Thing 6

For this thing I explored QuickOffice which was already on my Google phone but I had never noticed.  I'm so glad I tried it.  I use Google Drive extensively for keeping track of personal and volunteer work.  I'd tried creating content on my ipad and phone with the Drive mobile apps and just been so frustrated trying to use them that I would only do it at my desktop.  QuickOffice made creating a simple document pretty easy.  I also tried to make a presentation.  This is complex enough that I wouldn't want to create one on my phone if I had a choice but it did work and in a pinch you could do it, or at least edit one that you already had created elsewhere.  I'll show a few screenshots to illustrate using Quick Office on my phone.

So here is what I see when I start up Quickoffice. I can open a file or start a new one.  It even put my most recent file at the top to make it easy to find.

The formatting options were easy to use.  I created a list.  Next I chose the title and centered that text.

When done you hit the check mark in the corner to save it.  Overall, it was easy to use.  It's not perfect though.  It's hard to choose and highlight text sometimes.  Using a stylus was easier but could still be frustrating.  Also, after saving I went back and discovered that it had somehow added weird spacing into my list.

For a simple quick document, using Quickoffice was pretty nice.

  Next I tried to make a presentation with lots of pictures and different kinds of slides.  This was much harder and very frustrating on such a small screen as my phone.  Perhaps on a tablet it would be more worthwhile.
The basic options to make a presentation are there.

  I did manage to make several slides, My Presentation on Little Kitchen Food Shelf

If you look at the presentation you'll see that the photos I uploaded all have terrible quality and wouldn't be usable.  These started out as good quality jpegs that I uploaded to my Google Drive account and then put in the presentation.  Here is what the cute Daisy Scouts should have looked like.

 So I'm not sure what went wrong with the pictures.  It was also really frustrating trying to highlight and edit text.  If I chose text and then brought up my formatting options to change the font size, the window that came up obscured the text I was trying to edit.

What you can't see here is the text that is behind the window.  I want to enlarge it and see it as I go, but it wont let me, no matter how I tried to manipulate the screen.  In general, all the options were there to make slides, but it was just really difficult on such a small screen.  Also, every time I saved it and then went back later I got an error message saying it had saved incorrectly and needed to be restored.

Overall, I wouldn't use Quick Office to try to make a presentation, but if you were just trying to do a quick edit on something you'd created elsewhere it would be ok.

23 Mobile Things, Thing 5

For this Thing I downloaded two apps, Remember the Milk and Sprindpad.  I also explored one I already had on my phone, Google Keep.

Remember the Milk is much more complex than the name implies.  I thought it would be a simple app to make to do lists for groceries and such and this is the kind of thing I've been doing more of on my phone. (Personally, I really like the Target App for grocery lists.  I also use the Target Cartwheel App which is like an online only coupon app just for shopping at Target.  If you're a regular Target Shopper like I am it's worth checking out )

I would say that Remember the Milk is more for organizing complex tasks and projects.  I could see it being useful for event planning or a big project.  You can make all sorts of tasks to be done, rate them by priorty, give them deadlines and reminders, connect them to a calendar, share them with others and sort them under categories like "work" or "personal" .  Here I'm adding a task of "Food Shelf Meeting"  putting it on my calendar for Friday and nesting it under "personal".  I've used drop down menus to give it those tags.

You can also add items with a user friendly calendar type feature.  Here I'm adding an appointment to Give Blood.

I can add notes to a task too.

Once you've added tasks to your app, you can view them in your inbox.

You can mark them completed when you're done.  When I tried to do more complex things like sync it to my Google calendar or share items with others it prompted my to try out the "pro" version of the app which I assume costs money.  If I was going to use this to organize complex tasks it would be much easier to do the bulk of it on a desktop and just read tasks and get reminders on my phone.  For simple to do lists this seems too cumbersome.

Next I tried Springpad.  This reminds me of Pinterest.  You can save items to "Notebooks" with categories like Books, Movies, Recipes, Music, articles to read later, etc.  You can follow other peoples Notebooks and I discovered that of course there are alot of companies pushing content on Springpad.  It's easy to save things I find on the web to Springpad.  You can install a free Springpad Clipper on your browser.  When I downloaded the app onto my Nexus phone it automatically installed the clipper in my share choices.

 So instead of Boards on Pinterest, you create Notebooks on Springpad.  The items you save to your notebooks are called "springs"

 It's easy to find items.  You can search books by titles or there is a built in barcode scanner.  Here I'm adding a book.

I can rate it with stars, mark it read, give it all sorts of tags like mystery, P.I., whatever I want.  I can make it public or keep it private.

I do like this app for keeping track of books.  I already use Goodreads though and I'm not about switch over.  The recipe notebooks seem like a pretty good use too.  You can do the same thing with Pinterest but I seem to often have trouble pinning items and end up getting error messages.  This seemed pretty straightforward.  One downfall with the app is that the mobile version doesn't let you create a shopping list directly from an ingredient list like the desktop version does.  

Springpad also has task management aspects to it like Remember the Milk. 

 You can add project notebooks, set privacy levels and, my favorite part, choose colors to organize different projects.

Then you can start creating your project.

I created a notebook called  Work Project and added the task "send out invitations". I can add comments, tags, photos, links, whatever I want.  Set deadlines and reminders and share it with others.  

These can get pretty complex and it seemed like it would be easy to collaborate with others.  Springpad never prompted me to upgrade to a different version.


For simpler tasks like notes and reminders you can also just easily add tasks to do with notes and due dates, even set up reminders.

 

Overall, I liked Springpad better than Remember the Milk, especially for its ease of use as a mobile app.  It's still more complex than I often need for simple note taking.  

I explored the app Keep from Google that I already had on my phone.  It's was easy to use.  I could talk into my phone to make a note or list and it not only typed out the list but also kept the recording so I could listen later.  This is especially helpful when it has misunderstood me and I want to listen to what I really said. 

 Again, it was easy to color code my notes and add reminders.  For simple notes, this is the app I'll use.