Week three of the Tech Savvy Writer posts. Today, we're covering merging the old style - writing with a pen - and new - electronic storage of information.
If you still love the appeal of writing by hand, but hate the thought of buying countless note books, Evernote has a option in the app where you can write on the screen. It’s super handy, but you may find it easier to use a pen designed for your device, rather than your finger.
The downside of this, of course, is if you have messy handwriting, it can by hard to read later on.
Evernote and other apps are working on handwriting recognition, which will translate your handwriting to a generic, editable font - which is something I really can't wait for!
The other alternative to old meets new is the Rocketbook. Starting at $35 and requiring special pens, the Rocketbook is the alternative to carrying around a dozen notepads for all of your different writing ideas.
Rocketbooks have a few variations – from ones that you can erase by putting in the microwave, to ones that you wipe down with water. They all have a limited number of pages, but are able to be used again and again. You’re also able to click and upload your items to either the Rocketbook app, or to Evernote.
There are now a multitude of notebooks like this out there, but I use the Rocketbook Everlast. It's really simple. It’s a matter of:
writing or drawing what you want with one of the Pilot Frixion pens
marking an X in the location bar at the bottom where you want the info to go – which you do as part of the set up
scanning your pages with the Rocketbook
then uploading it to the cloud.
If you want to see it in action, check out the Rocketbook site. Rocketbooks YouTube site also has some great videos for you to check out.
Evernote will also automatically scan your Rocketbook pages in as well, without needing the Rockebook app.
You can see here one of my notes, taken directly from the app and uploaded to Evernote. Once you set it up, it’s an automated process that all happens behind the scenes.
Speaking about automated processes – sometimes, writing doesn’t happen as freely as we’d like. Sometimes I get stuck on a name, or a description, or an image. Stick around for next week, where I talk about some super handy generators.
Please keep in mind, I am a windows and android user. I don’t use macs or iPhones in my writing life. There may be other alternative for Apple users, but the majority of software I will cover in this blog series is multi-platform.