Hasta La Gadget!

If you ever wanted to catch up on your online reading while on the treadmill or puttering about the kitchen, Evernote now offers you the ability to do so without actually, well, reading. The online brain dump has introduced text-to-speech functionality to its Clearly extension for Google Chrome, a plugin that clears out ads and other distractions for a clean reading experience. While the Clearly extension itself is free, the text-to-speech feature is only for Premium accounts, each of which costs $5 a month or $45 a year. Words are highlighted as they’re read, and you can pause and skip as you like. The feature launches with support for over twelve languages and is powered by iSpeech, which has worked with BlackBerry apps and connected homes in the past. Just don’t accidentally blast TMZ articles during your next conference call, ok?

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Evernote

Evernote Clearly is a Google Chrome extension that promotes distraction-free reading on websites. By just clicking on the extension button, all ads and navigation controls are hidden, leaving users with a simple webpage with the only the text that you want to read. Evernote announced today that they’re adding text-to-speech capabilities to the extension.

Evernote explains that the new features is incredibly handy when you don’t have time to actually sit down and read an article. By opening a link to an article and clicking the Text-to-Speech icon in Clearly, the article will read itself aloud to you, letting you do other tasks while you listen. Evernote says that it’s “like instantly turning articles into podcasts.”

However, in order to take advantage of the new feature, you have to be an Evernote Premium member, which costs $5 per month, or $45 for a yearly subscription. But if you use Evernote a lot, we can’t say that Premium membership wouldn’t be worth it. And on top of the text-to-speech functionality, Evernote has included the ability to pause, skip ahead, or jump to different sentences.

This new text-to-speech feature supports over 12 different languages, and Evernote says that when you combine it with the text highlighting tool, it can make for a great language-learning tool. Just visit a site in another language, then have Evernote Clearly read it to you as you follow along with the highlighting. The Clearly browser extension is only available for Google Chrome, but Evernote says that it’ll be available for other browsers soon.

Evernote Clearly adds text-to-speech for Premium members is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but no one ever focuses on how quickly it fell. Skitch can’t exactly be compared to an empire, but with some ten million users globally, there were a lot of voices shouting a lot of various things when the upstart jumped in bed with Evernote and upgraded itself to version 2.0. Not surprisingly, members of our own staff as well as vocal readers have been forced to look for alternative options after v2.0 yanked and / or maimed some of our favorite features from the original. Truth be told, there’s really no alternative that doesn’t also come with a severe compromise, but the Skitch team knows full well that said scenario could change if rivals are given enough time.

Today, the company’s chief designer Keith Lang is clearing the air on what happened, what’s happening, and where his program is going in the future. For starters, he mentions that his team was so heads-down on managing the product, that they failed to actually take into account “how deeply ingrained Skitch had become into many people’s daily workflows and how disruptive even small changes could be.” The good news, however, is that he’s vowing to “fix it.” He notes that version 1.0 was held together with many years of duct tape, and to ever truly move forward, a new program would have to be built from the ground-up. That new program, of course, was met with near-universal hatred from the prior user base, but it looks as if those in the passionate camp are fixing to be addressed.

In updates due to hit between now and sometime soon, Skitch will be regaining Menubar Extra support, FTP / sFTP capabilities, short URLs, direct hosting of Skitch images (!), multiple fonts and custom colors, as well as streamlined cropping and resizing. Aside from bringing v2.0 back up to where v1.0 left off, Keith is promising “really amazing stuff” in the future. We’ll be anxious to give the new builds a try — hopefully, they’ll bring back some good memories.

Filed under: Software, Mobile

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Source: Evernote Blog

The OS X version of Evernote 5 has been released out of its Beta state now for the public, available for all to download in the Mac App Store. This version of the app is ready to bring on “100+ new features” including shortcuts, easy access to recent notes, notebook expansion, and tag lists. This version also has easier browsing with a fully updated user interface and works with a lovely new notes list for simple usability all around.

Evernote 5 has a brand new Cards View so you can visualize what you’re opening rather than just relying on text titles. You’ll be able to edit notes inside Evernote rather than relying on 3rd party applications. You can change a geographic location of a note – this along with many other changes may seem small to some, but are game-changing for others.

Evernote 5 for Mac allows you to convert a file to plain text on the fly and works with a new set of keyboard shortcuts. You can use the following to bring on two- or three-click excellence to your Evernote-loving life.

CMD-J: Jump to a notebook from anywhere in the application
CMD-Shift-A: Jump to All Notes
CMD-Option-(1-5): Switch to main sidebar sections (Notes, Notebooks, etc)
CMD-(1-9): Jump to Shortcuts
CMD-L: Edit current note title
CMD-’: Edit current note tags
CMD-]: Indent text

You’ve got several different ways now to view your notebooks and tags including a new Grid view – this stacks all your stacks and notebooks in one place and sorts them according to owner, note count, or name. You have a brand new Atlas mode that allows you to see your notes visualized on a set of maps, map view also bringing you pan and zoom features – much like the updated version of Evernote 5 for your mobile device.

This is just the beginning, too – you can see a full list of feature changes over at Evernote’s Mac Feature Page or just download the app for yourself. Might as well – it’s totally free! Total integration with your mobile devices working with Evernote continues here too – notes for all!

Evernote 5 for Mac up for download now in the App Store is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Welcome to Tuesday evening everyone. We had a pretty big day, what with the reveal of the HTC DROID DNA and all. HTC announced that the DROID DNA will be arriving at Verizon on November 21, and we even managed to go hands-on with the device and its wireless charging dock. Of course, today was also the day that the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 10 became available on the Google Play Store. All but the 16GB Nexus 10 sold through pretty quickly, so we hope you got your hands on the device you wanted before Google put up the out of stock notices.

3G Nexus 7s started shipping earlier today, and we found out that Apple stores take in $6,000 in sales per square foot. IHS is predicting that the Wii U will sell 3.5 million units by the end of 2012, and Nokia has announced its new HERE mapping service to take on Google Maps. The release preview of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is now available to check out, and there seems to be a pretty major issue with some of the Black Ops II PC discs floating around out there.

Verizon and Motorola begin sending out OTA Jelly Bean updates to the DROID RAZR M today, while Google started installing its fiber network in Kansas City. BitQwik has released a search app for Evernote users, while Verizon said it will be launching 4G LTE in a bunch of new markets on November 15. mLogic unveiled a new PCIe expansion chassis that’s compatible with Thunderbolt, Android 4.2 has made its way to the Android Open Source Project, and Murfie and Sonos have teamed up to help you move your physical CDs into the cloud.

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm was finally given a release date earlier today, Vimeo has launched a new preview of its upcoming pay-to-view program, and we learned today that the ASUS VivoTab RT will be landing at AT&T later on this week. Finally tonight, we have a few originals for you to have a look at. Chris Davies tells us why the HTC DROID DNA should have been a Nexus device, while Chris Burns gives us his reviews of the Olympus Stylus XZ-2 and the Otaku Camera for iOS. That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up, enjoy the rest of your night folks!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: November 13, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.