Showing posts with label Web Apps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web Apps. Show all posts

Thursday, November 1, 2007

A Hot Date with Miro

Now that you've used Todoist to get all your pending tasks done (or at least catalogued) and Mint to sort out your fiscal world, it's time to sit back and relax.

Unfortunately, Comcast is evil and you're not eligible for Verizon FIOS. What's a girl to do?

I plan on sitting down tonight with Miro (formerly the Democracy Player) to see what is has to offer. It appears to provide everything an upstanding intellectual (well, intellectual property thief) could want in a video player:

  • High-Def content
  • DRM-free
  • Thousands of channels
  • RSS access
  • YouTube
  • Support for all kinds of oddball video formats
  • Privacy (if you take their word for it)
  • Open source GPL hotness
  • Something called The Midwest Teen Sex Show

I hope to post a review tomorrow.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Organize your life...

My Twitter feed alerted me to a post by mashable.com about 100+ ways to organize your life.

I'd encourage you to check it out if you like to manage lots of your life via the web.


I will highlight several from the article:


  • Todoist - previously mentioned by Zach and my preferred online task management site (we both use it and pay for the premium features)
  • Remember the Milk - another good online task management tool
  • Monkey On Your Back - attempt to organize others by sending them e-mail reminders
  • Knotler - create free, online, mobile shopping lists
  • Fitness Journal - track your fitness goals and progress online
  • Chore Wars - the World of Warcraft for chores
  • MyHomePoint - organize everything at your home
  • BrainCast - record messages for yourself and send them to your PC
  • Our Wedding Day - online wedding organization
  • Planypus - organize your social life with a wiki

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Todoist is the Truth

Over the last month or so, I've played with a few online productivity/task list tools (Tracks, GTDTracks, Vitalist) and they all have come up a little short for me.

I've used Todoist for the last 2 weeks or so and, like Jordan Bratman, I don't think I'm going to do much better than this.

A few of the things I like about it:

Clean Interface
After hiding the info page with one click, all you see are your tasks, projects, and a minmalist search window. No clutter on the screen.

Dates/Times
Maybe the coolest feature. Tired of clicking around in Outlook, setting a deadline for something that has to be done tomorrow by noon? I'm not going to check (it takes too long), but I'd guess it takes at least 12 clicks in several different date, time, scheduling boxes. In todoist you just type "tomorrow @ 12", "friday @ 12", or even "tom @ 12". Schedule recurring tasks by putting an "every" or "ev" in front of the date. I defy you to set up a recurring task in any other system with fewer key strokes than "ev 15" (Every 15th of the month) or "ev mon" (every Monday).

Contexts
If you're practicing your GTD mantra, or just sorting things out, you can add contexts to your tasks by simply adding "@home", "@work", etc... to the task description. Unlike GTDTracks and Vitalist you can add multiple contexts to tasks you can get done either at home or in the car, or wherever.

Prioritization
Similar to adding contexts, adding priorities is simple. "!p1" makes the task a top level priority, "!p2" a second level priority, and so on. There are 4 levels, each color coded.

Keyboard Shortcuts
Along with dates, the keyboard shortcuts are what really make Todoist stand out. Adding tasks, promoting and demoting tasks and projects, sorting, and much more can be done with shortcuts.

Launchy/iGoogle/Integration
Adding the Todoist DLL to your Launchy program folder allows you to add tasks to todoist using Launchy. 'Nuf said. I haven't used the iGoogle widget yet, but I imagine it works wonderfully. A Firefox extension for g-mail lets you send e-mails directly to your task list. And so on. There are Quicksilver and Mac Dashboard plug-ins and widgets, but, like Pony Parties (definately not linking to that, look it up yourself), I won't admit to knowing anything about how they work.

Chaining
I haven't done much chaining (a la Seinfeld), but it is equally easy to implement.

Price
It's $3 per month for the premium level. That gets you SSL, reminders (MSN, Jabber, Twitter, chaining, and other labeling capabilities. You probably spend at least $3/month on plastic silverware, replacement earring backs, and contraception. Todoist is more important than any of those things. Just think how quick it will be to type "[Ctrl-A] Go to planned parenthood, take care of it [Tab] tom @ 8".


What's Missing
There is not (or I have not found) iCal or RSS functionality.
Anyways, I've enjoyed using it, sign up, get your act together, then comment and tell me how smart I am.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Online Financial Tools

I've been putting off signing up for a one-size fits all online financial tool like Mint or Wesabe. Have any of you dummies used one of these and had noteworthy experiences?

I suppose there's always the security risks of putting all your financial information in one place, but once a sketchy Panamanian waiter takes your Amex out of site to settle your tab/order his new Segway Skateboard, why sweat the small stuff?