For those of us that follow all or some of the GTD principles, or are just working to always capture ideas and get them out of our heads ASAP, I’ve come across a tool that has become my one and only digital capture tool at this point. Its an app called Braintoss. Right now its only available for iOS, but an Android one is coming soon.
The premise is pretty simple. Launch the app and choose to capture as either voice, text, or image. Whatever you captured then gets sent off to the email address of your choice. You set one email address as your default, but can add more and select them with a long press when its time to send off what you’ve captured. If you capture with voice, you get transcribed text as well as an audio attachment of what you said. It works marvelously with Omnifocus. Just use the Omnifocus email address for your account, and your captured item shows up in your inbox. If you capture as voice, the attached audio file shows up in the notes. If you capture as an image, its a little clunky as the picture shows up as a jpg in the notes section, but still kind of cool.
Also works with Evernote if you are an Evernote person.
You can find them on twitter here: @braintoss
Check it out if you are in to this kind of thing.
Just FYI, while I have had the opportunity to speak with the creator of the app, I’m not an employee or anything. I’m not getting paid anything to talk about it. I just really like the app.
At first I had buyers remorse with braintoss. I wasn’t happy with the format of the emails. Then after sending an email to support and getting a response back within minutes, I found there are all sorts of settings to customize exactly how you want the emails formatted that are sent to omnisync server. A very happy customer too.
I’ve been using this for a couple of weeks now and love it. Thanks again for the suggestion. Siri feels so unreliable after using Braintoss on both watch and phone. The only problem I’ve had, and it is consistent, is the very first time I launch it on my watch, it says it isn’t installed on my phone, second time clears the problem.
Does anyone know if braintoss will capture offline? If I am not connected to the net, I would like it to capture things and when my phone is online, it’ll automatically email them.
Unfortunately, that is exactly how it is supposed to work.
The OmniFocus iOS app asks the Reminders app for new items, it doesn’t work as a ‘push’ from Reminders to OmniFocus. So yes, this means, you have to run OmniFocus on your iPhone for the reminders to hop over to OmniFocus.
