🎧 Listened to: Cortex #33: Cortek
I’ve been taken a lot of notes lately, for my masters studies. I take notes in class and, most importantly, I highlight passages in the books I read and also take notes around the reading. Some of those notes relates directly to the highlighted passages, other notes are more general thoughts as I’m trying to work things out.
As I was reading, highlighting and writing last week I realised that over the course of two years these notes and highlights would grow to a big mess of assorted thoughts that I could never have any hope of organising in my final thesis, or any written exams either for that matter. So I need a better system.
I recalled having heard one or more podcasts where CGP Grey talked about how he handled similar tasks around his research for videos so I googled and found this old episode of Cortex. Around the 44:00 marker he describes his main workflow. Here’s the gist of it
Read ebooks -> Highlight passages -> When done, screen shot the pages with highlights -> import screenshots into Evernote -> Make notes in Evernote
I need to do something similar, but two things
- I prefer to read paper books for this. Not a huge problem, but a small change.
- Evernote seems like the wrong way to go.
Grey (and Myke) was already upset with Evernote when makes this podcast (in July 2016) and in later episodes that has been mentioned again and again, so it seems like it would be dumb to actually start taking these kind of notes in Evernote today.
So basically what I need is
- A way to ”scan” a page in a paper book using my iPhone
- Important: A way to OCR the scanned page
- A place to save the scan and associate it with various notes.
I’m thinking of maybe some kind of combination of Microsoft OfficeLens for the scan and Apple Notes for everything else, or maybe just Microsoft OneNote for the whole thing. Or maybe save the notes as flat text files (preferably in Dropbox or iCloud Drive) together with PDF scans from something like OfficeLens. In this later case I might not need the OCR on the phone since instead I can use PDFPen on my Mac.
What do you think? Any suggestions?
Henrik Carlsson posted this
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Replies and comments
hutaffe
25 september, 2018 11:19@MrHenko I think it’s the same and just got rebranded. If you searched for shortcuts in Spotlight, the search result was still named Workflow, although this has changed now 😉
MrHenko
25 september, 2018 11:30@hutaffe Seems something like that, yes.
I just tried to download Workflow to my iPad, where I haven’t had it before. A search for it just showed me the Shortcuts app. Since nothing about Shortcuts on the App Store told me that it in fact was Workflow, instead I tried to find the app store link from my phone where I do have Workflow installed. When I searched my list of installed apps via the App Store app I found Shortcuts instead of Workflow. Really confusing!
So I installed Shortcuts on the iPad, got an error message telling me that the latest version isn’t compatible with my OS (iOS 11) and asked me if I wanted to install an older version. I said yes and got Workflow installed.
If this had happened on Android it would be the kind of thing that Apple nerds (myself included) would complain about as ”typical Android”. ”This poor user experience is why iOS is superior”, etc.
hutaffe
25 september, 2018 11:33@MrHenko yeah… I don’t know why they didn’t just really replace it. Would have been much better understandable. I searched for the Shortcuts app and didn’t find it. Instead it showed up in the Updates section, but I never installed it… I had Workflow… confusing.
MrHenko
25 september, 2018 14:24@hutaffe Either that or kept the Workflow name. Doing that would also avoid the problem that seems to be present now when there are shortcuts (lowecase s) and there are Shortcuts (uppercase s), or possibly Shortcuts shortcuts.
Avancee
25 september, 2018 20:12@MrHenko it’s mostly the same; but there are a few differences in some of the integrations and the Siri activation. For my iPad, restarting after the update showed the update to Shortcuts and things changed from there. However, the system name is still Workflow in several areas, and also when connecting/reconnecting to apps like Evernote
MrHenko
26 september, 2018 08:37@Avancee It’s a good thing that Workflow is/was something that mainly ”power users” used. This transition seems like somtehing that would confuse the hell out of a regular non-technincal user.
Avancee
27 september, 2018 00:30@MrHenko Indeed. For as much as people have love to see the workflows that I’ve created; they are just a little bit further out there that many people want to travel. That said, it’s a very similar reaction to when people used to talk about macros in Excel. Which means the learning curve, and the potential to do a whole lot more, is open for as many developers and power users who want to explore