Productivity Sauce

An Android device is ideal for snapping photos of receipts, handwritten notes, and white board drawings. And you can use apps like Evernote, Catch, and Springpad to keep tabs on captured snaps in the cloud. But if you prefer not to rely on third-party services, then you can set up a DIY solution based on the Jambunote Python script cobbled together by yours truly. This script lets you snap photos, add text notes to them, and upload everything to an FTP server of your choice. In my particular case, all snaps and notes are uploaded to a separate directory on my FTP server, and I can then access, view, and edit them using the File Thingie web-based file manager.

Obviously, this solution is not exactly a drop-in replacement for Evernote or similar services, but it provides a simple way of capturing and uploading snaps and accompanying notes with a minimum of effort and without uploading and storing data with third-parties.

To make the script work on your Android device, install SL4A and Python for Android. Grab then the latest version of the script, and copy it to the sl4a/scripts directory on your device. Fire up SL4A, launch the script, and follow the prompts.