Microsoft OneNote 2010 Digital Notebook Software Review

May 212011

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Microsoft for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

We were recently selected to participate in the Microsoft OneNote Around the World in 40 Days blogger program, which gave us an opportunity to test out Microsoft’s OneNote 2010 digital notebook software as we worked on our itinerary for this summer’s trip to Alaska. We were assigned Alaska’s capitol city of Juneau, which can only be accessed by air or water. Our assignment was to use OneNote to create a quick guide for a 24 hour visit to the city. You can view and download our 24 Hours in Juneau with Teens TripBook, and those from all the other 39 bloggers and cities, at: OneNote TripBook

We had never used OneNote before but it only took minutes to start having fun with it. The user interface is highly intuitive with lots of options for fonts and colors as well as templates and drawing tools to make it fun and festive. As you can see from the screen shot from our TripBook, we picked a simple blue template since Juneau is on the water and got busy researching and organizing.

Microsoft OneNote 24 Hours in Juneau TripBook Screenshot

We really enjoyed how we could type anywhere on the page and the text would appear right where we wanted it without having to fuss with margins or tabs. We could easily grab links and insert photos anywhere on the page as well. With OneNote it is pretty much “what you see is what you get”.

We particularly liked how easily our OneNote could be shared locally on a single computer or put online so the whole family could read, edit and add ideas to the planning process from whatever computer they happened to be using. It was a real time saver in helping us to organize our research and make decisions about what we wanted to do.

The end result is that our Juneau TripBook is chock full of great ideas about things to do with teens including suggestions for places to eat, hotels with family suites, and enough teen oriented shopping options to keep the whole family busy during a 24 hour visit. If you go, be sure to visit the Mendenhall Glacier and go on a whale watch. Juneau is about the only place in the world where you can be 100 percent guaranteed of seeing whales every trip.

Using PoiEdit and Google Earth to Get Your GPS Ready to Roll

Tech & Gadgets No Responses »

Sep 252010

Whether we are on the go to the hockey rink or navigating around Hawaii, we have come to rely on our GPS to get us where we want to go. Of course, GPSs can only help navigate if you are able to provide them with accurate information about where you want to end up. In planning our family vacations our research usually identifies a number of restaurants, landmarks, hotels, and activities that we don’t want to miss. Unfortunately, sometimes when it comes time to actually find these sights, the roads they are on may not be in the GPS or the unit can only approximate the location because it is on an private road, inside a large complex or otherwise hidden from the GPS mapping models.

To avoid the incredibly frustrating experience of getting lost or missing the intended destination, we have found that investing a little effort up front to find the actual location on Google Earth and to program the actual latitude and longitude coordinates into our GPS (a TomTom One XL) ahead of time pretty much ensures we will reach our intended destination. It is a lot more efficient than entering addresses manually in real time and hoping the resulting directions match reality. Instead, you can make a list of destinations ahead of time and check that the coordinates are accurate, before you need to use them. In GPS parlance, these pre-programmed destinations are known as Points of Interest, or POIs for short.

Create POIs Ahead of Time to Simplify Navigating on the Road

Once the POIs are in your GPS, you can just select destinations from the list when you want to find them with your car. Camera Guy is a pro at creating these POIs and adding them to the GPS using free software from PoiEdit. He has agreed to share his wisdom – so click this link to see the step-by-step details.

If you are comfortable installing software and editing files, give it a try. We find POIs are much easier to use than entering addresses manually and you have extra assurance of verifying the address or location of your destination with Google Earth. Good luck and stop back to let us know how this approach works for you.

A Word to the Wise

Despite the wonders of technology, we never travel with just a GPS as they do lose the satellite signal and sometimes the map information isn’t 100% accurate. Overall, we find a GPS is much easier to use than a map, although we still keep paper maps in the car as a backup . Increasingly we turn to the iPhone for backup as well.

Favorite iPhone Apps for Travels with Teens

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Sep 182010

iPhone4, courtesy Apple

In our family, iPhones and iTouches have become top priority travel gear. For the adults, real time access to directions and the ability to instantly look up nearby restaurants and activities is critical. For the teens, hours in the car speed by when they have their music and games at hand.

Our teens almost always have a school reading assignment to work on, even in the summer as our schools assign a number of required vacation reading books to middle school and high school students. We make sure they stay on top of school work. Beyond that, we don’t lose much sleep about whether the apps they are using have an educational value – for us its all about keeping peace in the car or killing time on planes and in airports.

Five Fav Teen iPhone Apps for the Road

When asked to pick their favorite apps for the road, our teens didn’t have much trouble making up their minds. All of them are free or low cost and promise to provide hours of entertainment. They are:

Pandora Internet Radio - allows each subscriber to customize play-lists and broadcast selections based on algorithms developed under the Music Genome Project which analyzes each song using up to 400 distinct musical characteristics. Our teens have very different tastes, but with Pandora they can each get a steady stream of what they like. Pandora will run over many cell networks (check your usage agreements) and on free wi-fi services and hot-spots.
Cuberunner - an incredibly addictive game that involves flying a ship across a cube-infested universe. The simple design and fast loading times make it a game that the teens can play for hours.
Kitten Jump - the basic concept is that a kitten got a bit over-zealous chasing butterflies and ended up in the clouds. The player controls the cat as it jumps from cloud to cloud to leaves to bricks, collecting butterflies along the way. This one is more of a favorite for the girls but it does keep them occupied.
The Impossible Quiz – even teens like to work their brains sometimes. During those moments, this game challenges the player to quickly respond to a wide range of questions that test logic and touch screen reflexes. A silly app with music and video clips this one is a winner.
Facebook for iPhone - don’t leave home without this one if you want to stay connected while traveling. If they could only take one app along for the ride it would probably be this one!

“Where” iPhone App a Must for Mom and Dad

Of course, mom and dad have their apps too. We rely heavily on the Where iPhone app which marries GPS and search engine technologies with yellow page type databases. The result is an app that can point you to nearby Mexican restaurants, big and tell men’s clothes stores, or organic grocery stores – whatever you need. It can give you a range of options sorted by real-time distance to your current location and has links to reviews to help you decide where to go.

In just a couple of years, these mobile games, music and information services have become a standard part of how we travel – not sure how we managed back in the pre-iPhone dark ages. If you have a good app for teens and their traveling parents leave us a note in the comments. Thanks!

Note: we got no compensation for identifying these apps, but if you want to buy iPods, iTouchs etc. from Amazon using the link below we’ll get a small commission.