Getting Organized With The Google Nexus 7 Tablet – Part 1
Date: March 19, 2013Category: Author: Michael Brinson
I know I’m arriving late to the party, but I’ve finally shown up and I am now enjoying my new Nexus 7 Tablet. The price tag of $249.00 plus tax (total of $271.53 at my local walmart) made it easier to join in the tablet fun than it used to be. Even so, I did go through a good amount of deliberation before arriving at my choice of the Nexus 7 and sticking with the android OS. So, today I’m going to share the process I went through that led me to to my final decision.
Before I go into my list of “must-haves” for my device of choice, I need to explain my “Use Case” for even feeling the need for a tablet solution in the first place. For several years now I’ve wanted to have a system that consolidates all of my notes, tasks, calendar minutia (read in the voice of Homer Simpson: mmmm.. “minutia”), and other organizational items. Back in the day I would use a Franklin Covey planner for managing my appointments and tasks which worked fairly well, but it was not SEARCHABLE! That was a huge shortcoming for me because after the advent of google I had become search-dependent.
After I moved away from paper-based methods of organization I enjoyed having the ability to search my digital notes. Different platforms provided varying degrees of usefulness regarding search-ability and the ease with which I was able to add and organize new notes. I used wordpress for a while, but found that adding and organizing new information was not as fast as I wanted. I probably could have eventually built out all of the functionality I wanted by cobbling together the right plugins and performing other tweaks, but even then, I was always dependent on being connected to the internet. Also, there was no “free-form-ness” to wordpress like there was with paper based methods.
Enter OneNote. Cue heavenly music – The clouds part and rays of sunlight pierce the darkness of ineffective organizational solutions. Okay, so OneNote hasn’t been perfect either, but it was definitely a huge improvement over other solutions I had used before. The search capability of OneNote 2007 was actually disappointing. It was slow in some cases and seemed to be hit and miss as far as accuracy went. With 2010 things are much improved. Everything is searchable and it is FAST. The only thing that is lacking is “partial match search”, or “regular expression search” in geek speak. That just means that if you search for “rch” and somewhere in OneNote you have this line of text: “I wish OneNote supported regular expression searching” then OneNote would find the word “searching” because it contains the letters “rch”. That limitation aside, OneNote is awesome at what it does – Organize Your Mind. It is very free-form. Rather than detail all of the features here, I’ll let you go google it if you’re interested.
So OneNote is great. But it is not enough by itself to handle all of my organizational needs. AND one glaring problem with OneNote Mobile on Android (or iPhones for that matter) is that your notes are not SEARCHABLE! It’s almost like I’ve come full circle to paper based note taking again. If you happen to use an iOS based device, then you are in luck. You can install an app from Aqrate Software called “Outline+” Unfortunately for me, it is not available for android devices. I’m sure that eventually microsoft will update their OneNote Mobile app to support searching and other things, but for now it just stinks.
Even if OneNote mobile did perform the way I expected it to (which it doesn’t), I still needed an effective way to manage my tasks, calendar minutia (mmmm…), and other organizational items. The desktop version of OneNote actually does have a great method of adding tasks to your notes, but if you want to be reminded at particular times about those tasks, then you are dependent on having Microsoft Outlook. That’s where the effectiveness of this functionality breaks down – It is not portable. And without pop-up reminders, it is too easy to forget about your actionable tasks that are drowning in a sea of notes. Again, OneNote actually does have a method to display a list of all of your tasks separate from the rest of your notes.. but without that magic pop-up feature that is available across ALL of your portable devices, it’s just not effective.
Fortunately I have found the solution to that piece of the puzzle. In a word, the solution is “Jorte.” Weird name, but great application. I originally looked into using Microsoft Outlook to fill this need, but for various reasons it didn’t do the job for me. One hugely useful feature of Jorte, is the Agenda View. Microsoft Outlook used to have something similar to this before Outlook 2010. It was dropped in 2010 and newer versions for reasons incomprehensible to me.
So, what is Jorte? The way I am using it, it’s just a viewer for my google calendars. Since I’m in the Android OS world, everything is tied together via Google’s various products such as Google Calendar, Google Mail, Google Docs (now called Google Drive), etc. But the app that comes bundled with the Nexus 7 is lacking support for tasks. The way that Jorte displays the calendar appointments together with tasks meets my requirements very well. With the way I have it set up, I can still look at my appointments in the Google Calendar app interface if I ever want to because both Jorte and the Google Calendar app are just Views (via different interfaces) of the same calendar data saved in the Google Calendar cloud space.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not promoting anything here. Just sharing the system that I have arrived at for now.. always evolving, of course, for organizing my life. Another app that looked promising that I have not tried yet (as an alternative to Jorte) is “Business Calendar” by Appgenix Software. If anyone has tried that and has anything to say about it I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Well, that’s enough for this time. Next time I’ll present the Pros and Cons for the way I have things set up, as well as some additional details on how things are set up between the apps.
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