Filed under: iPhone
Reduce clutter, improve productivity with iPhone
Unclutterer is one of my favorite blogs. They offer practical advice and tips on keeping your work, home and life tidy and clutter-free.This week, they've posted an article on using the iPhone for increased productivity and clutter reduction. There are several great tips, including my favorite -- photograph the bar codes of your membership cards (gym, Staples, etc.) and store them in an appropriately named album. Most scanners should have no trouble reading the bar codes (test this before ditching your cards, of course).
They also mention apps like Jott and Evernote. It's definitely worth a read. Check it out.
Update: Their website seems to be having a bit of trouble this morning, folks. We're sure they're working on it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Hal said 9:14AM on 7-23-2008
Am I think ony one that sees http://unclutterer.com/ as being a page of random characters?
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Erik said 9:27AM on 7-23-2008
Thats all I'm seeing as well
rob said 9:27AM on 7-23-2008
Nope, you are not the only one.
RE- photographing bar codes- I've NEVER had this work. I guess all the scanners at all the stores I visit must be hosed.
Hal said 9:43AM on 7-23-2008
it's ironic that a blog on uncluttering should be filled with jumbled characters.
Tony said 10:35AM on 7-23-2008
Photographing barcodes isn't goin to work from a security standpoint either. If it were me stood on the door and I saw someone trying to get past the scanner with a phone I'd demand they produce their card or get sent packing.
It's *way* too easy to copy a graphic scanned onto a phone. You could have sent that card to 50 people.
Mez Jr said 12:05PM on 7-23-2008
@ Tony
I assume they're talking about those "reward cards" that stores pass out all over the place, not special coupons or something. And busting the nuts of a customer is a real good way to ensure he doesn't come back (as if forcing me to carry a membership card to a grocery/drug/book store is a good way).
Jash Sayani said 9:16AM on 7-23-2008
Well, you forgot about reQuall. The best Sppech to Text TODO App. Freeware!
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Evan Lugh said 9:19AM on 7-23-2008
Hal: Yeah me too..
http://www.grabup.com/uploads/1ac17073b436be63f659c3968a3258a2.png
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Neil said 9:19AM on 7-23-2008
Umm - they do realise you actually can clip web pages to Evernote from your iPhone? Just sync their bookmarklet to your bookmarks folder.
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skyman375 said 9:54AM on 7-23-2008
Why take digital photos of the cards? Why not scan them front and back, so you get a consistent size/quality image? I did this for my grocery store club cards and some others that I'm not to concerned about security for (I use eWallet to keep secure copies of my credit card information).
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dastranger said 10:24AM on 7-23-2008
Because some people don't have a scanner? Just a thought...
mike said 9:57AM on 7-23-2008
Why take digital photos of the cards? Why not scan them front and back, so you get a consistent size/quality image? I did this for my grocery store club cards and some others that I'm not to concerned about security for (I use eWallet to keep secure copies of my credit card information).
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King Fysel said 10:04AM on 7-23-2008
Don't you just hate it when sites offer impractical advice and tips?
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Adegen said 10:12AM on 7-23-2008
Umm, I tried the whole scanning your cards thing, and none of the bar code readers at any of the stores I go to could read the code off of the phone.
You also have to be comfortable letting the person that checks you out hold the phone over the lasers when it doesn't work when you try it.
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Erin at Unclutterer said 10:23AM on 7-23-2008
Those of you having difficulty seeing our homepage, can you let me know what browser you're using and if you're still getting the problem? We can't recreate the problem any longer ...
Also, those of you having difficulty with photographing your bar codes, you can't take the picture with the iPhone. You have to upload the picture from a camera that has a high-quality zoom. A scan won't work, either, since the bar code has to be larger than actual size. This is explained in the article ... which, unfortunately, you probably can't see because of whatever this bug is ... sorry about that ...
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Pepijn Bruienne said 11:38AM on 7-23-2008
Both FF 3 and Safari 3.1.2 produce garbage here. FWIW, lynx renders the page just fine, albeit in text mode. Curl also seems to have no problem pulling down the page's html and other code. Seems to me there's some issues with the chunked transfer encoding (Transfer-Encoding: chunked) and/or related mime types going on that are throwing FF and Safari off.
HTH.
Hal said 11:43AM on 7-23-2008
iPhone 2.0 Safari and IE7 on xp sp2 (in England).
The article displays fine, its just http://unclutterer.com/ that is jumbled.
Jerry said 12:41PM on 7-23-2008
The scanner thing only sorta works. CCD barcode scanners will do it, laser scanners will not do it. The vast majority of scanners in my area are laser scanners.
Pepijn Bruienne said 12:21PM on 7-23-2008
So I had a hunch that the garbage on the screen was actually gzip-compresssed data, having seen that kind of thing before, which turns out to be the case. I'm not sure if you want to include a "Content-Encoding: gzip" to your code, the lack of which some browsers are choosing to ignore resulting in them properly decompressing the gzipped page content before rendering it. Anyway, for those wanting to verify, load the article (or home page) until all the "garbage" is in your browser window. Save the content as plain text, name it something like unclutterer.html.gz to your Desktop (or wherever you please). Double click the file with the .gz extension in the Finder (Windows users faites vos jeux) and hey-presto! The resulting html file will load just dandy (minus whatever dynamic content PHP is supposed to be generating) in your browser.
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