How does springpad work

The comment field is especially helpful for when you share a notebook with another Springpad user to collaborate. You can also attach photos, links, audio recordings, PDFs, and reminders to each note, which makes for an incredibly robust note-taking experience.

And of course, you can share a link to your notes with any of your device's other installed applications using Android's share feature. The nice thing is that Springpad will format your note appropriately and even add some relevant information according to the category selected. For instance, add a movie, and you'll get a synopsis, release date, and cast information.

Add a restaurant, and Springpad will show its location on a map and embed a link to the corresponding Yelp, Foursquare, and OpenTable pages where available. Conversely, if you're looking at a restaurant from your Yelp app, share it with Springpad, and Springpad will turn it into a Restaurant note with all the relevant information.

It's a very convenient feature. If you save a Web site bookmark or online article, Springpad will only pull in the link and small snippet of text into the spring, not the full text of an article. That's disappointing to me, because I like to save entire articles to reference later and to do that in Springpad, I'd have to copy and paste the article into the spring after I saved it.

In contrast, Evernote's clipper tool captures the full Web page or article. You can group your springs into collections called notebooks. You can customize each notebook by giving it a name; choosing a color and design scheme, which includes a handful of textile, paper, and wood textures such as denim and grid paper ; and choosing to share it with others or keep it private so only you can view it.

If you don't keep your notebook private, other Springpad users can see it when they browse public notebooks in the app. I am a big fan of the notebook themes, where I can choose a color and textured background. The effect in the notebook is subtle, but it makes the app look refined and pretty to look at. Since explaining everything that Springpad can do could go on for pages, I'll describe two ways I've used the app over the last several years.

First, Springpad has served as a digital cookbook, where I store recipes I find all over the Web. Anything that's been. The attractive interface makes it easy to add and organize your content. If even that fails you, you can add a URL, set the type for the note a product, for example and then fill in the rest of the information. Notes can contain almost anything — along with photos, videos, and links, it's possible to upload any file to share as part of the note.

There's also a "Spring It! Having added everything to your notebook, you can choose whether to set it as public or private and invite other users to collaborate.

The sharing is very simple — simply add a friend using an email address or username — but there's no address book or auto-suggestion, meaning that you'll either need a good memory or have to open up your address book each time. The best public notebooks are shown under the Explore tab at the top of the page, letting you find other users with similar tastes and search for inspiration easily. You can also follow individual notebooks, or a user's entire output. The Springpad update extends to the company's mobile apps for Android and iOS, and we're told that apps for other platforms are also on the cards.

The styles you create for your notebooks carry over, with the same textures and highlight colors appearing on your mobile device. Everything you create on the web interface is automatically available in the apps, and it's also possible to enable background sync, meaning that you can be notified of any changes or comments to your notebooks on the move. Springpad has created different interfaces for the iOS and Android apps. The iOS app is universal meaning that it'll work just as well on your iPad as your iPhone or iPod touch , with a primary yellow navigation bar running across the top of the screen at all times.

It should feel instantly familiar, following Apple's design language with minimalist navigation, and content given the majority of the screen space. The Android version is reminiscent of the official Facebook app, with a button in the top left hiding a pop-up navigation menu and a large plus symbol on the right adding new notebooks or notes depending on where you are in the app. This product is no longer available.

Check out top picks for more great tools. Learning rating. See full review. Community rating. Privacy rating. Not yet rated Expert evaluation by Common Sense. Great for. Productivity , Social Media. See how we rate and review. Take a look inside 5 images. Pros : Robust, clean design, integration between different genres. What Is It? Is It Good for Learning?

Continue reading Show less. Common Core ELA. Editor's Note: Springpad has closed and is no longer available. Click the plus-sign to quick-add that item to your Springpad account. You can paste a URL, or just start typing the name of the product, and Springpad will auto-complete the entry for you. Then it'll add links to buy the product at Amazon, check other prices elsewhere, and even look up reviews and other information on the product so you can make an educated decision, all without you spending time looking it up yourself.

If you decide to sleep on it, Springpad will even send you an alert if the price on your item drops to warn you that now might be a good time to buy.

The same applies for music, movies, and books—Springpad automatically organizes them for you and pulls in relevant information so you don't have to. We noted this a while ago , but perhaps the biggest joy of using Springpad is that you don't have to have a half-dozen tools and utilities that do similar-but-just-slightly-different things web clipping, public sharing, private collaboration, to-do and task management, etc when Springpad does them all well enough that you can spend more time doing instead of planning and organizing.

Each notebook in your account can represent a category that you want to organize items into, like "Recipes to Try" or "Parts for My Next Computer Build," or a whole project where you can to collect ideas and to-dos instead of projects, like "Basement Renovation" or "Garden Planning. Here's how:. Your notebooks can be public, private, or only available to a select group of people. If you and your significant other are planning to redecorate the living room, for example, the two of you can share a notebook where you both post design or furniture ideas for the other to see.

You can connect your Springpad account with your Google account to pull in events from Google Calendar. If you have a friend who's into music, you can create a notebook for new albums, and invite them to comment on your tastes and suggest new bands without exposing the world to your music tastes.

If you prefer being public, you can just as easily share your notebook with all of your friends on Twitter or Facebook so they know what you're into. It's flexible, and the way you use the notebooks is entirely up to you. Springpad is primarily a webapp, but you can also manage your notebooks on your iOS or Android device thanks to the Springpad mobile apps. There are also tablet-specific variants for the iPad and for Android tablets, and while we love the webapp, the mobile apps are just as useful, especially for retrieving information on the go, like a shopping list or itinerary.

Don't be fooled though—the mobile apps are designed for data entry as well, and you can get some real work done using the Springpad mobile apps, especially on a tablet.