These days, by the advancement of technology, we enjoy very useful information technology in our works. Recently, the latest advancement of technology significantly affect my research life, which I do not know how long will it take. The excellent weapons are as follows:
Google Docs, Drop Box, and Evernote.
If you do not use one of them, I had to say that you lost very important part of your life. These systems enable us to access data from anywhere. I would like to explain what is the good point of the systems.
1) Reasonable price
Every service is available for free. If you want to increase their capacity, you can do that with some fee. Google docs can increase your storage size from 5$/year(20GB). Other services cost almost 5$/month, a little expensive.
2)Maximum portability
Those system is accessible via Mac, Windows, Linux. You can access Evernote from iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. I feel that the gap of the OS would disappear in some day.
help page of Google docs. You can access to the system from everwhere, from every OS.
3) Best User Interface with ultimate search engine
The common best feature is sophisticated interface. For example, you can enjoy maximum ability of serch by using Google docs. Google docs enable us to search in the words of documents. Evernote also facilitates the OCR(Optical character recognition). If you have some data which you scanned from magazines or old PDF files, Evernote enable us to search these data for free. If you do not pay, you just can post PDF, Screen shots, but it is still very useful.
Drop box is just a data storage. It can access from terminal window like regular directory.
You can download Evernote for free with 30MB/month.
If you use Evernote, you can use Tags for identify your data. Categorizing by notebook and Tags make us easy to find our data. A lot of researcher use Evernote as Lab notes.
Google can manage your files with folders like on your PC. In addition, they provide us with word processor, spread sheet, and presentation system like power points! Cool!
4)Attention!
Google Docs are good for keep all of your data. On the other hand, Mendeley would be alternative for your bibliography. Mendeley is web PDF storage system which enable us to set up interface of bibliography like Endnote or Zotero. Those softwares needs actual data in your computer. However, mendeley enable us to make lists just drag&drop of PDF. Zotero is excellent, but Mendeley is more powerful. Moreover, you can import from data kept in zotero.
After installation of the systems, my research environment rapidly improved. I feel that the cost of these system will decrease.
