A free screencast and whiteboard app for iPad

Came across this reasonably new iPad app: PageSend. It is free and does two important jobs very well.

1. It's a very nice screencast  app. It supports  writing/typing/drawing, provides choice of colors and line thickness and allows multi-page boards. The only downside is that it is not integrated with Dropbox -- the finished product can be emailed or viewed at pagesend.com


2. It's a great whiteboard app. You need to create pagesend.com account(s) then you and any other users you invite can use your iPads as a common whiteboard in real-time. Multiple users can write simultaneously. 

[Advanced] Fixing up a sluggish Win7 machine

Excellent instructions for a savvy techie on what to do to fix a sluggish Win7 machine:

2012: Fixing a sluggish PC link

Worthwhile additions to your Web browser

They go by many names: plugins, extensions, add-ons, bookmarklets. Whatever you want to call them, they are extra functions that you can add to your Web browser. The best browsers for adding stuff is Firefox and Chrome; the worst is Internet Explorer. But, even with Internet Explorer, there are ways. While you can certainly go crazy with these add-ons, be warned that they do take up extra resources. So, if you have an old machine and you like having a gazillion tabs open at the same time within your browser, you may want to severely limit your add-ons. Here are the ones I use on a daily basis:

• to make reading Web content easier: Evernote Clearly and Readability
• to capture screenshots (including automatically scrolling a long webpage): Pixlr Grabber
• to create a short URL for a webpage: bitly (if you are wondering why anyone needs this, leave a comment and I'll explain)
• to manage my passwords: LastPass

I also have an auto-syncing cross-browser bookmarks manager since I use a number of personal and work devices daily and want to have a consistent and organized set of bookmarks: Xmarks.


All the ones mentioned here have Firefox and Chrome versions. If you are using Internet Explorer and are looking for an excuse to switch, this post might be your ticket.

Distraction-free reading on the Web

This is a long-ish post because I have included examples to motivate and illustrate these tools. If you just want just the punchline, skip to the end.


Here's what a first page of a typical online news article looks like nowdays:



Here is each page with the story's content marked with a red rectangle:




What you do not see in these snapshots is that each webpage has at least one advertisement with motion in it, making each page even busier and more distracting when looking at it "live". If you would like a less distracting experience when you read content online, here is what you could have

OnLive -- a better Office on the iPad?

Onlive Desktop is a new app for handling Microsoft Office documents. It is fast, it is sleek, but there are two reasons to wait: getting any document into or out of Onlive Desktop is a pain in the neck, and it is not at all clear if Onlive will survive Microsoft's licensing challenge. For more info, check out OnLive's train wreck: Office on the iPad and First look: OnLive Desktop Plus.

 

OneNote on iPad?

There is no good news for OneNote devotees. Your choices are the newly-released OneNote app by Microsoft, Outline app by Aqrate Software, or Mobile Noter for iPad. Outline allows viewing of any OneNote files in Dropbox, but does not allow editing. Microsoft's app syncs to cloud storage via your LiveID, but you can only edit the typed text part of the note; any handwritten notes are not only not-editable, they are not even displayed -- they show up as "[ink]". MobileNoter is free only for 30 days; after that you need to pay $15/yr if you want sync functionality. MobileNoter does not allow you to edit existing OneNote notebooks, just view them. [3/11/2012 Correction, thanks to oblacksmith: MobileNoter does allow viewing and editing existing OneNote notebooks. I still don't think this app is worth using since there are a lot of complaints in the reviews.]

So, what do you do if you have copious handwritten notes and like OneNote? To be honest, I do not know. There are good iPad apps for handwritten notetaking, but they do not have versions for Windows or Mac. Evernote exists on all the devices, but its support for handwritten notes via Skitch is kludgy, at best.