15 Essential Chrome Extensions For Google Drive | Dramel Notes

Google Drive is pretty amazing as it is, but how can it be improved? With certain apps and extensions for Google Drive that integrate it with other services, you can make better use of the cloud storage service and do even more with it.

If you’re immersed in the Google/Chrome/Android system, you’ve probably got a bunch of files on Google Drive and you use Google Docs whenever possible. And if that’s the case, you’re going to love these extensions and apps to make better use of your Drive space and the files you keep there.

Note that some of these are really web apps with a Chrome app link, just as the official Google Drive and Google Sheets and Google Docs apps are, but they’re still worth installing (and bookmarking) to keep all the best tools at your fingertips in the Chrome App Launcher — especially if you’re using a Chromebook!

Kami (AKA Notable PDF)

Kami is one of many amazing PDF tools for Google Drive, but it also works with DOCX documents, PowerPoint files and popular image formats. It lets you annotate these documents and share them with Google Drive collaborators. It’s perfect for group research projects or researching personal projects, like weddings or renovations.

Music Player For Google Drive

If you keep audio files in your Google Drive storage (as opposed to in Google Play Music), you still want to be able to play them easily. There is an official Audio Player tool for playing your audio files, but it’s not for everyone. This extension lets you take those files and create a quick playlist you can save in a lightweight browser player.

Drive Template Gallery

Drive templates are a great way to get a particular type of document up and running quickly, and despite having a fantastic directory of templates, Google seems determined to obfuscate them from view so you forget they’re even there. This extension puts the template gallery back into the “Create” menu, so you’ll remember to check the template gallery before recreating the wheel.

DriveTunes

DriveTunes is yet another way to play your Google Drive audio files, but it’s a little more comprehensive. It loads up all of your available files (or whichever folders you want loaded) so you can browse them and play them really easily. As a Google Drive user, it’s an essential addition to the best music extensions for Chrome.

JoliCloud

JoliCloud is for people who use Google Drive along with a number of other cloud storage services. It lets you connect all of your accounts and search for files across them all at once. This is a neat service, but it’s just one of many ways you can manage multiple cloud storage spaces.

For instance, if you’re using a Chromebook you could always add these cloud storage services to your file system, then use your Chrome app launcher to search through them all.

Drive Notepad

This is mostly for Chromebook users, as they find there is a real need for an app that just lets you quickly add a few notes into a simple document. This is that app — plus, it syncs to Google Drive. It could be useful for anyone who wants synced notes.

Drive Migrator

If you’re setting up a new Google Apps account, you’ll note that you can’t change the owner of your old files to a new account. Instead, if you want to copy all your files to the new account, this tool is exactly what you need.

Drive Files To Dropbox

If you need to back up your Google Drive, the Drive Files to Dropbox extension will get you there. It downloads the files to your local hard drive and moves them to Dropbox, so you may find you need a lot of local drive space and bandwidth.

Translate For Drive

If you work with people on the other side of the world or have some other reason for needing to translate documents all the time, this is going to become your favorite tool. All you do is find your document on Google Drive and get a full translation immediately. Yes, you could cut-and-paste text into Google Translate, but this just makes things so much easier. Seriously, it’s the best thing for workplace translation since Gmail auto-translate.

DocuSign

DocuSign is the essential signing tool for Google Drive documents. If someone sends you any file that requires your signature, you can immediately add it and send the signed file right back to them — all within Google Drive.

It works the other way around too, in that if you want to ask for a signature on a Google document you can guide participants through the signing process using DocuSign. Use this for your banking, insurance, work, legal documents or whatever else life throws at you.

Gantter For Google Drive

Have you ever used Microsoft Project? Well, Gantter is a free cloud-based alternative that works almost exactly the same way and integrates seamlessly with Google Drive. You can easily attach Google Drive docs to your Gantt charts and save your Gantter files to Google Drive.

Besides being a solid project manager, Gantter also includes iCal export, easy Google-style collaboration and a collaborator chat, which makes it incredibly useful for group projects.

Simple Invoicing

Do you need a quick template to bill someone for a few hours of work? Would you want that invoice to appear in your Gmail ready to send? How about automatically logging the invoice in a Google Sheet? Simple Invoicing is a freelancer’s dream app. The only bad reviews this app gets is for the invoice itself being too simple, but it is absolutely perfect for simple invoicing, as it says.

LucidPress

If you’re a fan of InDesign, or just need a program to do the same things, LucidPress is your ideal Google Drive extension alternative, as it uses Google Drive seamlessly. Use it to make magazines, flyers, company reports or any other design work you’ve got planned. It’s entirely cloud-based and perfect for Chromebook usage.

Envelopes For Google Drive

If you ever need to do real-world posting of paper, you probably need a way to print up professional envelopes. This is basically the perfect envelope template maker for Google Docs, so you can get all the right information in the right places.

PDF Compressor – Small PDF

Of all the PDF converting tools out there, this is by far the most comprehensive and slick. Small PDF (AKA PDF Compressor) lets you grab files from your local drive, Google Drive or Dropbox, then manipulate them in all sorts of ways.

With Small PDF, you can convert Word documents, PowerPoint documents, Excel spreadsheets, and JPG images to PDF — or vice versa to convert PDFs to these file types. You can also make PDFs smaller, split them into multiple PDFs, merge them into one PDF, rotate PDFs, and protect or unlock PDFs.

What Else Should Google Drive Do in Chrome?

What more would you need Google Drive to do? Is there an app or Google Drive function that you really wish someone would emulate in a Chrome extension or app? Tell us!

[Read more]

8 Effective Evernote Apps for Painless Productivity | Dramel Notes

Evernote helps you increase your productivity with only a little effort.

One of the best things about Evernote is being able to integrate it with other web apps. So apart from it being an excellent note-taking app, Evernote can do an IFTTT manoeuvre and sync up with your favorite web app (assuming it is supported).

Bear in mind though that these apps obviously do need you to grant them access to your Evernote account.

 

You do not need to fall back on IFTTT always. After taking a wander through the Web Apps section of the Evernote App Center, I have found 8 good useful apps which integrate well with Evernote.

Go forth and be amazed.

MapClipper

If you are taking a trip somewhere, you may not have continual access to WiFi (I know, scary thought). This means that if you need Google Maps to navigate, then you are a wee bit stuck.

MapClipper aims to help solve that problem by enabling you to choose a certain area of a Google Map within a fixed size of square. When you have this, then click the “Save to Evernote” button, and the clipped portion of the map will be sent to your Evernote account.

Blinkist

Blinkist is an interesting service which takes works of non-fiction, and distills the main facts of each book into 15 minutes. This saves you the time of reading the entire book which could take hours, days, or even weeks, depending on your schedule.

Blinkist decides what the most important facts are in the book and presents them to you so you can learn them. You can highlight important passages, and send them to your Twitter or Facebook account.

The only downside to the service is that it is mostly not free. After only 3 days paid trial, if you want to get the most out of the service, the prices start at 50 Euros a year. The free plan gives you only one pre-selected book per day.

With each 15 minute distilled summary, you can have them sent to your Evernote account. However to do this, you need to have a paid plan.

Voice2Note

One of the great things about Evernote is that you can speak to the service to leave voice notes. This is great for those spontaneous thoughts of genius, the ones that will ultimately shake the world to its foundations.

But the big snag is that voice notes are not searchable (yet). Evernote boasts of its OCR technology which reads written text, and the search engine takes care of digital text. So how do we search the voice notes?

Voice2Note takes your voice notes and transcribes them into searchable text. But, it will only transcribe the first 30 seconds, so this is only suitable for short snappy notes. Not the next audiobook adaptation of “War and Peace”.

The free plan will give you up to 5 notes per month, and according to Voice2Note, the “transcription frequency is low”. The paid plan is $29.99 a year or $2.99 a month. This unleashes all the bells and whistles – unlimited notes, tagging and a “high transcription frequency”.

Sush.io

Running a busy business is a hectic affair. You have so much to think about, and forgetting just one thing has the potential to put a spanner in the works.

Sush.io gives you a chance to automate some of those essential tasks. It collects your recurring bills and statements, and all of your other online bills. It then also sends them all to an Evernote notebook (you can also choose from a huge amount of other cloud services. This page showcases just a small sample of them.

The first 100 transactions are free but you must pay a minimum of $25 a month for the service. But there are two things to consider here – the amount of billable time this app saves you, and the fact you can offset the charges against your tax bill.

StudyBlue

StudyBlue touts itself as “the leading crowdsourced learning app providing intelligent learning tools“. What does that mean in simple English? It means that everyone’s notes for a particular class are uploaded and made available for everyone to read and use. StudyBlue claims that they have more than 250 million pieces of user-generated content available.

Any class notes that you make in Evernote can be imported into StudyBlue and automatically turned into flashcards. So you can make your notes in Evernote, and later you can lie in bed and learn that day’s course content via the newly made flashcards. The flashcards are also sent back to the Evernote account so you have a copy of everything.

StartUp Tracker

Another day, another startup. Keeping up with which 15 year old entrepreneur has started what in their bedroom can perhaps be an overwhelming affair. That’s why I have totally fallen in love with StartUp Tracker.

StartUp Tracker is a browser extension for either Chrome or Safari (one for Firefox is apparently in the works). Once installed, if you see a name of a new startup, just highlight it and click the browser button. Alternatively, StartUp Tracker has embedded itself in the right-click menu.

A box will then appear on the screen with all pertinent information, and if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see a “Save To Evernote” button. Clicking on that will send the startup information to your Evernote account.

Using the app is completely free, but the one snag is that you cannot assign these notes to a specific notebook. It will just send it to your Evernote account, without putting it in a notebook for you. On the plus side, it DOES automatically tag each note for you.

Cronofy

If you are a knowledgeable Evernote user, you will know all about reminders. These can be added to a note to remind you to give it some attention on a particular day and time. Extremely useful if you deal with a lot of notes containing time-sensitive information.

Cronofy links up with the calendar of your choice (iCloud, Google, Office 365, Exchange, and Outlook.com). Then when a reminder is posted on Evernote, it posts the reminder on your calendar as well. This not only gives you a backup alert, but it also gives you a very good overview of all your different reminders coming up in the future.

NYT Cooking

Finally, one of my favorite destinations on the web. The cooking section of the New York Times! Whenever I want to fantasy cook, or find something to ask my wife to make, I head over to the New York Times. They have 17,000 recipes, and one visit to the page is enough to make me extremely hungry.

Now Evernote has partnered up with the Times to enable you to save recipes in your account. When you see something you like in the recipes, just click the Save button. That will save it in your NYT account, but it will also send a copy to your Evernote account. No tagging, but well, that’s a minor gripe.

It also goes the other way. Save recipes from other websites in Evernote, and scan any handwritten recipes you have. Then you can send those straight to your NYT recipes list.

Which Apps Do YOU Integrate Into Your Evernote Account?

Evernote is becoming more robust and useful as time goes on. As more and more apps become integrated, Evernote truly will become your second brain, as it scoops up all the information it can get its hands on.

Let us know what apps you use in conjunction with Evernote. Do you have a must-have that I missed out? Do you wish there was a web app integration someone would build?

[Read more]

The 5 Best Apps That Integrate With Apple Healthkit in iOS 8 | Dramel Notes

The 5 Best Apps That Integrate With Apple Healthkit in iOS 8

 

Apple’s iOS 8 comes with the new feature that integrates with health and fitness products so that your iOS device will be able to connect to the information through a new service called Healthkit. All those data, like the distance you have walked, your sleep pattern, or what you have eaten will be stored directly on your phone in an organized database.

 

Since Healthkit is still pretty new, apps are starting to appear in the App Store. Here are the 5 best health apps that you can use on your iOS device.

 

1. UP

If you own the UP Jawbone, the UP app will synchronize with the Healthkit and shares data with it. With the data fully integrating into the Healthkit folder, you can just launch the health app and will have all your data available there. It tracks your steps, sleep, and diet.

 

2. CARROT Fit

CARROT Fit takes a military-style approach to get you into shape. So be prepared to be shamed and the app will definitely make you feel guilty. Even though not everyone can take it, some finds that it really helps them to stay healthy.With the new Healthkit integration, this app can monitor your actions even more closely and will comment on what you are doing.

 

3. MyFitnessPal

If you are serious about exercising, then MyFitnessPal is your go-to-tool. It tracks a ton of different exercises and foods. The app will even calculate the total number of calories you are allowed to consume daily, but of course you will have to manually enter your meals in order to keep track.

 

4. WebMD

WebMD aims to help you recognize your own health. You can check what disease you are suffering from by simply clicking on the part of your body that isn’t feeling well. The apps will give you fitness tips as well as information about various medicines, and health magazines.

 

5. 7 Minute Workout

Don’t have the time to exercise? The 7 Minute Workout came with a list of high intensity exercises. It times your exercise, and guides you through the process. There are also instructional videos for each workout.

[Read more]