Just a few days back, Evernote announced a new section on their site called ‘The Trunk’. Being a long time user of the tool, I was immediately interested in knowing what it was all about and hence decided to check it out. This article sums up what I’ve discovered about this new offering from the folks at Evernote.

What is Evernote Trunk?

Evernote Trunk is basically a neatly organized collection of apps and tools built by third-party developers using Evernote’s API. It’s like Apple’s App Store or like the collection of Facebook apps built using Facebook’s API.

There’s one unique thing about Evernote Trunk though. The product range showcased includes hardware stuff too. There are sections called ‘Hardware’ and ‘Gear’ that talk about physical tools cameras and printers that work with Evernote.

App Categories

Now, lets see what are the categories under which Evernote has organized all these apps and tools. There are almost 100 items, mind you. It’s a very comprehensive collection for Evernote enthusiasts.

Mobile

Evernote works on all kinds of cellphones. It has apps for iPhone, Android, iPad and other smartphones. Hence, there’s bound to be a section dedicated to mobile users in the trunk. It features all kinds of different mobile apps and add-ons.

You’ll find apps like iNews that can quickly send an item from your mobile RSS feed reader to Evernote, Seesmic to save items from Twitter and Facebook to Evernote, and many more.

Desktop & Web

The Desktop & Web section, as the name suggests, features various Evernote related desktop tools and web applications.

And there are some pretty interesting apps here too. Like Scandrop that can scan documents and transfer them directly to your Evernote account, Nitro PDF Reader for saving PDF documents to Evernote, and many such nifty tools.

Hardware

Now we come to Hardware. As I mentioned earlier, the Hardware section showcases some of the physical tools like printers, scanners etc that could make the job of importing notes directly into Evernote easier.

This section lists Evernote compatible hardware from major vendors like Canon, Fujitsu, Nokia and Sony. One very interesting tool in this category I came across lets you wirelessly send pictures from your digicam to Evernote. It’s known as Eye-Fi.

Gear

If you are big fan of Evernote then you’d love the Gear section. It features all kinds of Evernote branded accessories and tools you could make use of.

There’s the Evernote starter pack, Evernote essentials guide, stickers, all kinds of t-shirts, wallpapaer pack, premium notepad, a podcast to listen and much more.

Notebooks

Finally, we’ve got a section named Notebooks. It’s an interesting category to say the least. You’ll find some familiar names in this section, like Make magazine and Cool Hunting.

What Evernote has done is that it has partnered with some of these publications to create customized content for Evernote users. So, basically, you can import these notebooks to your account and get customized content delivered right inside your Evernote. And they include some really cool stuff. Like, the Make: Projects Home and Garden notebook adds a bunch of DIY projects to your account. On the other hand, the Cool Hunting Travel Notebook comes with a number of essential travel tips.

How to Get Them Into Your Evernote?

Right, so now that you are tempted to try out some of these cool apps in the Trunk, you’d be wondering how to access them. Well it’s pretty simple actually. If you are using the latest version of Evernote on Windows or Mac, you should be prompted to update and once you do, you will see a ‘Trunk’ on the toolbar from where you can get direct access to the all those applications.

For those who prefer to use Evernote on the web, well, just sign in to your account and you’ll see the Trunk link present already, right on top. Click on it and start trying the apps, especially from the ‘Notebooks’ section.

As you can see, this new suite of tools from Evernote has to offer augments an already great note taking solution. If you are an Evernote user, I’d love to hear what you have to say about it.

Step 1

Open up PowerPoint 7. Automatically you will have a new PowerPoint document with one slide. Remove all text boxes on the main slide. The click on the Insert Tap, then Picture and choose a nice background image. I downloaded a funky swirl background here.

Step 2

Insert the picture and position it. This will be our main background image.

Step 3

Now click again on the Insert Tap and choose Shapes. You will have a ton of options from the dropdown menu. I went ahead and chose a rounded rectangle from the menu.

Step 4

Draw the rounded rectangle onto the main slide. The default color is blue in this case. Let’s change that.

Step 5

Right click on the shape and choose Format Shape on the bottom of the pop up window. You will be presented with a new window called Format Shape. From there you can choose almost any style you’d like. I changed the background fill to gradient with some transparency, the line color and style, added a drop shadow and changed the size of the corner radius. If you have a look at the outline of the shape when selected, you will see a small yellow diamand shape. You can slide this shape towards the left or right, depending if you’d like to increase the corner radius or decrease it.

Step 6

We are still in the Format Shape window. Let’s have a closer look at the gradient option. You can play around with the Stops, add them or remove them, change the position and transparency and the color of the gradient stops.

Step 7

Here is a screenshot of the rounded corner box.

Step 8

I added another rounded shape. Just repeat the previous steps, change colors and size. When right-clicking on the shape, you can send it to the back or to the front in the drop down menu.

Step 9

Click on the left hand side where all your slides will appear and when you right-click on, you can choose to either delete or duplicate it, or add a totally new slide to your presentation.

Step 10

Now a neat feature of PowerPoint is that you can select the elements you created and when you right-click on them, you can choose Save as Picture from the dropdown. You can then place them again into your presentation or have them on file. In this case, just add more buttons. You can also add Actions to it. Click on the shape and go to the tap Insert. There choose Action. You’ll get a pop up windows with options which let’s you choose various actions.

Conclusion

This is it. It is a simple and fast template. Save it as a .potx (template file) and you’ll have it handy again for another presentation. Of course you’ll need to add some text, pictures, graphs etc.

Below you’ll find over 100 free and premium applications that will either fit right into your current workflow or revolutionize the way you get things done. Let’s take a look!

The Ultimate Collection of Productivity & Office Software for Mac

That means five different Web browsers with different sets of bookmarks. So if I save a site to my bookmarks at work, how do I remember it when I’m at home or working from my favorite coffee shop?

Thankfully. there are plenty of ways to sync bookmarks. Basically they store your URLs on their servers and sync them with your computer – or allow access via the Web. I prefer the tools that integrate smoothly with my Firefox browsers and keep bookmarks private.

• Xmarks: This is my preferred choice for the Firefox browser. It’s seamless, fast and easy. It also will save passwords if you like.
• Google Chrome Sync: This is  built into Chrome so you don’t have to download or install anything.
• Sync2It: This offers a toolbar and mobile access with your device/phone browser.
• Evernote: A lot of people love Evernote’s features for taking notes and clipping web pages. It can serve as a bookmark storage if you use someone else’s computer or one with community access. Note this isn’t as easy as using the previous tools.
• Gmail: Lifehacker explains how to create a bookmarklet that saves links to your Gmail account. It’s a hack and takes some work. But it may serve your needs.

If you don’t have anything to hide when you’re surfing and saving URLs, maybe a social bookmarking service is for you. There several that let you easily share and categorize the pages you think are worth saving. Plus these sites have privacy features that let you keep URLs hidden.

The beauty of social bookmarking sites is that they are great places to look for other sites you may be interested in seeing.

• Delicious.com: One of the earliest services that’s easy to use.
• Stumble Upon: Again, easy to use. Many bloggers and Internet marketers credit the service with increasing traffic.
• Google Reader: If you use this RSS reader, you also can create a bookmarklet that saves URLs and clips text to a central page. Privacy and keyword categorization are available.
• Bit.ly: Yes this primarly a URL shortener. But it does keep track of the URLs you shorten, which could end up being a handy bookmark storage system.

These services and tools also serve as backup for my bookmarks. If something goes wrong, I don’t lose the important addresses I need.

What bookmarking tools work well for you?

Step 1

Open up MS Word 2007 and click on the Office Button on the top left.

Step 2

In the pop up click New and choose Blank Document.

Step 3

Save the document by clicking the Save button on the top left (Ctrl + S) and name the document “letterhead”. In the drop down menu(Save as Type)  for document types, choose Word Template(*.dotx). Then save your template in a location of your choice.

Step 4

Now let’s add a Header to the document. Double click the top part of your document and you will see the Header section gets  opened. On the top right you’ll see a tap that says Design.  Set the Header from Top to 2cm. Then start adding your info, for example, your name and address, phone number, fax and email etc.

Step 5

While we are still in the Header, click on the tap that says Page Layout and set the left indent to 2cm. Make sure that you highlighted all your text.

Step 6

Now click on the tap Home and select the text. I only selected the name and set the font to Arial, 16pt and from the font color drop down, I picked red. You can easily change the size and color and font style via this tab.

Step 7

I added all the address, phone and web info on a new paragraph underneath the name. When I highlight the text with the cursor, a pop up window appears in Word 2007. In there you can change the font, color indent etc. This is a very handy tool. I selected white for the font color and  via the small “ab” with pen icon, I set the background color of the highlighted text to red.

Step 8

Just in case you want to change or double check the  paragraph setting, highlight the text and right click, then choose Paragraph from the popup window. This will give you the Paragraph windows and in there you can change things related to the paragraph.

Step 9

To leave the Header section, just double click on the middle section of your document.  Then repeat all the steps with the Footer section. Just double click on the bottom part of the document or  simply click on the Insert tap and select either the Header or Footer icon and select Edit Header/Footer on the bottom of the pop up. I added the address and contact information again, but this time I set the font color to red and the background color to light grey.

Step 10

Double click the middle of the document to close the footer and start adding your text. For example add date, address of the recipient, and your body text.

Conclusion

Here is a quick letterhead template with body text. Just print it out on your home desktop printer. Anytime you need a official looking document with your credential, just open up your template and add your body text and just in case you need to change your phone number or email address, you know now how to do that.

Do you fantasize about role-playing while you do your household chores?

Does your real world keep you away from your virtual world?

Now you can bring them closer together, thanks to the brilliant folks at EpicWin.

EpicWin puts the adventure back into your life by providing you with an iPhone app that rewards you for completing your household chores; from washing the car, sending birthday cards, doing the dishes or going to the gym.  Gain experience points for doing your menial tasks, and maybe even find some loot.  Develop your character and stats based on the chores you complete, and if you’re lucky, your character might even develop into a CEO of Pain – or a Mage of Paperwork Mountain!

“Doing the laundry is an epic feat of stamina…”

EpicWin isn’t the first to try and merge a to-do list manager with a role playing game (RPG), and it’s not quite available yet.  If the hype about EpicWin has got you wondering why you aren’t getting experience points for doing your daily chores, you can check out Chore Wars or Booyah Society and then decide if EpicWin is truly an epic win once it finally arrives on an iPhone near you.

That may be simplifying things a little, but it’s not too far fetched.

As for me, I fall somewhere in between the extremes – and I’m betting I’m not alone. Sometimes we need some tools to help us manage all our social networks. I understand that using some tools is considered obnoxious behavior by some people. But it’s a free Internet. You make your choices and live with them.

So if you think you can do this responsibly, here are seven social media management software tools to automate your updating and following:

SocialOomph

This website offers many free and premium services to help you manage your Twitter account. And by manage, I mean you can  schedule tweets, send automatic messages to those who follow you and follow all your followers automatically (Which I’m sure can cause a rip in the space-time continuum) for free. The full list of features will take a couple minutes to read.

Sending canned direct messages to welcome new followers is a bit controversial. To many, it’s Spam. Plain and simple. Others don’t mind and appreciate the contact. Those who do employ it swear by it. They say it helps them achieve high numbers of followers. The same goes for automatically following those who follow you.

My favorite though is the e-mail that rounds up all the tweets that manage any of my Twitter handles. Yes, it’s an exercise in ego gratification. I don’t care. I like it.

Hootsuite

Like SocialOomph, Hootsuite will automate your tweets. But it’s most useful feature is how it juggles multiple social media accounts. Not only can you create a dashboard that gives lets you monitor your Twitter accounts, but you can add your Facebook (this includes Facebook pages), LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress blog, MySpace and FourSquare accounts. This is so integrated that you can write one update that goes to any and all of those social media timelines/pages.

I don’t want to do that, but I do use it to monitor and update accounts one at a time. It saves me time to round up all my social media activity onto one page.

TwitterFeed

One of the best ways to get people to read your blog is to send updates to your social networks when you write a new entry. But some people are lucky to get the blog post written. Then they have to write a tweet? Never fear. TwitterFeed comes to the rescue by monitoring your RSS feed and updating your Twitter and Facebook accounts when you update your blog. It’s not pretty but it gets the job done.

I do use this to update @CarlNataleRSS with all the feeds from various blogs I update. Basically, I made this account for my mother who doesn’t know about RSS but wants to keep track of what I write. So it doesn’t hurt my feelings that the account only has three followers.

Ping.fm

This is the granddaddy of updating every social media account in the world. One stop for all your accounts. And it will accept your SMS texts and e-mails for updating.

To be honest, I’m not that interesting that I would need this.

TweetBeep

TweetBeep rather modestly only sends you an e-mail when you – or keywords of your choosing – are mentioned on Twitter. So it’s like Google alerts. It’s great for reputation monitoring, keeping track of what people say about your competition and following specific interests.

Gist

Social networks are like potato chips. You can’t have just one. So if you want to keep track of what your friends and contacts are doing on their multiple networks (assuming they don’t have Ping.fm accounts), Gist will let you know about their latest tweet, post or like.

I consider it a light-weight contact resource manager. Since it also connects to my e-mail accounts, it keeps track of when I communicate with them. I know there are more powerful options out there, but this may be just enough for me.

RSS

OK, this isn’t a specific tool but a technology. One of Twitter’s nicer tendencies is to create RSS feeds for updates. If your RSS reader is how you keep track of the Internet, then add Twitter feeds. Not only can you monitor what any specific tweep posts, but you can have a feed of search results. Again, you can track any keyword.

This works very well for me in Google Reader. I can organize different feeds into categories. This all adds up to a very powerful dashboard. The big drawback is that the updates are delayed. The RSS feeds seem to update on a schedule so it doesn’t give real-time monitoring. Which is fine for me. Your mileage may vary.

For what it’s worth, I don’t see the value of using any of these tools to duplicate messages. Why would someone follow me on Twitter and Facebook if they get the same messages twice? I try to use the networks for specific purposes. But most of the value I get from these tools is in monitoring. There are some very powerful ways to sift through all of those streams.

How do you automate your social media management?

This tool, which I came across on TechCrunch, looks to be a promising one. Based on Skype’s concept, it lets Android users save a significant amount on all kinds of calls. And for international Android-to-Android calls – though some local call charges might be applicable – the international call rates won’t be charged.

More than 50 countries are included…and you don’t need Wi-Fi to make the calls. You could do it using the same cellular network.

So, if you are an Android phone user, tell us – would you ditch the popular Skype app for Rebtel?

Ubiquitous Capture

While I don’t necessarily have to carry my iPad with me wherever I go, I generally have my iPhone with me.  With the synchronizing of common apps between the two devices, I no longer have to fiddle for a pad and pen – no matter how elegant they may be.  Before, I’d have to bring around my Hipster PDA (which, to be fair, I still have in my car just in case my 1st generation iPhone’s battery dies on me – and yes, I am going to upgrade) and then transfer what I captured there to my productivity program of choice.  No longer.  Now, I simply use a program like Note2Self if something comes to me quickly or go directly into my productivity app of choice and record it there.  By the time I get home I’ve either emailed the note to my self or have synced the task with my iPad (and MacBook Pro).  I’m never at a loss.  There’s nothing more ubiquitous than that.

The Right Tools

With my new Dodocase, my iPad is disguised as Moleskine.  I can carry it around with me and search for things quickly and easily.  I can move much faster and make the two-minute rule achievable on a consistent basis.

Besides a case that is functional, you’ll need to have software that is just as functional – likely more so.  Here’s what I’m currently using:

• OmniFocus: Tried ‘em all…yet I keep coming back to OmniFocus.  It appears to be the heavyweight champion of productivity apps.  It’s the syncing that does it for me – and I’m beta-testing their web server now as well…which has worked like a charm. I’ve got a lot on the go and don’t mind that you have to wrap your head around OmniFocus before you can really make it what you need it to be.  There are other great apps out there in the native application realm (Things, The Hit List), the web app realm (Producteev2, Remember The Milk, Nozbe) and others that either work in tandem or do one thing really well (Evernote is one I sue for all the “other stuff”) but OmniFocus just keeps hooking me back in.  It’s that good.
• Note2Self: This is great for those times that you need to quickly get something out of your head and don’t want to scramble to do so.  Just record your voice memo and you can email it directly to yourself (or to an assistant, someone you delegate to, etc.) straight away.  You can preset email addresses in the app and if you’re not in 3G range or just feel it can wait, you can save the note.  Simple and useful…that’s why I like it. (And it’s available for Blackberry and Windows Mobile as well.)

The transition hasn’t been completely smooth – setting up OmniFocus again to work just as I need it to has taken some time.  There’s plenty of ways to do it, and having a listen to the MacPowerUser podcast comparing OmniFocus to Things definitely helped.  So even though it took some time, it was time well spent.  Just as the money on my iPad was.

Not that I’m giving up paper completely.  I still use my trusty actual Moleskine for journalling.  For now.

I prefer using cloud-based, or I should say online time tracking software. This list talks about some nice web based time tracking software applications which you might find useful. Check them out and offer any of your own recommendations below.

1. SlimTimer

SlimTimer is a brilliant online time tracking solution that lets you track time for different tasks, and also share them with coworkers. And it’s free to use.

2. Toggl

Toggl has a great interface, nice reporting features and also has desktop versions for all the major operating systems. It has both free and paid versions, but the free version should suffice for most of us.

3. RescueTime

RescueTime is a popular time tracking and productivity software for individuals and business owners, and we’ve discussed it here before. If you are only interested in a web based solution then the RescueTime add-ons for Firefox and Chrome should get the job done.

4. MakeSomeTime

MakeSomeTime is a cool time-tracking and invoicing tool for freelancers, and anyone who juggles more than one project at a time. The interface is simple and easy to comprehend. Check out Lifehacker’s detailed review on the tool.

5. Colorhat

Last but not the least, Colorhat is a simple online time tracking tool that helps you quickly analyze the time spent during the day through a graphical interface.