“Wow, they’re doing a good job, right?” said the little Tedesco munchkin.

It was one of those cute family moments when I wished I could go back in time and hit the record button.

So I did.

I tapped the screen of my smartphone and the Cogi Android app captured the last 15 seconds of our conversation. Cogi kept on recording until I tapped the screen again. And I repeated the process through the whole speech, capturing only the highlights of what our kids said.

This is the genius behind Cogi — you only record what you want. And Cogi lets you jump back in time to capture that fleeting moment. Because by the time you realize you want to record something, it’s usually too late.

“I don’t want to record everything,” said Mark Cromack, president and chief technology officer of Santa Barbara-based Cogi Inc. “But by the time I realize I do want to record something, I do need to back up a bit. That’s the cool part.”

The app’s name is about capturing the “cogent idea” and it’s like a DVR for your life. Cogi could help anyone who attends long meetings, school lectures or court hearings. You can also get creative with it. I’ve started to use Cogi during car rides with the kids when they’re being funny. Cromack said bird watchers use it to record bird calls. Lifehacker called it one of the best recording apps for Android.

I interviewed Cromack last week to ask how the company came up with the clever idea for Cogi, discuss a couple things I see as limitations, and learn what new features are on the horizon. Cromack is an avid Cogi evangelist who said he, his co-founder and his son thought of the idea years ago before anyone knew how useful smartphones would become.

“Imagine a world where you got, let’s say, a lapel pin,” Cromack said. “You could just tap it that moment when something interesting happens. Or better yet, it just magically knew that something was cogent to you.

“Well, that’s an interesting dream. Roll that back to some degree of reality. What could we achieve nowadays?”

Then smartphones became a thing. Today, the Cogi app is available on iTunes and Google Play. Here’s how the app works:

You open Cogi and a button on the screen says “start session.”

Tap on that and start a new session. A session is when Cogi is listening but not actively recording. The button now says “tap to highlight.”

When you hear something you want to keep, tap the highlight button. Cogi then starts to actively record, and it goes back in time to record the previous audio it was listening to before you hit the button. You have the option to go back five, 15, 30 or 45 seconds in time.

You can repeat this process as often as you like. When you’re done with the session, hold down the button. Cogi lets you add notes, tags and photos to each session. You can upload sessions or audio clips to services such as Evernote.

That’s all free. Cogi makes money by offering a monthly membership service that allows you to record phone calls and receive transcripts of recordings for a fee.

While you could use it to record an entire interview and soak up every word, Cogi really shines when you only want to capture the highlights of long conversations or events.

One problem with Cogi is that it only records in Windows .wav files. The quality is great but the large files hog memory. Cromack said Cogi will soon add options to record in other formats.

“That’s coming out within probably the next public release,” he said. “It has to.” Cromack said the company knows users want that option but it’s one item on a long list of improvements the company is working on.

“We’ve known about it,” he said. “The issue was just one of, ‘Let’s get something out there that works and it’s solid and has that cool experience.’”

Related: A running list of must-have Android apps for journalists in 2017

Another quibble: When the screen is off or when you’re using other apps, Cogi no longer passively listens during a session. (If you’re actively recording, Cogi will still capture audio.) The screen dims after awhile to save battery life. But if I’m taking notes or something I don’t want to accidentally brush the screen and screw something up. Or maybe I’ll need to use another app during a session.

Cromack sounded receptive to that critique but declined to discuss details about whether it will be addressed in upcoming updates, or whether Cogi will branch out beyond audio into the world of video. He later sent me an email saying the company is developing a version of the app that lets users record sessions even when the screen is off.

“Based on your input and questions, we already have implemented a private version of the app that continues to record/monitor when the screen is off,” he wrote. “Control is passed to the volume keys and feedback to the LEDs (on Android). This not only provides a more subtle way of triggering Cogi, but it dramatically improves power savings achieved as compared to the current dim screen feature. As such, we’ll be delivering this ‘power user feature,’ no pun intended, in a future release (soon). We still have some things to work out with this feature, as this proof of concept version was to just see how it *might* work.”

Cromack said that later this year Cogi will offer cloud services to members. This would enable users to share highlights, notes and photos with others who could view that material in a web browser.

“All of that is part of Cogi cloud services,” Cromack said. “It’s not available today but it’s going to be out.”

If demand increases for Cogi’s transcription services for members, Cromack said the company plans to include other languages and translation services. Cogi is also going to be updated to support enhancements for larger devices, such as tablets and iPads. “There’s a long laundry list of really exciting capabilities,” he said.

For me, Cogi offers a way to capture fleeting moments not only for news stories, but for the times with my kids when they say something funny or insightful. Parents think they’ll remember every moment of their children growing up. Cogi can help make that happen — even for the moments we miss. Just hit that highlight button, upload your session, and make a family journal.

Now you’ll never forget that time your daughter watched the State of the Union address

The post Review: Go back in time with Cogi to record fleeting moments appeared first on John Tedesco.

Here’s the news story and one of the videos. “We started out with a link to the live stream from a breaking news story about the bear downtown. People in the office tweeted about the story and live stream,” Justin wrote.

The video showed how authorities managed to capture the bear without hurting the wild animal. It’s a good example of how a smart phone can be an amazing tool when you’re covering breaking news. Apps like Qik let you broadcast a video as the news happens. Awesome. Glad it was useful, Justin.

The post New ways to cover breaking news appeared first on John Tedesco.

At the same time, you need to stay on top of this rapidly evolving technology and use it to truly understand it. I had blogged about handy Android apps for journalists a few weeks ago. Here are some more smart phone apps and tools Kiesow recommended:

• Audioboo: For instant podcasting — make a recording on your phone and upload it straight to the Web. Simple.
• Yelp, Foursquare, and Gowalla: Can be used for researching businesses and finding customers.
• Eye-Fi: Smart cards for cameras that create WiFi connections and let you upload photos. Awesome.
• Dropbox: Handy file-sharing system.

The post Smart phone apps for mobile journalists appeared first on John Tedesco.

Smartphone apps have radically changed the ways journalists do their jobs. With the right tools, your phone can become a photocopier, audio recorder, high-quality video camera and police radio scanner all rolled into one.

Here’s a running list of Android apps that have helped me over the years. I’m continually updating this list as old apps die and new apps come to life. Contact me if you’ve found something amazing and I’ll be sure to add it. Many of these tools will also help iPhone users find, organize and share information, and some are designed to keep your data private.

Recording interviews with Android apps

The best Android recording apps I’ve found are Simple Voice Recorder and Cogi. The audio quality on both apps is crystal clear, and you can adjust the size and bit rate of the files.

Cogi brings a unique angle to the recording field by letting you cherry pick what you want to keep.

Let’s say you’re writing about a long, boring City Council meeting. You don’t want to record the whole thing. But you don’t want to miss anything juicy, either.

Open Cogi and start a recording session. When you hear something interesting, tap “highlight.” Cogi starts actively recording and magically goes back in time to record what was said up to 45 seconds earlier so you don’t miss anything. When the interesting part ends, tap the screen again to stop actively recording. You can repeat this as many times as you like.

Related: How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques

Hi-Q MP3 Recorder offers outstanding audio quality and allows you to automatically upload your files to Dropbox or Google Drive. It has a widget button you can put on your home screen to quickly start and stop recording. For some Android phones, it can record phone calls. I use this app for most of my interviews.

Taking notes and organizing files

I view Evernote as a vast, searchable, personal archive — a place for primary documents, images and web pages that can be tagged and retrieved in moments.

When you save a file to Evernote, all the text in that file is searchable — even in jpg images. So if you’re on deadline and desperately need to find a picture of a business card you uploaded to Evernote months ago and vaguely remember the person worked for the city of San Antonio, search your Evernote files for “city of San Antonio” to call up all those business cards to find the right match.

You can organize your files into notebooks and tag them to further refine your searches. Your files are synced with Evernote and can be accessed from other devices.

While Evernote is great for saving and searching documents, I found it to be a bit glitchy for taking actual notes. For no-frills note taking that puts the focus on writing, try SimpleNote, offered by the makers of WordPress. I’ve been using it for a few months and it really is dead simple, which is a good thing. If you want more features, Google Drive is for you.

But the problem with services such as Evernote and Google is that they can access your notes, files and messages and hand them over to authorities without even telling you.

To beef up your security, avoid creating files in the cloud if you’re working on a sensitive story and use apps that protect your notes with end-to-end encryption, which means no one can make sense of those files except you.

Evernote offers a way to encrypt text within each note. Standard Notes is an open-source app that pledges to securely encrypt your notes and sync those files across multiple devices. Sync.com is a file-sharing app that touts itself as an encrypted, secure version of Dropbox.

Communicating securely

To protect your email messages from prying eyes, check out ProtonMail, a service based in Switzerland that’s obsessed with privacy. The app uses end-to-end encryption to keep the contents of your inbox safe. No one, not even ProtonMail, can read your messages. ProtonMail works best when both the sender and recipient use it. Keep in mind that metadata, such as the subject line of the email and the sender and recipient’s email address, isn’t encrypted.

For text messages, Signal Private Messenger offers end-to-end encryption if both users are on Signal. Users can also make encrypted phone calls to each other. Signal says it collects very little metadata.

For routine, work-related phone calls and texts, check out Google Voice. Google provides a free phone number that can be assigned to multiple phones — even a land line. Your original phone numbers will still work. In the Google Voice app for Android, when someone leaves you a voice mail, Google transcribes (somewhat accurately) the message, so you can quickly read it and get the gist of what the person wants without even listening to it. When someone calls your Google number, you can press 4 to record the call — another handy tool if you’re caught without a recorder. You get an e-mail of each voice mail and audio recording, and you can embed them on Web pages. Lifehacker examined the pros and cons of Google Voice after it was unveiled.

If you’re concerned about your online activities being tracked by advertisers, one option is Firefox Focus, a free browser that lets you block or erase tracking cookies, your browsing history and unwanted advertisements. You can also surf the web anonymously via the Tor network with Orfox, which is based on the open-source code for the Firefox browser but with tweaks to make it compatible with Android.

Scanning documents

A big part of a reporter’s job is making copies of records, analyzing them and sharing them. Our smartphones have become personal photocopy machines.

To take pictures of multiple pages of documents and combine those images into a single pdf file, I use Clear Scan. After photographing a page, you can crop the image and adjust brightness levels. The final result is a high-quality document that you can publish online with a news story or upload to your favorite file-sharing app.

Gathering and sharing news

Nuzzle is a handy addition to your social media arsenal. Sync the Android app to your Twitter account and it alerts you whenever a big story is blowing up on Twitter. It’s a useful way to stay informed about the stories people are sharing online.

Andmade Share is a cool little utility app that lets you customize sharing options in Android. It solves the frustration of encountering different layouts every time you try sharing content in Facebook, YouTube, and other apps.

Monitor radio traffic of police officers, firefighters and paramedics using a radio scanner app such as Broadcastify. The free version has annoying ads, but signing up for an annual membership removes the ads and grants you access to radio archives.

For political junkies, the Sunlight Foundation made the Congress Android app. You can look up profiles of U.S. senators and representatives, track the bills they file and receive notifications on your phone when the status of a bill changes. ProPublica took over the foundation’s online tools and the Congress app still runs smoothly.

The best weather app I’ve found is AccuWeather Platinum. It’s not perfect but it does offer timely precipitation maps and decent predictions of when it will rain at your exact location and for how long.

There’s no shortage of photo-editing apps for Android but I find myself using the reliable features of the default Google Photos app. You can fine-tune brightness, saturation and other aspects of each photo, and Google recently introduced a feature that stabilizes shaky video. Google Photos also automatically saves photos and videos in the cloud, if you want it to.

Beyond Android apps

One of the unique things about Android is you can customize your phone’s home screen with app launchers and widgets. You’re not stuck with the default home screen on your device.

Evie Launcher offers a polished interface and a wide array of customization options. The developers promise to take your privacy seriously.

Tapping on Evie’s search box on the home screen lets you search the web with your choice of three search engines, not just Google. For privacy advocates, you can select DuckDuckGo as your default search engine. Evie also displays recently used apps in the search interface.

Evie’s privacy policy says it collects some user data to personalize search results, but it doesn’t share identifying information with third parties. You can adjust your permission settings to prevent Evie from accessing your location and contacts list.

Android widgets are snazzy tools that can be huge time savers. Google Calendar’s widget lets you scroll through all your upcoming events on your home screen without having to open the actual calendar app. Widgets for Google Maps let you save directions to specific locations. Save a Google Maps widget for “work,” for example, and save yourself some time every morning navigating the chaos of rush hour.

To find widgets, hold your finger on a blank area of your home screen and the option to add one will appear.

Read more: Web tools and apps to track weather emergencies in Texas

You can also add bookmarks to your home screen to quickly check web pages with one tap. This feature is handy for emergency calls. Whenever I hear sirens nearby and I want to find out what’s going on, I tap on my bookmark for the San Antonio Fire Department’s “active fires” dispatch page. Up pops a list of active emergencies and their locations in San Antonio. Use this technique for any website you routinely check on your phone.

Did I miss any Android goodies? Let me know, I’m updating this post from time to time.

The post Updated: A running list of must-have Android apps for journalists appeared first on John Tedesco.

Why install the same application in so many different places? Evernote stores your collected items in the “cloud,” so every time you capture something using, say, an iPhone, that item resides on the Evernote server and thus becomes available through other interfaces such as the standalone Evernote application on a desktop machine or via the Evernote website visited on your laptop.

Miller explains the myriad ways he relies on Evernote. To use a technical term, it looks wicked awesome for journalists and researchers. I’m now inspired to try it out on my Android phone — check the instructional video.

Related: What’s Evernote for? How about making a vast, searchable archive of all your files

Update: Just found this vid that demonstrates how Evernote uses a type of Optical Character Recognition when you upload photos. So when you type keyword searches, you can find the words in documents you photograph. Madness.

The post Reporting tool: Taking notes with Evernote appeared first on John Tedesco.