Hipmunk: A fresh approach to finding flights

If you've traveled by plane anywhere as a librarian, you've probably used some of the travel sites such as Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, or Kayak.  But I often find that such sites have gotten overly complicated.  It's always nice to find a new travel site that gives a more minimalist interface and a useful display of results.

Most recently, I used Hipmunk to find a flight from my home city to a conference in early February.  The home page of their website (they also have apps for iOS and Android) asks just for the two cities, and the travel dates (a useful calendar rests just below the two dates).  There is also a dropdown to change the number of passengers and to indicate Coach or Business or First Class, but the default is a single passenger in Coach.  Hipmunk also remembers your previous searches, so if you get interrupted or can't decide right away, you can always return to the website and repeat the search.

The best part of Hipmunk is the sorted display of results.  It defaults to "Agony" (in other words, a combination of price, duration, and number of stops), but you can re-sort by price, duration, departure time, or arrival time.  You can also choose to indicate that certain airlines are preferred (very useful for frequent fliers) and listed first, or that non-preferred airlines not be shown at all. 

The display is graphical, letting you very quickly get an idea of how long the flight will be compared to other flights, and how much of a layover you'll have at your stops.  There is also a WiFi symbol to mark legs of the flight where WiFi is available (for me, an important features on multi-hour legs).  If you want the details for a given flight as to its exact departure and arrival times, the flight numbers, and the kind of airplane, you can click on any displayed flight to get that.

And did I mention that Hipmunk links you to the airlines' own website to purchase your tickets? 

So the next time that you are planning a trip to a library conference, why not see what Hipmunk comes up with?  You might find that you like it better than the competition. 

Evernote Hello: When the face is familiar?

A good blog won't merely tell you about old stuff, but will keep you informed of the latest news.  In a blog about personal productivity technology (especially stuff of interest to librarians), I think the announcement of the new Evernote Hello app is relevant.

I'll be honest: One of my most stress-inducing moments is when I'm at a meeting or conference and run into someone who seems to know who I am but whose name I just can't bring to mind.  At a genealogy conference, I usually joke that I'm much better at remembering the names of dead people, but that humor isn't as useful at a library-related conference.  So I was intrigued to hear about the new Evernote Hello app.  Here's what I know so far:

It's an iPhone app.  (Sorry Android users.  I would assume that if it proves successful, Evernote will create an Android version soon.)

It synchronizes with Evernote, so all of the information you put into it will be available on all of the devices you use with Evernote (but it will be read-only information...you won't be able to edit it except in the Evernote Hello app itself).

It's intended for people (the people you meet) to put in their own name and contact information, and then to take several photos of themselves.  I suspect that this will work for some, but that in other cases, you'll need to enter this info for them.  In any event, the information is already date/time-stamped and location-tagged, so you'll be able to figure out the context of where and when you met them.  That means that if you meet a whole bunch of people at the same time, you can search for them that way, and the same is true for when you meet a whole bunch of people at the same location.

Finally, when you display someone that you captured using Evernote Hello, you'll also see any notes you took around the same time, so this means that you can see notes you made during a meeting with these people.  Interesting idea, eh?

OK, I'll try this out at my next opportunity, and let you know how it goes.

Evernote: For all your note taking needs

We hope you all had a great holiday! My partner and I took a brief respite from blogging for Thanksgiving, but we're back and ready to blog.

Today I want to start telling you about Evernote. I say start because there's a lot to it and a full report will take more than one posting.

Evernote is a note-taking app that, according to their tagline, will help you "remember everything." I use it everyday - in formal or informal meetings to keep track of my action items or sitting in Starbucks (enjoying a chai tea latte) and jotting down ideas for an article I should write. I use it to help me keep track of an overwhelming multitude of user ids and passwords. I use it at ALA to take notes on the meetings and presentations I attended. And the list goes on...

One of the best things about Evernote is that it works on PC or Mac and on most smartphone and tablet devices. That's a great benefit, especially if you want to share your notes. It can also capture just about anything - you can type your notes or you can use the built-in recorder. I've used that to record focus group sessions. You can also add images or save entire webpages.

Of course, since it runs on so many devices, it has built-in syncing. That way, the changes you make in Evernote on your desktop are automatically reflected in your Evernotes on all of your other devices. And the app let's you create folders to help organize your notes.

Evernote does have some text formatting features, like bold, italics, bullets, and such. However, please remember that this is a note-taking app. Evernote is not word processing software. In fact, sometimes the simple formatting doesn't sync perfectly, especially from the desktop to an Evernote on a mobile device.

There's a great deal more to say about Evernote, but I'll leave that for another post.

Wix: Whizzing thru website building

I work with digital collections and have been looking for an easy-to-use web-based tool to create mobile websites to promote and display those collections. Today, I discovered Wix and it might end up being something for my tech tool belt. Of course, I've got a lot more evaluation to do, but I thought I'd post about it and see if any of you have any experience with and/or comments about Wix. By the way, Wix also let's you build regular websites, but I'm going to concentrate on the mobile version in this post.

First, there is a free version and a series of paid "premium" versions. With each upgrade of the paid versions, you get increased storage and bandwidth, as well as a few new features like removing Wix ads, connecting to your own domain, and integrating with Google Analytics. Obviously, since I'm still in the test mode, I using the free version.

Basically, building a mobile site is a four step process: choose a template, add a title, enter content, and publish. And the interface is point/click and drag/drop so it is very easy to learn and use. For templates, Wix gives the user a cornucopia of theme/style templates from which to choose. Once a template is selected, you can change colors, fonts, and backgrounds. Each template also sets you up with a few generic pages like Home, About, Contact, Call Us, and Email Us. You can edit the pages, delete any or all of the pages, and/or add additional pages. Images can be uploaded and text can be typed in or copied/pasted. Once you're done editing/entering the content, you publish by clicking a button. That's my kind of web dev tool!

My very basic, initial test of Wix can be viewed at http://m.wix.com/bilewis/test. I'll be testing it more in the weeks to come, so look for more posts.

Also, if anyone is using another tool of this type that you'd like to recommend, please leave a comment. I'd be grateful for the input.

Week Cal: The Slightly Better iPhone Calendar

Sometimes it is the little things that make a big difference.  I have always been slightly disappointed by the standard iPhone calendar app (Calendar).  I usually use the List display because it takes up the least room (meaning I can see several days forward) and so it allows me to schedule a meeting without having to click thru several days worth of calendar.  But the List display shows only the start time for my meetings and other events.  It's hard to schedule meetings when you're not sure if your other meetings are only 60 minutes or possibly as long as 90 or 120 minutes.

So it's a little thing, but I have discovered Week Cal, an iPhone app (the iPad version isn't available at the moment), and Week Cal's List view shows the start time and the end time of each item.  At a glance I can see if I have time between meetings, or if I have unintentionally overlapped two meetings.  The font is a little smaller than the one used by Calendar, too, but not too small to read, so I can see a little bit further into the future without scrolling. 

Siri (again): Will Remind, Will Remind, Will Remind Me

No, not the song by Royksopp.  Now that I've had a little more time to play with Siri, I may have stumbled upon one of its most useful additions to professional productivity: the ability to remind me to do things.  Let me elaborate.

iOS 5 has a built-in app called Reminders.  It isn't quite "Tasks", although when you open it up, you can swipe between Completed, Tasks, and Reminders.  I'm already using a different system for tasks, so the interesting part for me here is the Reminders part.  I had a little bit of trouble getting this to work the way I wanted, until I found some online sites that explained how to configure this. 

First, in the iOS 5 Settings, you need to turn on Location Services.  They have to be on for Reminders, too.  (I also have it on for Siri.)  Then, in the Mail/Contacts/Calendars setting, you go all the way to the very bottom and set Default List to Reminders (where it syncs with the iCloud).  If you leave it set to Tasks, it will sync with your work Exchange server, but that setting didn't handle Reminders the way I wanted.

If you've gotten past all of the techie stuff so far, I'll now explain how this is going to work in practice.  You can say to Siri "Remind me to call Barbara at 5pm", and Siri will dutifully repeat this back to you (to make sure it's right).  You confirm that it is, and Siri adds the reminder to your Reminders app list.  At 5pm, your iPhone 4S beeps to remind you to call Barbara. 

Now let's get fancier.  Siri can know where certain places are (such as your home and work).  You can say "Remind me when I leave work to stop by the dry cleaners."  No matter what time you leave work, you'll get beeped when you're geographically away from the location Siri knows as your work location.  You could also have a reminder such as "Remind me when I get to work to speak to Barbara about my orientation idea". 

Suddenly, you've got time-based reminders and location-based reminders.  Just when and where you need them.  How handy is that?

Event Observer

One of the things we do occasionally is observe the traffic in the Library, trying to determine how long patrons wait for service or the room count for different areas of the Library. Even with a smart phone or tablet that has clock and timer applications, getting good data is cumbersome.

Recently I discovered an iPhone/iPad app called Event Observer, which provides the ability to time or count multiple events at once. The free version (Event Observer Lite), can record the time or count for up to four events. The for fee version, which costs a whopping $0.99, lets the user track up to 10 events.

Event Observer is an interaction analysis tool and it has made my observation tasks much easier. I've set it up to record the wait time for patrons in line at our different service points, the amount of time there weren't any patrons waiting in line, and the amount of time there weren't any patrons at the service point. All I had to do was to create the list of events (also called attributes), indicate whether I wanted to time or count the attributes, then start conducting the observation. If I want to time multiple events simultaneously, Event Observer can do that or if I want to toggle between timers, it can do that too. It is also easy to setup and use for counting the people in a room, the number of students attending instruction or library events, or anything else I'd want to count.

I just began my use of this app, but I think it's going to be a very useful addition to my little toolbox.