Skitch brings markup tools to Evernote PDFs

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Many business users rely heavily on Evernote for managing documents and other information, but the service's Achilles' heel has long been its lack of markup capabilities.

That's where Skitch comes in. Now owned by Evernote, this desktop/mobile app provides a simple but effective set of tools for annotating documents, the idea being to get your point across visually when communicating remotely.

And it just got a much-needed feature boost: Skitch for iOS (and Mac) now supports PDF annotation.

That may not sound like a big deal, but for anyone who uses Evernote to store and especially share PDFs, it's welcome news indeed. Now you can mark up PDFs with text, arrows, shapes and highlighter tools, then sync them back to your account and/or share them with co-workers.

The new Skitch 2.5 also adds something called Summary, which assembles all added mark-ups into a single view. Evernote describes it thusly:

When you share an annotated multi-page PDF, Skitch lets you add a new first page to that document. This page is made up of previews of each piece of feedback contained in the PDF. Click on one and you’re taken to the annotation. This summary makes it a snap for your recipient to scan over all of your feedback, understand it, and take action without needing to go beyond the first page.

Other additions to Skitch 2.5 include a stamps tool used to add color-coded, at-a-glance feedback (approve, disapprove, question, etc.) to specific areas, and tool tips to help you learn the new features.

Although Stamps is available to all Skitch users, the PDF and Summary functions require an Evernote Premium account (though you can try them free for 30 days even if you're not a paying Evernote customer).

There are, of course, lots of PDF apps that offer markup tools, and a few that can even sync with Evernote. But if you're looking to keep everything in the Evernote ecosystem, as it were, now you can.

For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow.
More by Rick Broida

View the original article here

Review: Google Mail Lite brings Gmail to your desktop about Pokki

Gmail client Google Mail Lite takes email out of your browser and brings it with a twist to your desktop. This Pokki-based app is incredibly easy.

Gmail lites clear interface makes supports Gmail user friendly desktop, provided all Google mail features that you need at the moment.

The best part of having Gmail on your desktop is the real time notifications; These are in Pop-Up banners and small specialist badges, and to ensure that no e-Mail is going unnoticed. Google Mail Lite is located in the Windows system tray and click, you have access to all emails, including labels, played and sent emails. Several Gmail actions such as assigning labels, actor and unstarring, archiving, and, of course, read and write emails can be performed easily.

Google Mail Lite is almost perfect, but it is missing some important features: you can not attach files; There is no email spell checker; You cannot select which email address to send if you have several, and (the most painful) the search function does not work. However, Google Mail Lite is an excellent client for most of the features of Gmail and supports multiple users really sealed the deal.

Note: The download button on the product information page will download the software on your system.

Yaara is a foodie and horse lover biologist who enjoys as a geek as a full-time job.
More products from Yaara Lancet

View the original article here

Review: Wunderlist for Pokki brings the to-do list (not the bloat) to your PC

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Renowned to-do list application Wunderlist is available for multiple platforms, including both Web and mobile. While you can get Wunderlist for Windows, the installation file alone is over 20MB, and this is before you even begin the installation. With Wunderlist for Pokki, there is no installation—once you have app platform (and excellent Windows 8 launcher) Pokki installed, you can start using Wunderlist less than a minute after deciding you want to.

Wunderlist fans will recognize the elegant simplicity of the Pokki edition.

If you're a Wunderlist user, the Pokki version of the app will look very familiar, with every feature you've come to expect from other versions of Wunderlist. After logging into your account, you can start adding scheduled tasks and to-do items, with or without a date, placing them in your own custom lists. Wunderlist for Pokki comes with several useful keyboard shortcuts for easy browsing which you can easily learn by pressing "H." In fact, not only can you access your slick to-do list with one mouse click, you can easily access most of its features without having to click that mouse again.

As with other Pokki apps, Wunderlist comes with tray badge notifications for overdue tasks, which will keep reminding you of the things you haven't done. With its customizable backgrounds, super-easy browsing and automatic mobile syncing, Wunderlist will make you want to get things done.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
More by Yaara Lancet

View the original article here

Data Explorer brings Big Data connectivity to Excel 2013

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Today we continue our series of BI related posts highlighting a recent announcement for a new add-in for Excel.

On February 27, we announced an early look at a future addition to our self-service line-up with Microsoft Data Explorer Preview for Excel.  Data Explorer enhances the self-service BI experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery and access to a broad range of public and enterprise data sources, enabling richer insights from data that has traditionally been difficult for users to get to. If you haven't seen it, check out the video below to see how Data Explorer enhances the BI experience.  

With Data Explorer, users can now quickly and easily import data from a variety of sources, including Web, Excel, Text, Database and Azure. Access to non-traditional sources such as Active Directory, Facebook and big data solutions like Hadoop are now within the reach of any user.

Connecting directly to data from the web is easy and intuitive. Filtering and transforming your data can be done in just a few clicks and importing your final data into Excel is straightforward.  Given this is a preview, these features may appear differently in the future versions.

To learn more about how you can put these new capabilities to work for you, follow the links below.

Download the Add-in

Find out more

--Carlos Otero 

View the original article here

Word brings a book to life (video)

Colleen Padilla and Audrey McClelland, blogger, a book leave (http://www.digitalmomhandbook.com/). Colleen in Philadelphia and Audrey in Rhode Island-and 200 interviews and 6 children manage between ihnen--how did she get the work? They used contained all the major digital communication tools to the there - and Word. Tracking changes and comments enabled it, with each other and with their editors and agents work.

If you think about putting together a book or any other kind of long document, here are some things that can help are:

Congratulations on the book, ladies!

--Jessica reading

View the original article here

Do not panic! But brings a sense of urgency to work

An employee, Steven Thomas (no relation, honest), recently his opinion assigned to here after taking a workshop at Microsoft keep projects to promote. I wanted to with his permission that pass "good parts" of the workshop on some ideas in John Kotter to expand book A sense of urgency. Take it way, Steven:

To bring the outside inside: too much leads internal focus to stagnation and complacency to the things happen, you sometimes need external point of view.

Act with urgency every day: Urgency must not mean scurrying in panic - it can also mean rationalization, what you do and respect people's time, for people on results and success can focus.

· Appeal to emotions, not only logic - use stories, to persuade them to justify data. Think of a good brown bag talk – what is engaged with a project?

· Get the stories from customers, the business as usual challenge - front line people have access to a gold mine. Customer feedback and community sites are all part of our work, and they all have stories to tell.

· Call data from competitive reviews and industry metrics that show our weaknesses-of which prevent you, but not make them feel, condemned to failure. A look at our website page metrics and trends is benign but there are still by our data on our competitor data compare to have more value.

-Identify and remove non-productive activities - to those meetings where you regularly not action points, and they would like to get your calendar to stop.

· Provide short-term objectives - what can I do next week?

· Is someone else created to optimize the resources delegate - better, in order to achieve this?

· Ask for short-term measures of employees - what you can do next week? Make sure that your sessions are non-productive for others not.

Thanks to Steven. Do you have a great tactic to make the day productive? Comment removed.

--Doug Thomas

View the original article here

What Creative Suite 5.5 brings to game developers

Building games for mobile devices with various operating systems is one of the biggest challenges for developers. Creative Suite 5.5 makes it easier and allows you to deploy games that run across Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and iOS. You can also test your game with different resolutions and DPIs using device profiles in Flash Builder. In Flash Pro, you can rescale content to any screen-size just by ticking one checkbox and so on…

As a game developer CS5.5 brings to you are not only new export options, but also tooling that is tied to mobile publishing and helps you to do things faster.

Let’s have a look at what CS5.5 brings you and how it makes your life easier.

Deploy to web, desktop and mobile
Mobile porting has never been easier. Choose among iOS, Android and BlackBerry Tablet OS or all of them.

Export as Bitmap for better performance
Next to Cache as Bitmap is an option to convert your vector artwork directly to bitmap format right in Flash CS5.5 IDE during export. The good thing is, that you still work with the artwork as with vector, but once you export the SWF, it’s converted to bitmap. Tweening bitmaps is less CPU demanding than vectors and your app will perform better. Unlike Cache as Bitmap, you can rotate and scale the artwork during runtime without having it re-cached – so that’s why Export as Bitmap might work better you. Cache as Bitmap is good choice, but only if you change positions – if you start rotating and scaling – it will re-cache every change. Although this can be solved with cacheAsBitmapMatrix on mobile platforms, Export as Bitmap is another very useful option to consider.

Sharing assets across FLA files
Once you create a new Flash project, you can share Library assets between different FLA files. This makes life easier, especially when you are porting your game to different screen-sizes and devices. While you link libraries together, you can change a symbol in one of the libraries and it will automatically update it in other FLA files.

In the image below I have edited the star in only one of the libraries and it’s been automatically updated in the second one.

Scale content with stage
While porting your game to different screen-sizes, this feature might come very handy. When changing the stage width and height, you can tick “Scale content with stage”, which will resize the content to fit the different stage size.

Copy/paste assets from Illustrator to Flash
I like this one, it makes my workflow faster. Although it’s a feature from CS5, it’s still good to be reminded of it. As you can see, shapes and gradients done in Illustrator are represented natively in Flash.

On-device USB debugging
Helps you to test and debug your app right on the real device. Access multitouch, accelerometer and other device specific features you are implementing in your app.

Device profiles
There are many device profiles ready for you. If there is a new device on the market, just add it by yourself or update the list.

There are many more features you’ll find useful and I hope you will enjoy building games with CS5.5.

Have a look at Lee Brimelow’s video tutorial showing new Flash CS5.5 features.

Check these links for further information about the tooling:
Flash Professional CS 5.5
Flash Builder 4.5

Visit Adobe Game Technology Center for tutorials.

Finally, look at this mobile and tablet game running on iPad, XOOM, iPhone, HTC and more built with Creative Suite 5.5 and AIR 2.6:

View the original article here

Valentine's day brings the love for access app

In the weeks before Valentine's day 2011 three access team members came together and created an access Web database that allowed users to their plans and/or needs for themselves and their loved ones on Valentine's day book. The team published the database in access services and promoted it in the Microsoft intranet. People flocked to the site add their ideas and then vote for their favorites. The ideas that received the most votes prices collected for their authors, and the whole event generated attention for access 2010!

Check out their video about the database on Channel 9 and download a copy of the database for yourself so you can see how it works!

--Chris downs

View the original article here