ididwork.com is a great site to use if you a freelancer or if you want to keep track of what you have accomplished at the office. You are given simple text entry points to log what project you did and you can tag it into a certain category, things like presentations, blog posts, report, etc.
This gives you a running list of what you have accomplished, it provides charts of daily accomplishment, what you have done the most work on according to your tags and a graph of overall performance.
You can also use the feedback button to email your manager your recent progress and get comments from him or her. It's very simple to use and free to sign up. I think it will be a great place to keep track of my blog posts and time spent on other writing projects I am doing.
And, the most useful part if you are working in a team, you can add feeds to your teammates ididwork accounts. For example, if Brad, Lee and I are working on a joint feature post and I need to wait for Brad to be finished with his portion before I can complete mine, if we link up, I can tell as soon as he is done. Then Lee can see when we are both finished and work on his portion.
You can also use the feature as a manager or supervisor and keep track of what your team has completed.
The best part? Since it's on the web you can use it from any computer you are at and if IT decides to "fix" your computer overnight, you won't lose all your data.
There are lots of nice launcher apps out there (Launchy, SpeedLaunch, Executor, etc.), but why bother with them when you can do the same thing with functions already built in to Windows? Explorer's running anyways, so you may as well get something out of it.
First, create a new folder that will contain your shortcuts. If you've got a data drive or partition, put it there so it'll stick around after a reformat. Next, right click my computer, and open system properties.
Click the advanced tab, then click the environment variables button. In the bottom box, find path and click the edit button. Now scroll all the way to the right, add a semicolon to the end, and input the path to your new folder.
I've used plenty of hotkey applications, but none is as visually appealing or easy to configure as QLiner.
Download and install QLiner, launch it, and then press win + z to open the main window (above). New hotkeys can be added by simply dragging a shortcut from your desktop onto a key - it even works with URLs from your browser.
More than just a launcher, QLiner first tries to match your hotkey with a running application. If it finds a match, it'll bring that window to the front instead of spawning a new process. You can add runtime arguments to your hotkeys as well: for example, /auto on CCleaner to add a one-key system cleanup.
QLiner also has built-in layouts that are tailored for Sony, IBM, Toshiba, and Dell laptop keyboards. Dvorak keyboards are supported, and international users will be thrilled by the massive number of languages available.
Its 45mb memory footprint is a tad on the bulky side, but it's easy to overlook because of QLiner's ease-of-use and flexibility. QLiner is freeware, Windows only.
About six years ago Mitch Kapor, the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, started a new open source project called Chandler. The goal was simple enough: Create an personal information management tool that would allow users to store, share, and collaborate. It would have things like a calendar, address book, and to do list.
In other words, Chandler is a lot like Microsoft Outlook. But there are a few major differences:
Chandler is open source
Chandler works with Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a web interface
You can sync your Chandler tasks with an online server and share them with others
Overall the interface of the desktop and web clients is pretty, but not necessarily intuitive. For example, there's a nice big text entry box at the top of the application that you would think would be for searching. But it's primary use is for entering new tasks. Type something into that box and a new task is created. If you want to use the text area as a search box, you need to type "/f" before entering your query. Is Chandler kind of useful? Sure. Is it an Outlook killer? Maybe. Was it worth a six year wait? Maybe not. But now that it's here, Kapor says it's up to the open source community to continue developing the project. And I've learned never to understimate the open source community. If there's a will, there's a way, and this application could be the future of collaborative task management. On the other hand, it's not entirely clear if there's a will at the moment.
What do you think? Is Chandler the wave of the future, or should Kapor have given up on it years ago?
Wikipedia is a great source of information, and it's getting bigger every day. If you're like me, you'd be hard pressed to go a day without looking something up on Wikipedia. But sometimes you might not have Internet access -- devastating, I know! -- and you still need to know whether there's a grammatically correct sentence made up entirely of the word "buffalo." Well, it's a good thing there's Wikitaxi, an offline Wikipedia app.
With Wikitaxi, you can snag the entire database of Wikipedia -- or, if you're pressed for bandwidth, the Simple English version is a lot smaller -- and read it offline on your Windows machine. It comes with a separate importer app that you can point at a database, and then you can use the main Wikitaxi app to run searches on it. Those clever people at Lifehacker suggest that you carry it around on a USB drive: then you can prove that buffalo thing to your friends at a moment's notice!
While computer work tends to not be physically risky, that doesn't mean you should assume it's not impacting your health. Carpal tunnel and Computer Vision Syndrome are no laughing matter, and it's important to take steps to avoid them.
EyeDefender helps by starting breaks at intervals of your choosing (you choose the length of the break as well). To rest your eyes you can choose either your default screensaver, an image, or the visual training mode. The training mode is a bit reminiscent of the relaxation portion of Flash Focus for the Nintendo DS.
If you stick to the schedule you set up, EyeDefender breaks will also help prevent repetetive strain injuries. Like anything designed to help your quest for improved health, you've got to stick with it to see benefits.
For web workers that have a hard time tearing themselves away from their screen, EyeDefender is a handy application with tremendous potential benefits. It's free for non-commercial private use and runs on Windows only.
Vyew My PC is a flash-based instant desktop sharing product with a lot of fun features.
Basically, go to the Vyew My PC web page and click start sharing my desktop. You will be given a unique, unguessable URL. You can then share that URL with anyone you'd like to share your desktop with. There are some features you need an account to use, but the basics are usable by anyone.
You can upload files to be shown on the Vyew My PC desktop, use the whiteboard features, chat and with registration, use audio/video features. You cannot however, view anything outside the Vyew My PC desktop area. So, if you want to switch to a new window and show a web page you are viewing, it's not going to show up unless you take screenshots and present those.
It moves smoothly and all the features seem to work. Now, I didn't go in and have a full-fledged sales presentation to a CEO or anything but I did show a powerpoint to two of my friends who logged in from two seperate locations.
My main concern was about security. Showing a powerpoint to my friends is quite a bit different than important company information. So, this is what I found out; the packet data for your session is not encrypted but the URLs seem to be unique enough that someone wouldn't just stumble into your meeting without being invited. SSL encryption is not offered publicly but could be a possibility for some clients.
Have you ever bookmarked a web page only to forget what it was you were supposed to be looking at on that page? Wired Marker is a Firefox add-on that lets you highlight text on a page in one of 8 colors. Next time you load the page the plugin will remember your annotations and reload them for you. If you don't like the default colors, you can also customize them.
This isn't the first application we've seen that lets you markup web pages like old textbooks. But unlike Awesome Highlighter, Wired Marker is integrated with your web browser, so you don't have to enter the URL of the page you want to mark into a separate web application first. Just right click anywhere on any page, select Wired Marker, and pick your color.
If you're anything like me, you're probably at least a little bit addicted to your internet connection. The first thing I do when I wake up is check my email and RSS feeds, and it's also the last thing I do before going to sleep. But that addiction can sometimes be a problem.
Staying on-task these days is not easy, particularly if you work at an internet-connected computer. The possible distractions are virtually limitless. So what is a geek to do? One option is to simply pull the plug. The network plug, that is.
But of course, these days almost all computers have wireless capabilities, so turning off your internet connection isn't quite as simply as just pulling the plug. If you're on a Mac, you can use Freedom.
Freedom will turn off all of your Mac's wireless and ethernet networking for a set amount of time. So if you need to put your head down for an hour and get some work done, you can set Freedom to an hour, and know that you won't be tempted by any distractions.
If you absolutely need to get back online before the chosen duration is up, the only way to do so is to reboot your computer.
This is one of those apps that will be a life saver for some people, and seem totally ridiculous to others. Which are you?
chosr is a web based bookmarking and productivity tool. It uses a Quicksilver type interface and apparently, if you're a Quicksilver user it's very intuitive. If, like me, you're not, it takes a little bit to get the hang of the interface. (More about Quicksilver).
The idea is that basic keystrokes move you through a three panel screen. So if I want to search for Download Squad in the first box I would use the period key to open my text entering mode and type in Download Squad. I would then press the tab key to move to the next window where I would again press the period key to enter text. You can type in various search methods like Google, wikipedia, YouTube, etc. Tab over to the third square and the default for searching "in new window" will probably already be there. Press enter and a new window with your search results will open.
Want to bookmark it in your chosr file? Copy the url, paste into the first box, after hitting the period, tab to the second box and type bookmark and you will be ready to go. Then you can bookmark all your daily sites, tab through them and basically eliminate your mouse for some things.
I have not used Quicksilver before so it seemed very awkward to me. For example at one point I got to a list where one of the options was to change the background. I was happy about that since the normal background is rather ugly. I couldn't get the right combination in the right boxes to actually make it work though, which was frustrating.
If you're a regular user of Quicksilver and you enjoy it, you should definitely check out chosr. If you're looking to use your keyboard more and have a few minutes to play with it, then check it out. And if you can change the background, let me know how!
Vito Technology is probably best known for developing software for Windows Mobile and Symbian phones and PDAs. But the company has just made the jump into a new arena: web apps. First up is an online task manager called Task2Gather.
The interface is clean and easy to use, if not entirely intuitive. It took me a few moments to figure out how to name new tasks or projects, for example (you type in the Name & description box, but it wasn't immediately clear that the light blue area was a text box). You can either see a list of all your tasks from multiple projects at once, or you can browse tasks using a tree mode, which lets you pick a project and look at your finished and unfinished tasks and sub-tasks. You can also invite other users to share your task list.
Overall Task2Gather is useful if you want to keep your task list online and accessible from any computer, but there are other task managers out there that accomplish this as well or better. Vito has an ace up its sleeve though: the company plans to release a Windows Mobile and iPhone version of Task2Gather soon. These mobile clients will likely not only let you create and manage tasks while you're on the go, but also synchronize them with the web client.
Task2Gather is free to use. Eventually Vito plans to offer a subscription-based premium version with access to additional features like RSS feeds for task updates and the ability to upload file attachments for tasks.
We're willing to bet radiologists in Shanghai like to listen to music -- who doesn't? -- but that's not how they're using iTunes. At Renji Hospital and Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, they're using it to organize PDFs of important medical research and images that they say are more useful than many textbooks.
You can drop a PDF into iTunes and sort it just like you would with music. That means that the medical documents in Shanghai are searchable, ratable, and can be given multiple different tags. Before iTunes, they were keeping redundant copies of PDFs in directories by category. Now, they only need to keep one of each. So, if you've been looking for software that can organize your PDFs, think about an app you likely already have: iTunes!
Since the dawn of time Google Calendar, we've been waiting for a free, easy way to fully synchronize our Google Calendar to desktop calendar clients like iCal. We'd love to be able to access the same calendar data across multiple computers, but it's always been a messy affair,not free,an incomplete solution, or PC only.
Well, Calgoo has been one of those paid options up until now, but the minds behind the program just announced that it is free from here on out. That's right, Calgoo is now the free option in Google Calendar and desktop caledar synchronization. Calgoo officially supports 30 Boxes, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, and -- of course -- Google Calendar.
Calgoo's "Chief Owl" will not employ ads in the app in order to pay for the costs of developing the program, but the team will begin to run ads on Calgoo Hub and possibly other future products. As for the software itself, it's pretty easy to use, and it provides for two-way synchonization, which means that any changes on one calendar will apply to the other.
If you have a lot of studying to do, StudyProf FlashCards might be the buddy you've been looking for. The program, which has a free trial version available, allows you to create flashcards in a relatively simple environment. Give your card a title and an image or audio then virtually flip the card and place the information you are trying to learn on the back.
After making a set of cards you can file them in your card box and retrieve them and replay them, slideshow style with simple mouse clicks.
If you are studying something specific, StudyProf creators, Felling Software Development, has also created the Flashcard Archive to make it easier to download precreated sets of flashcards (though only the English to German flashcards are currently available).
Studying is never a lot of fun, but at least if your typing is better than your handwriting StudyProf gives you an alternative method to get the job done.
The clock just turned 5pm, and if you are like us, everything you have worked on all day has instantly evaporated from your mind (yes, this just happens, we don't need alcohol). Luckily, we left all those papers on our desk, the scribbled whiteboard, and a monitor-o-sticky notes to help us figure out where we left off.
5pm by QG | Software is a web-based project management suite that provides us the tools needed to get back on track at 8am.
The underlying features of 5pm are fairly standard in the project management world. You create projects and assign them to one or more users or groups. The project can have a deadline, a client, and a priority level. Once you have created a project you can add items such as tasks and files. Tasks can be assigned to individual team members and emails can be sent to the group when tasks are completed. etc...
To help visualize your project over the course of its life, there is a timeline feature that shows your projects and tasks in a "Gantt" style chart. In addition, there is a reporting section that can help determine who is completing their projects on time and who isn't.
If you have a lot of studying to do, 
