Saturday, February 07, 2009

Digital Inventory

iPhone Screen Capture
Picking up an iPhone has made me take stock of all the applications and sites I use to ourganize myself and keep in touch. At this point, I should be able to do most of the miscellaneous organizing and reading I do on a computer from my iPhone.

Calendar: Google Calendar - synched with iPhone calendar app via Nuevasync.
Mail: Gmail - iPhone mail connects.
Tasks: Remember the Milk + free iPhone client.
Work Notes: Combination of TiddlyWiki and Evernote. I started on Evernote, switched to Google Notebook, and recently switched back. They have an excellent iPhone client app.

RSS Reader: Google Reader. Has an iphone optimized site. Also use Gazette offline reader for iPhone, it synch's with Google Reader subscriptions.

Workout and Run Logging: Shapelink. Has a mobile optimized site. Nice mapping interface to Google maps as well.

Links: Delicious primarily, though I still have stuff on Google Bookmarks.

Books: Shelfari for tracking and rating, and Safari Books Online for technical reading.

Social:
Social Hub: Facebook - all my social content feeds hit Facebook eventually. Facebook has a fantastic iphone client. I prefer it to the web interface! If I didn't have to type on that tiny little keyboard with my big fat fingers, it would be the only interface I'd use.
Photos: Flickr (though see below)
Status Updates: Twitter + Tweetie iPhone client. Though I find Twitter a bit limiting, see Microblogging below.
Blogging: Blogger (obviously). Blogger's a little too clunky for iPhone.
Micro/Mobile blogging: Tumblr. I like Tumblr a lot. I think I may start doing small and minor technical blog posts on Tumblr in preference to Blogger. Blogger's still great for larger posts requiring more layout and formatting, but for a single picture and a little blurb, or a small status report, error message screenshot and technical solution, Tumblr is nice. Their iPhone interface is excellent.

The Photo Problem


Picasa 3 is my camera import tool and the first catalog they go into. They get sorted, picked over, and edited. The best ones, or the ones I need for blog posts get uploaded to Flickr using the Picasa2Flickr plugin.

I'm still trying to figure out the best process from there. Photos that tell a story end up here on the blog in a post. But other snapshots don't necessarily warrant a blog post (say from the Lantern Festival last night).

Facebook wants photos to be uploaded to their photo library. That's OK now I suppose as Picasa has both Facebook and Flickr buttons to make that easier.

So far I've been importing my Flickr photostream RSS feed into Facebook, but that get's slightly annoying, there's not much control over how they're displayed, and I'm getting duplicates from the feeds from the MyFlickr Facebook app. I think the solution is to turn off the wall posting of the flickr stream item. I can subscribe Tumblr to a specific RSS feed from Flickr, and subscribe Facebook to Tumblr.

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