Skip to main content

Paper or digital? The hybrid Slice Planner gives you the best of both worlds

Do you drive yourself a little bit bonkers switching back and forth between digital and paper planners? That’s a common problem with people who want the syncing and flexibility of digital planners and the immediacy and “realness” of paper. The hybrid Slice Planner, currently in a Kickstarter campaign, is designed for people who need to manage busy lives yet want the best of both digital and paper planning tools. In addition to calendar syncing, Slice Planner enhances planning with utilizing computer vision (CV) and augmented reality (AR) technologies.

A key to Slice Planner’s concept is using a clock-face diagram on the paper side of the hybrid planner. According to the designers, 65 percent of the population are visual thinkers, so a clock face helps them focus on tasks and time. The radial clock-face diagram also enables the AR and CV features.

Related Videos

A PDF version of the paper planner will be available for those who just want to print out hard copy sheets. Two attractive versions of the Slice Planner notebook, one hardcover and the other with a leather soft cover that holds planner refills, will keep your pages neater and easier to use and carry. Each paper planner has 224 pages with a 12-hour calendar clock face on the left side pages and open space for notes and diagrams on the right side pages. Use the next two pages if your days extend longer than 12 hours.

The free Slice Planner app, which works with Outlook, Google, and Apple digital calendars, adds features and flexibility to the calendars and your planning management. The app uses your smartphone camera and Google Vision’s optical character recognition (OCR) to recognize and synchronize events and notations from the paper clock face diagram to your digital calendar (legible handwriting helps). AR comes into play when you focus the camera on your paper calendar — overlapping events show up in red in the app, alerting you to adjust the schedule.

A Smart Crop app tool helps you transfer written notes or drawings. Draw a solid line around the note, formula, figures, or whatever and the app crops that segment digitally and attaches it to a calendar event. You can use this tool to capture content on any surface, not just the paper Slice Planner, so you can grab content on a whiteboard or from a book, for example.

The Advanced Sharing app feature enables sharing notes or diagrams or any selected content from paper. You can send the content via email, store it in the cloud, or attach it to calendar events.

You can get breaks on the eventual retail prices for the hardcover ($37) and leather soft cover ($50) versions of the Slice Planner by pre-ordering via the Kickstarter campaign. A limited number of paper planners will ship in December, with full production scheduled for March 2017.

Editors' Recommendations

New Windows 11 update adds ChatGPT-powered Bing AI to the taskbar
Microsoft has released a new Windows 11 feature that makes the OS photos app compatible with Apple's iClould.

Microsoft has just unveiled the latest update to Windows 11 which has already started rolling out. There are plenty of changes on the horizon, including those involving the ChatGPT-based Bing AI search.

The new update lets Windows 11 users communicate with the AI-powered version of Bing right in their taskbar. The AI model itself also seems to have received an update that might make conversing with it less bizarre.

Read more
Don’t watch this YouTube video if you have a Pixel 7
Someone holding the Google Pixel 7 Pro.

Reports of another "cursed" piece of content have been making the internet rounds as a video on YouTube has been causing Pixel devices to crash. The video, a clip from the 1979 movie Alien, seems to cause Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and some Pixel 6 and Pixel 6a smartphones to instantly reboot without warning.

As first reported on Reddit and spotted by Mishaal Rahman, the video will begin to play for only a second or two and then instantly reboot the Pixel 7 it's being played on. Digital Trends can confirm the bug to be active and working, too, with the video instantly rebooting a Pixel 7 Pro we tested it on.

Read more
Google just announced 9 new features for your Android phone and watch
Samsung Galaxy S23 showing Google Photos

Google has announced some big new features coming to Android and Wear OS devices during the Mobile World Congress 2023 event in Barcelona, Spain. These new features are beginning to roll out starting today, February 27, with others to come later.
New Android features available starting February 27

Google Drive users will now be able to do freehand annotation on Android phones and tablets. This means you are now able to use a stylus or your fingers to annotate PDFs directly in the Google Drive app on Android.

Read more