web app

Farewell Google Reader…Hello Feedly!

I’ve been a loyal Google Reader user for many years now, but Google decided to shutter the service.  Anyone looking for an alternative has until the end of June to make it happen.    I tried a few alternatives and am most impressed with Feedly and highly recommend it.  They make it easy to migrate (1-click simplicity) and offer a richer experience that still feels familiar to a Google Reader user.

Feedly Screenshot

Not sold?  Here’s a list of what they’ve done in the last 100 days to support the Google Reader community.

Evernote: The first cloud app I’m “buying” into

I’ve been wondering for a while now which freemium cloud app would be the first one to nudge me from the free to premium version.  I’m pleased to say that Evernote has earned that honor.  Why?
Evernote Menu

The free version wasn’t crippled

In fact, far from it.  I got to see and play with every key Evernote feature in the free version of the client application.

They Offer a Free iPhone App that is Well Integrated with the Service

The iPhone app they have makes total sense, is lightweight, and makes the most common features easy to use.  The main screen prompts me with four different options to collect notes and four tabs across the bottom that give access to existing notes and options.

I Care About and Will Use their Premium Features

One of the greatest features in the application is the ability to do a text search of picture-notes.  Within a couple of minutes of capturing a photo in Evernote, I can do a search for text that was in the photo (and it comes back highlighted too).  That’s in the free version.  The premium service adds the same text searching in PDF files I attach to notes, as well as priority recognition of my images.

The free version caps the monthly upload bandwidth at 40MB, which I’ve seen as a very reasonable (even lofty) quota.  However, as I’ve used the iPhone app more and more, I’ve been running awfully low on available space.  The premium version bumps that over 12X to 500MB per month.

The Pricing Model Makes Sense

Not a whole lot to say here, it’s a reasonable $5/month for the service.  Tell you what though, it’s an easy decision to sign up for the annual service since it nets a generous 25% discount.  I debated trying the month-to-month for a while first…but that wasn’t necessary with that kind of an incentive available.

Where can Evernote Improve?

Things aren’t perfect yet.  It’s definitely a growing venture, which can be seen in the large improvements in each new release of the client software.   Things have been rocky at times, especially during synchronization, when trying to capture or recall notes.

All that said, I’m quite pleased so far.  Next, I should detail how I’m using the app, but that’ll  have to wait for a while 🙂

Tumblr Stopped Aggregating My Feeds

I’ve been using Tumblr to serve my content behind www.matthewcanderson.com for the last few months.  For the most part, it does what I want it to: acts as a central point for most of my online postings to be aggregated.  It’s not exactly what I want to have (which I’ll discuss further in another Dream posting) but it’s been good enough.

Old Content...

Correction-I was satisfied using some standard feature  functionality of their service, until about a month ago when they stopped monitoring my RSS feed.  Boo.  It looks like I’ve had a dead site since September 27th.

My hope was that it was going to be a temporary blip…but at this point I’m pretty confident that there’s a larger issue that’s not going to magically fix itself.

At this point, I’m debating jumping ship from Tumblr altogether.  I haven’t posted anything directly through their interface…not once.  It has truly been a repository for pulling everything into one spot (think Yahoo Pipes but more hidden).

For now, I’m going to sleep on it, hoping I’ll have an epiphany by tomorrow evening when I’ll have time to address the issue.