Here are a couple of things that caught my eye in recent days:
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Dropbox: a file storage/sharing system with clients for Windows, Mac and Linux (not to mention a really cool web interface) which “just works”. You know, not unlike the way the iDisk was supposed to work on a Mac, but never really did?
It uses Amazon’s S3 service for storage (but this is just a fun geek factoid, you don’t need to worry about that) and it allows for 2GB of free storage –more if you become a paying customer.
I’ve been using it to share stuff between a couple of Mac and another Linux machine and you know what I said about it “just working”? Well, it’s true; -
Evernote: a huge “memory outside my head” system. You feed it web-clips, links, documents, images, audio-clips, etc, etc and it stores, indexes and remembers everything for you.
Now I’m not using it’s full power because I’ve only used it via two interfaces: the web interface and the mobile one.
Actually that’s not entirely true, the one thing that amazed me the most was using the email interface. I took some pictures of a book and a few business cards with my cell-phone and then sent them (via MMS –low, low rez) to my Evernote mailbox and after a little time voilá: all of the pictures indexed and –get this– OCRd!
The OCR works incredibly well, even on crummy cell-phone pictures. When I later searched for some of the words that I knew were on the business cards the card pictures popped up in the results and if I selected them they came up with the words I searched for hi-lighted in it!
So far (it’s only been a couple of days), I’m extremely pleased with it.