its purpose adequately if you are not too into customization and tools. The free account gives you basic encryption with a password, photo uploads, plus sharing options with email and link. You can set up a notification to remind you to write every day.

The Penzu Pro account with all its features is appealing, but the free account is a quick fire journal tool that keeps things simple. You might grow to like the notebook style pages (see Directory mention).

If you are looking for customization and editing options, then you will be disappointed with these apps. For that I will always recommend Live Journal. But I believe when it comes to journaling or keeping an online diary, it’s best to start simple, keep it about the words and move on. For the making of a habit, these five online journal apps serve as a minimalist starting point. Your thoughts?

Image: Shutterstock

From Diary Writing to PDF Forms: 5 Awesome Free iPad Apps You Should Get

Bakari Chavanu — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:30:06 +0000

With hundreds of thousands of apps in Apple App Store, it can a little difficult to find free awesome applications that both work as described and are not laden with advertising.

Over the last week or so, I’ve downloaded a handful of practical apps fully optimized for the iPad. This is not a definitive list by a long shot, but if you’re an iPad owner, you will no doubt want to add one or more of these free iPad apps to your collection.

My Secret Diary

There’s no shortage of word processing applications for iPad, and rightly so. The size and orientation of the device invites users to type and write on it almost as if they were writing on a notebook pad. If you would like to maintain a diary or journal on your iPad, My Secret Diary [iTunes Store link] is very well designed app with some great features for keeping your private thoughts.

Just as with a traditional paper diary, a date is automatically stamped on each entry, but you also have the option of changing it with the built-in calendar. The above left side of the journal contains a nice set of menu features, enabling you to add yellow sticky notes, smiley stickers, photos and various types of bookmark icons.

If you like listening to music while you write, you can even access your iPad’s iTunes library right from within the application.

Finally, My Secret Diary includes a three-digital lock code for keeping your personal thoughts private, but unfortunately this feature doesn’t work in the version I downloaded. I’m sure it will be fixed in the next update.

LifeForms

One of the best reasons for owning an iPad is that it enables you to do paperless reading and writing. There are several apps for reading PDFs and other types of documents on the device, but an app called LifeForms [iTunes Store link] is one of the few which allows you to fill in digital forms on the iPad.

That’s right, you can import PDF forms into the application and use the text, date, signature, and notes features to fill in the text fields. It works like layers in Photoshop, which means you set data and then move the layered text onto the appropriate space on the form. There’s also a feature that enables you to hand write your signature, save it, and add it to forms.

When you’re finished filling out the form, you can export it via email, iTunes, or print it directly on a supported wireless printer.

Terra

If you’re a dedicated iPad user, you probably find the default Safari browser limited in some areas. There are some really great alternative browsers in the App Store, but the best free one of the bunch seems to be one called, Terra [iTunes Store link].

I’ve used this browser for about a week, and I have found it to be a clean and feature rich application that includes full-screen browsing, unlimited tabs, passcode protection for securing browsing activity, and the ability to save images from a web page, as well as save and archive pages for offline reading.

Because many of these features are missing from Safari, you might very well put Terra in the home dock or the home page of your iPad for regular use.

Windowshop

If you’re an avid Amazon customer, you might want to check out its new application for the iPad called Windowshop [iTunes Store link]. In Windowshop, you can now shop for both paper and Kindle books, as well as other products, in one application, instead of the two in the previous versions.

There are so many categories of merchandise in this online store””including books, electronics, movies and TV””that you can only view and read it in landscape mode.

All the other traditional features””wish lists, shopping cart, product details””are included in this latest version as well.

Mad Math Lite

If you’re an iPad user and you have kids, you absolutely know you need to keep a folder of games and educational apps as part of your collection.

I downloaded Mad Math Lite [iTunes Store link] for my son, and he has found it to be an easy to use flash card application for reviewing math problems.

Mad Math can be set up for various types of equations, plus it includes a timer and report card for goal settings.

The large colorful, interactive buttons, and font styles make it very easy for kids to read and use.

Your Suggested Free Apps?

Though the apps describe above are free, they won’t be collecting digital dust in my iPad. I’m also sure you have a handful of freebies that you recommend; so let us know about them. And if you’re looking for more recommendations, check my first list of 10 free iPad apps posted back in April.

4 Alternative Uses For Your Gmail Inbox

Daniel Pataki — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:10:02 +0000

Gmail = email right? Well not any more. With some of these alternative uses, you can use your inbox for a ton of other things, from writing a diary to keeping a fitness plan.

You can also apply these methods to Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other mail client with some similar features. Let’s jump right in!

Writing a diary

Gmail is almost built for this function in a sense. It is private, it can store as many entries as you want, you can categorize using labels, everything is there to make this a great diary application.

Each day, start a new email draft in the morning and either write everything that happened to you that day when you get home in the evening, or add to it as the day goes by. When you’ve written all there is to say, you can save the email, or better yet, send it to yourself.

The great thing about this method is that it allows you to amend any comments, or your friends to comment on an entry too. Just reply to an entry and send it to yourself again to add some additional thoughts, or send the whole message to a friend to get his/her comments. This way all the comments will stay in one thread, so you will have a very organized diary indeed.

Plus, you get all the categorization and search features Google offers you. You can use labels to add your emotional state (happy, sad, etc.) or you can categorize as usual, highlighting the main events of the day.

Keeping your diet

You can also use the power of Gmail to manage your diet and take a look at how many calories you consume daily. This is helpful because you can dedicate a whole inbox to this subject and you can keep track of your progress on a daily (or even more frequent) basis.

I recommend either adding a new message for each meal you ate, or adding one each day. I would write what I ate, ingredients, how it made me feel, was it necessary, and all the additional info you need in the message body, and write the calorie count in the subject. This would give me at a glance info about my consumption if I take a look at the inbox.

You can use labels to flag all the days where your consumption was good, and to highlight the ones where it was not so great. You can also create labels for the amount you consume. Create one for 500-700, 700-1000, 1000-1400, 1400-2000, etc. You can then easily switch to view all the days where you were in these specific regions.

Book & Movie Organizer

Gmail can also help you organize your Books and Movies, or indeed any other items you have a collection of. If we take Books as an example, you can create a new email for each book you have. Type the book title, author and ISBN in the subject, this will help you sort and search very easily later on.

You can write a short synopsis of the book, along with any other info, like publisher and so on in the body, plus you can include an image from Amazon to accompany it. Just we did with the diary you can write down your opinion, your review and so on as replies to that email. You can also send the email off to your friends to get their opinion on the book.

You can create emails for books you would like to read, which will come in handy when you’re shopping (you already have a list of titles with ISBNs you would like), and when you want to decide which one to get (you can send them off to friends who have read them to get their take on the book).

Labels can be used well to mark the genre of each book, but you can also use them to indicate whether you liked a book or not. If you also enter books you would like to read later on, you should also assign a label to separate them from books you have already read.

Google’s search will give you a great way to sort through your collection, all you need to do is enter the title or the ISBN and you have it already. I for one read good books multiple times and I have approximately 30 Terry Pratchett books. Selecting which one to read (again) is no easy task, and this system helps me, and could help you too.

Note Taker & Task Manager

Nowadays when we have Google Notebook, Remember The Milk, Todoist, Zoho Writer or Adobe Buzzword we have quite a few note taking and management goodness apps at our fingertips, but I like to keep things simple and integrated, so I came up with a system to use Gmail for taking notes and managing tasks.

Basically there are two types of emails, a note or a task. Notes are assigned the label “note”, tasks are left without a label. I keep adding notes and I use other labels to categorize them (personal, work, website design, etc), the main thing is to separate needed and not needed notes. If a note becomes unimportant I just delete it, or archive it, depending on the contents. Make sure the subject is to the point and short, so you can sort through your notes in a jiffy.

Tasks are mainly managed using the Gmail Superstars system, which can be enabled in the settings under Google Labs. It replaces the usual Gmail stars with an assortment of different icons like a green tick, or a red exclamation mark. I use the normal star, the blue star, the exclamation mark and the tick to indicate the status of a task.

If I enter a task and it needs my further attention until I can start work I slap the yellow star onto it. If I am waiting for someone else’s input to get it going I apply the blue star. The exclamation mark is used when I need to work on a task and the tick is used to mark finished tasks.

This method enables me to have an inbox where I just keep notes and tasks. All the methods we talked about above like sending a task to someone to get their opinion and so on still apply, you can add more using threads, and of course you have the all powerful search available.

Conclusion

While Gmail is not a management system or a CMS, it can do a pretty good job of organizing anything really. It won’t beat some top notch systems, and is NOT a better note taker than Google Notebook, or other services, but if you just need simplicity and ease of access, these uses may be for you. let us know if you use your Gmail inbox for some weird stuff!

Keep A Personal Online Diary With Penzu

Daniel Pataki — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:25:38 +0000

Recently, Tina introduced us to Springnote, a great Wiki-like application for taking notes, sharing them and collaborating. However, many of us still like to keep our personal lives documented and there are very few places on the net which allow you to do this as you would in real life. Let me introduce Penzu, a great solution if you want to keep an online diary. Springnote is geared toward collaboration, but in theory it can be used to make notes for yourself. Penzu is the exact opposite, it is specifically tuned to individual needs, but some sharing is available.

The basics behind Penzu is that it aims to merge all the goodness of a real life diary, and all the usefulness an online format can offer. The first thing you’ll notice for example is that you are writing on “real paper”, a ruled, margined notepad, which resembles a real notebook, so you have the feel of writing in real life. At first I thought this would be a bit obtrusive, but I felt right at home after the first line and it looks quite cool too.

Writing with Penzu

Right now Penzu doesn’t offer all that much in customization and settings, but it’s on the way. In the settings section you will be able to change the font, the size and so on. It would be nice if you could even change paper type in the future, since the application’s main visual feature is this. I’m guessing it may be implemented soon.

The writing experience the application offers however is very rewarding, creating your first online diary page is just like doing it in real life. Of course you don’t have the freedom you would on a real piece of paper, but the ability to add images spices things up a bit. These images are inserted in thumbnail format on the margin and when you hover over them with the mouse you can see the large image and the caption. Again, this takes away from the freedom, but is a very unique approach and one that fits the format very nicely I think. It allows you to create highly organized pages.

Sharing is again implemented very well and goes very well with the notebook theme. Rather than inviting people to view your page or pages, you can send them the page via email. This means that the recipient gets a link to a page on Penzu’s site where they can view that page and that page only, without any connection to your other pages. I think this seems a bad move in today’s sharing web 2.0 world, but is a great solution for an application like Penzu. If you want to show someone a page in your diary you either show it personally or photocopy the page, you don’t send them your whole diary and tell them the page they should look at do you?

Managing your pages

You can manage all your pages by going to the ‘my entries’ tab. There are basic options available for renaming, selecting and deleting, but the main feature here is the search option. It is a ‘search as you type’ box, so as you type something your results will pop up automatically. This is a great way to search through all your pages, especially if you actively use Penzu, which means 365 pages a year if you follow strict “diary guidelines”.

These basic features suffice, the only thing I would add is tags and categories. This is a feature which helps you categorize and group pages, it would be nice to be able to list pages where your mood was sad, or happy, or neutral, where you talk about books, movies or your love life.

Should you use Penzu?

My overall impression of it was very good. The application is obviously at its early stages of development so I wouldn’t necessarily say that lack of features is a huge problem. For the target audience the already implemented features are 70% enough I would say. The only things I would need badly are tags, categories and some design change options. I am confident these will happen, since the framework is actually very good. There is an option to save a note, but they are saved about every 10 seconds seamlessly as you type. The search function is awesome too and the site design is just as it should be, a great job in all respects.

There are limitations however, as this application is not meant (and never will be) for people to share their stuff widely. If you need a personal diary application though you will find Penzu very helpful and easy to use, but if you need collaborative power and awesome arrays of advanced features you should look elsewhere. I have only seen a few other diary applications so if you know a different cool one please let us know and I’ll take a look at them.

“Daniel changes his signature lines all the time because although he has a blog about organization, Hack Your Day, he can be a bit all over the place at times. He also has a Blog management service called Blogtastique which helps newbie and pro bloggers in anything they need.”