Amazing things that don’t cost much (or indeed anything):

Evernote (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Ask around the office, I live in Evernote. Along with Dropbox (see later) it’s how I organise my information. Evernote is a simple note-taking application. So far, so unspectacular. It supports rich-text, images and can group notes into ‘notebooks’. Ok, not life-changing. Everything you do syncs silently into the cloud. Install Evernote on another PC, Mac, Linux distro, iPad, iPhone or Android device and you’ll get the same collection of notes. None of those to hand? Log into Evernote’s web site and you can view, add and modify your notes using any recent web browser. A bit more mouthwatering?

There’s more. Evernote comes with a browser plug-in that allows you to capture a webpage in one click and turn it into a note. The tray app sits in the background and helps you quickly select text and add it in. Tagging allows you to organise notes and Evernote will even remember which web pages you ‘clipped’ and when. It understands text, images and media. You can happily combine them within one document.

Create notebooks and share them with others, even publicly via the website. Or, keep everything private. Pro users can place files inside and even get text recognition data for any uploaded graphics. All data can be exported or emailed to someone within a couple of clicks.

Evernote is priced in terms of transfer, not storage. You can get a 500MB per month Pro account or stick with the free account which gets you 40MB. This is a lot more than it sounds as you’re typically dealing with text.

Evernote

Dropbox (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Dropbox does a (seemingly) straightforward task extremely well. Install the app on each of your PCs, Macs or Linux boxes and marvel as it creates a synced Dropbox folder on your machine. From now on, any file placed in the folder (or any sub-folders) will be magically replicated on all the other machines. Doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, you’ll wonder how you did without it. Anything synced is just a regular file, so you’ve got full offline access. There are superb iPhone, iPad and Android apps available. It even keeps old copies of things you delete or change so you can rollback. You’ve got consistency across machines (and *platforms*) with an additional off-site backup.

As if that wasn’t enough, you can, with incredible speed, share files with others, no registration required. Folders of photos are detected and turned into usable photo albums online. Clever, clever stuff.

Oh, and for a 2GB account? Free.

Dropbox

JotNot Pro (iPhone 4)

This is my new favourite app. Short on space to put my behemoth printer/scanner/fax/teasmade on my desk, I was looking into the rather attractive Doxie, a small USB-powered scanner for quick scanning of documents. This was quickly dismissed by the appearance of JotNot, an iPhone 4 app that turns your new 5-megapixel camera into a perfectly adequate scanning device.

Start the app, photograph the document and it’ll do the rest. Post-processing includes colour removal or correction, easy cropping and image straightening. Once happy, photo another document if you want to create a multi-page PDF or send the scan on it’s way. This for me is the best bit. JotNot understands many cloud services such as Evernote, Dropbox and Box.net. Once you’ve configured them, you can save documents straight into your cloud storage of choice, wherever you are. Of course, you can also save to iPhoto or email the document anywhere you like.

For a quick solution to scanning information anywhere you are, it’s hard to beat.

OK, the price?

Brace yourself…

59p!

JotNot

Summary

So, for 59p and time taken to register and install all the above you’ve got a wireless portable scanning device that can transfer scans into the cloud, instantly replicating them on every machine and allowing you to share the results with anyone on the planet who can get hold of a browser.

Not bad.

Paul