After we rolled out an update last week with several enhancements to Zoho Notebook, we got several requests from users asking us to further enhance the app with some specific features. We now updated Zoho Notebook with some of these new features which we think you'll find them useful.
The key new features in this update include...
Let us look at each of these in detail.
New Zoho Notebook Plug-in (beta)
We completely redid the Firefox plug-in for Zoho Notebook. The new Firefox plug-in is available here. After you install the new plug-in, you'll see the Notebook icon appear in the bottom right corner of the status bar. Clicking on the icon, you can view all your existing notebooks or create a new notebook, add a page and add text within the page. The content added to the plug-in will automatically be synchronized to the online version of Zoho Notebook.
To aggregate content from external sites, just select the text, right click and choose the 'Add to Zoho Notebook' option. This will add the content to your Notebook which will be visible in the plug-in.
Currently, the plug-in displays text-only content. If you have other types of content in your existing Notebooks (like video, audio, embeds etc),you'll not be able to view these in the plug-in. The plug-in will work when you don't have Zoho Notebook open in your browser.
The new plug-in also has the option to take screenshots of web pages and upload these images directly to Zoho Notebook Page. You can also take screenshots of portions of web pages and have them automatically uploaded to Zoho Notebook. To take screenshots, you need to have Zoho Notebook opened in one of the browser tabs. You can then right click on any web page and take a screenshot.
Please note that this new plug-in is currently in beta. We'd love to hear your feedback on this for further improvements.
Google Notebook Import
Last week we received several requests from many users asking us to import Notebooks from Google Notebook. We think we have come up with a great way to import your Google Notebooks into Zoho Notebook in three easy steps and less than five minutes. After you login to Zoho Notebook, you'll see an 'Import Google Notebooks' option on the top right. Click on this link will get you started.
Here are the three steps to import your Google Notebooks
This should import all your Notebooks to Zoho Notebook.
We hope this works for you. We are looking forward to your feedback.
New Text Page
Some of you have asked us to provide a simpler/familiar way to add text notes in Zoho Notebook. To address the needs of Google Notebook users, we added a new page type called 'Text Page' which essentially lets you add text to the page, ordered vertically. You can reorder the text objects in this page by dragging the text objects vertically. To add additional text to the page, use the 'Add Text' object on the left.
The content added to Notebook using the new plug-in will be added with this new page type.
We hope you'll find these new changes useful. We are looking forward to your feedback.
Our Zoho Notebook team rolled out several enhancements to the app making it even better. I'd like to highlight some of the new changes.
Linking between Notebooks
Linking is one of the most requested features. In the text object, we now added the link option. You can not only link externally to any URL, but you can also link to pages with your other notebooks. This linking will also work in published books and pages.
Audio & Video Recording
We had to take down Audio and Video Recording capabilities (offered through a partner) earlier. We are glad to say that the recording capability is back in Notebook. You can now record Audio & Video within Notebook. Your previous recordings will continue to work fine.
Zoho Chat Integration
You might have noticed our char bar in the bottom in other Zoho Apps like Mail, Business, Docs etc. This Chat bar now makes its way into Zoho Business as well for consistency. We hope you'll like this.
No more Custom Scroll bars
This is not a feature addition, but a feature removed for better experience. If you remember our previous design, we had custom scroll bars on the side and at the bottom. We replaced these custom toolbars with standard browser scroll bars. Removing the vertical scroll bar leaves more space on the right. So we now use that space to display all your notebook pages on the right instead of restricting to 4 pages we had earlier.
Additional Changes
We hope you like these changes. There are many other exciting changes coming to Notebook. Stay tuned.
Some users like managing their portfolio using a simple spreadsheet like this one (it uses our recently launched VB Macros, BTW).
While a spreadsheet is good one for such use, research is a different story. Apps like Zoho Notebook comes in handy in such cases. Good news about Zoho Notebook is, you can even include such spreadsheets inside your notebook.
Mike Hogan from Barron's talks about using Zoho Notebook (and Google Notebook) for your Stock Research.
BOTH NOTEBOOK SYSTEMS make it easy to sort out the HTML-bound text, pictures and videos you want to keep from those you want to lose. Yes, popular desktop applications accept hyperlinks, graphics and other HTML gingerbread, but not with anything approaching predictability. Web elements can change a receiving file's formatting; and, if your mouse stumbles over an embedded link, you can find yourself transported to an image or video application or some other Web page.
Google Notebook is better at selectively stripping out Web links and other formatting, or turning a big note into plain text with the click of an icon. Zoho Notebook is more oriented toward page-building than text conversion. It has standing menu options that let you create multimedia notebooks by mixing images, RSS feeds, spreadsheets, presentations and other non-text elements, or even record audio and video directly to a notebook. In addition to text- editing tools, it has a drawing toolbar for page layout and object manipulation -- and a truly impressive ability to deal with disparate Web-page elements.
Google Notebook's strength is in on-the-fly research, where the fewer mouse clicks, the better. But Zoho's multimedia elements make for greater comprehension, and facilitate sharing. In this age of social media, being able to bounce your research and ideas off other market speculators is an important part of investing.
Both services let you create public folders online -- including password-protected ones accessible only to approved collaborators. But Zoho Notebook has more version-control and collaborative features for group projects, as well as chat access via Skype's (www.skype.com) instant-messaging and phone service. Both can be included as toolbars in Mozilla's Firefox browser (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com). With a right mouse click, you have the option to capture a Web page's URL to Google Notebook or the entire Web page to Zoho Notebook.
Full article here.
Research is obviously the core usage of Zoho Notebook. We have been making some good progress towards it for the next version to further simplify the research process with a better plug-in etc. More on that later.
Henry Thiele's notebook titled, Should I know Web 2.0? Nice aggregation of text, links, images, audio & video from the world wide web combined with one's own thoughts. Simply awesome! Another cool notebook from him : Digital Storytelling. Thanks Henry!
To our readers & Zoho users : Do leave your comments on how you are using Zoho Notebook.
We get this question quite often -
Does Zoho offer a backup function which will let me download all my data?
We have various options depending on each Zoho service.
Zoho Writer : Offers a variety of different formats that you can export a document to - doc, docx, pdf, odf (odt), latex, sxw, html, rtf & txt. Click on Export to see the options.
Also integrates with Google Gears. Offers upto 50 documents to be downloaded to your desktop. You can access these documents from http://writer.zoho.com/offline. Click on Go Offline to download Google Gears and your Zoho Writer documents
Zoho Sheet : Click on Export. Again offers a wide variety of options from xls to pdf to ods to xml. There is also a batch export option available from the sidebar.
Zoho Show : Open a presentation. Click on Export and you will see the options available (ppt, pdf, pps and odp)
Zoho Projects : Export all your tasks as an xls or csv file. Under Tasks and Milestones, click on Export button
Zoho Creator : Export all your data as xls, pdf. Also as RSS, JSON feeds etc.
Zoho Wiki : You can download all the pages of your Wiki as a zip file. Available under Settings -> Click to download the backup
Zoho CRM : Choose the module (Leads, Contacts etc) and click on Export. You can also export all your CRM data in one go also. We charge a nominal fee of $10.
Zoho DB & Reports : Export your reports as csv, pdf or an image file
Zoho Invoice : Export each invoice, estimate as pdf. Export customer's info as VCard (vcf).
Zoho Notebook : Has an Export as mht option. The exported page can be viewed in Internet Explorer.
We will be coming up with more export options in upcoming updates.
In the last few weeks we made several useful enhancements to Zoho Notebook. Here are few highlights...
Web Clipping
We made a simple but useful enhancement to the web clipping feature in Zoho Notebook. When you collect information using the 'Add to Zoho Notebook' option in the Firefox plug-in, the content will now be arranged one below the other. Previously, the content overlapped where you had to manually arrange them.
Editing Option for Objects
We now added editing option for the objects. The 'Edit' icon () lets you edit the HTML code in the 'Add HTML' object, Feed URL in 'Add RSS' object and URL in 'Add HTML' Object.
New Shapes
We noticed that several users use the drawing tools for drawing flowcharts. We now added more shapes that are useful for flowcharts.
RSS Object
The 'Add RSS' Object now supports feed from different RSS verions. This object currently support versions 0.91, 0.92, 1.0 & 2.0.
One of the most requested feature in Zoho Notebook is the ability to sort your notebooks. We now added this functionality in our recent update. You can now sort your books alphabetically, modified date and created date.
Also, Zoho Notebook Helper extension is now approved by Mozilla and is available directly here on Mozilla add-ons site. All future updates to the extension will be available on Mozilla site.
PC World announced a list of 25 most innovative products for 2007 and we are honored to see Zoho Notebook included. The list includes both software and hardware products.
PC World Says...
Innovation: Web-only app stores just about any kind of content and allows you to share it with anyone.
Benefit: More full-featured than competing online tools.
AdventNet's Zoho tools include everything from wiki software to customer relations management and project management applications, many of them free. Zoho Notebook (free, in public beta) continues the winning streak. You can enter text, graphics, audio, video, and embedded content from other sites onto your notebook's pages--or use the page as a single word processing document or spreadsheet. Put together everything on a certain subject, and you're ready to share your work with online compatriots.
As some of you may recall, Zoho Notebook was announced in Jan at DEMO conference and was open to public in May. Over the last seven months the application has been maturing rapidly with several updates and lots of regular users. Over the next few months you'll see several updates enhancing the functionality of the application further.
We will be talking about Zoho Notebook and other Zoho applications at the Show Stoppers event in Vegas.
We rolled out another update to Zoho Notebook with more goodies. Here is the list.
Lets looks at each of these enhancements.
Citation Support in Firefox Plug-in
This is one of the most requested feature. Our new Firefox plug-in lets you easily aggregate content from the internet and it also links back to the original site with the title on the top. Here is how the aggregated content looks with the new plug-in.
You'll notice the title on the top with a link back to the original site. You can change the title or the link using the 'Edit Title' icon ().
Skins Support
If you don't prefer the default color for the notebook, we now have two more options - Blue and Brown. You can change the Skin from the 'Preferences' section.
Keyboard Shortcuts
If you are used to keyboard shortcuts, some of them are supported now inside Zoho Notebook. Supported ones are - Save (CTRL + S), Copy (CTRL + C), Paste (CTRL + V), Undo (CTRL + Z) and Redo (CTRL + Y).
Linking Support
You'll now see two new icons in the text object - . You can now link your content to any URL. Of course, linking between notebook pages is coming.
Other Enhancements...
Remove Sharing
If you have a shared notebook which you no longer need, you can use our new 'Remove Sharing' option now () on the menu. Now you have the control on what notebooks you want to view in your shared section.
Rename/Delete Notebook
There is a new way to rename or delete a notebook. Simply right click on the book name, you'll see the new context menu appear.
Do give these new features a try and let us know your feedback.
We've scheduled a maintenance for Zoho Notebook on Sunday, November 18, 2007 between 9.00PM and 11.00PM PST. Hence, access to Zoho Notebook service will not be available during this period.
We apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause.
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