If I could do that, I could just use Expose’s shortcut (Command + F3 in my MacBook) – or the Show Desktop we’ve discussed before – to show the desktop to see everything that I have to do printed there. Of course, those with large screens will have everything visible at all time even without the trick.

With my recent adventure with GeekTool, everything comes full circle. Now my tasks and events can be shown beautifully on the desktop, and I can look at them anytime I need to with a single stroke of a shortcut key combination.

To be able to show tasks and events from iCal on the desktop, we need help from two freewares: the previously mentioned GeekTool and iCalBuddy.

In short, iCalBuddy is a command-line utility that can be used to query the OS X calendar database for items. Being a command-line based application, iCalBuddy is the perfect scripting solution to be used along with GeekTool.

The installation used to be something that ordinary people would try to avoid – involving working with command lines in the Terminal. But the latest version of iCalBuddy comes with an “install.command” file, which will make the process a snap. All you need to do is double-click it to start the installation in Terminal and then continue the process by pressing any key (or Ctrl + C to cancel).

Now that the installation is done, let’s add some to-dos and events to the desktop

After installing iCalBuddy, displaying iCal’s to-do and events on the desktop is a matter of adding new shell items from GeekTool. This means dragging out shell geeklets from GeekTool prefPane to the desktop and editing the items.

The most important part of the geeklet is the Command pane. This is the place where you write the command line to tell GeekTool what to do. This is the basic command line for iCalBuddy:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy *****

The “******” is where you put the customization strings. There are a whole lot of variations that you could use with iCalBuddy’s command line. There are some manuals that come with the installation file of iCalBuddy that you can refer to for further information. You could also access the program’s manual page by running “man icalBuddy” in the terminal to read the documentation for all of the arguments you can use when calling icalBuddy.

As for me, these are the strings that I use for my desktop.

To display iCal’s to-do, I use:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy –excludeTaskProps “notes” -nc uncompletedTasks | sed -e “s/*/–/” | sed -e “s/!/!!/”

While to display iCal’s events, I use:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy -nc eventsToday+7 | sed -e “s/*/–/” | sed -e “s/!/!!/”

These strings are not mine. I picked them up from a discussion between iCalBuddy users and the creator. So, the credit goes to them. And as you can see, what the customization strings do are:

• removing notes from the tasks (–excludeTaskProps “notes”)
• removing the calendar name (-nc)
• changing the * symbol in front of each item with — symbols (sed -e “s/*/–/”)
• displaying events for one whole week (+7)
• emphasizing the overdue tasks and events (sed -e “s/!/!!/)

You could do your own experiment adding and removing strings (or not).

Beautifying the look

Honestly, I spent so much more time experimenting on the look than on the function; dragging the position, changing the color, adjusting the size, that sort of thing. And here’s the final result (for now).

You could just let your creativity run loose and design your own. But in case you are wondering, I’m using Apple’s standard wallpaper, and Gill Sans – Regular and Thin – for the font. As for the layout, size and color, I think the screenshot has revealed them all.

While doing this article, I also found out several communities of GeekTool users who “show off” and share their desktop designs. If you’ve tried GeekTool and think that your design is cool enough, you could share them using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• iCalendar Lite- A Free Transparent Desktop Calendar (Windows) (12)
• How To Improve Your iCal Calendars With FlexCal [Mac Only] (4)
• Wally- Awesome Wallpaper Rotator for Windows, Mac & Linux (15)
• Three Free Desktop Calendar Applications For The Mac (8)
• Three Cool Desktops from MakeUseOf Readers (33)

But recently, I could barely keep up with everything that happened around me just relying on my biological RAM alone. While I’ve tried several free to do applications to overcome my anxiety, I couldn’t find free apps that can match the power of Apple’s iCal calendar.

So I chose iCal Calendars to help me manage my life better. One problem though, adding multiple tasks and events to iCal requires a rather lengthy process, including keeping it open at all time. Luckily, there’s FlexCal. This small application which reside in the System Preferences is designed to overcome that very problem.

The installation and settings

The installation process is quick and easy. Double click the prefPane file and choose which users you want to install this app to. Unless you use your Mac with several other users and don’t want the other users to use FlexCal, choose “Install for all users of this computer“.

Then the System Preferences will be opened. Since FlexCal is still in 32-bit, System Preferences needed to be restarted before you can tamper with FlexCal settings.

There are several things that you should adjust to make FlexCal comfortable to use. First the “Setup” tab. Click the “Start FlexCal” button (obviously) and tick the “Start FlexCal at login” box to make sure that this app will be available at all time.

Then you need to set your own shortcut to be able to access FlexCal quickly. Click on the shortcut field and press your chosen combination.

Don’t forget to choose which window should be opened every time you hit that shortcut key. If you add Tasks a lot, choose “Task Window“. The same thing goes the other way around. But whichever you choose, it’s not that important (and you’ll see why later on).

Next is the “Advanced” tab. This is the place to further configure FlexCal. You could choose to add an alarm to all new Events and how early should the alarm goes off. You could also choose which calendar should be the default place for all tasks and events, and whether you prefer to use Textual or Graphical style to display the calendar.

Using FlexCal

Using this app is a only matter of hitting the shortcut key. If you choose “Task Window” as the default, this window will appear every time the key combination is pressed.

But you could easily change the window to “Events Window” by hitting the combination one more time (and continuously alternate between the two).

Hit enter after typing the task/event and it will be saved to iCal. To cancel it, use the Esc key.

You could move between the field using the Tab key (forward) and the Shift + Tab key (backward), but you couldn’t edit the “Calendar” and “Priority” drop-down menu without using the mouse. The rodent is also needed to change the style of calendar from Textual to Graphical (and vice versa).

I wish the developer would add the ability to use the keyboard to its full extent so the process of adding Tasks and Events to iCal could be done without the need to lift a finger from the keyboard.

Other than that minor annoyance, FlexCal is something that every iCal user should have.

Do you use iCal calendars to manage your life? Do you know better free alternatives to add Tasks and Events to iCal quickly and easily? Share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Three Free Desktop Calendar Applications For The Mac (8)
• iCalendar Lite- A Free Transparent Desktop Calendar (Windows) (12)
• How To Show iCal Tasks & Events On The Desktop [Mac only] (3)
• esyPlanner – Manage Your Day With This Easy Scheduler & Daily Task Manager (7)
• When Is Good – Easily Schedule Your Meetings With Co-Workers (6)

My problem is the very reason I constantly look for new calendar applications – my mind is so filled with things to remember that I forget to check the calendar applications that I’ve installed. So it’s on to the next app, in hopes that it does a better job of reminding me to remember things. Alas, I believe I’ve finally found the solution, a very cool and free, transparent desktop calendar called iCalendar Lite.

Why do I love it? There are several reasons. First, it’s highly customizable. Second, it’s transparent (depending on how you configure it) so you can have it always in front of you no matter what you’re currently working on. Third, I really, really like how cool it looks.

Setting Up iCalendar Lite – A Free Transparent Desktop Calendar

iCalendar Lite doesn’t originally install as a very transparent application that’s always “on top” of all of your other open apps. In some ways this is good, because many people don’t appreciate an application that insists on staying in the foreground. However, for our purposes, this is exactly what we want the calendar to do. This is how the calendar first shows up at the upper right corner of your screen after you install it.

As you can see, with the default skin and transparency settings, it isn’t transparent at all. Also, by default the application is set up to remain in the background when you click on any other application. To set it up so that it’s more transparent and on top of your current applications, you’ll need to change the settings. In your system tray, you’ll find the calendar app appears as a calendar icon. Right click on that icon and then click on “Settings“.

Once you do that, the following window appears where you should make sure that the calendar is set up to run when you boot your PC, and also select whether or not you want the Event and To-Do windows to show up underneath the calendar itself.

Next, click on the “Appearance” to get to the screen where you can configure both the transparency and make the app remain on top of all other applications. Personally, I like the glass skin with 40% transparency, which makes the calendar look like a ghost. However, 100% transparency with the “Glass” skin also reveals the application underneath it and looks pretty cool too (see the bottom of this article).

With the new settings, the calendar application shows up like a faint mist on top of the application that you’re currently working with. For me, this is a perfect calendar setup, because it’s always there…but not really. It lingers on the edge of the screen as a constant reminder that you’re on a schedule, and you have deadlines. The next article due date is coming up fast and if you don’t complete it, you better believe that the editor is going to be all up in your face… OK, moving on.

As you can see, the calendar, event and to-do windows are unobtrusive and only slightly display on top of your application window, but not so much that they block the view or distract from what you’re working on.

Making Use Of iCalendar

When you want to add an item to the to-do list or the event alarm list, just right click the window and do so.

The to-do and event scheduling is pretty standard and has most of the features you expect in a decent calendar application, including delay time to an alarm, an alarm popup window, and notification sounds (configured in the general settings described above).

New Software – Needs A Few Bug Fixes

To show how much you can change the transparency, I’ve modified it to 100% with the “glass” skin in the display below.  However, aside from all of the “cool” factor of this app, it is clearly still new and in need of a few fixes.

Throughout the application you’ll find occasional spelling errors – fairly minor. However, a significant bug in my mind is the fact that when you configure the calendar to remain “on top,” only the to-do and event windows actually remain on top of your applications. The calendar itself has a tendency to slip behind until you click on either the event or to-do windows, or enter the settings screen. Another bug I found was that if you enter the settings window, and then right click the icon and enter the settings window a second time, you can produce an assortment of application errors.

For my purposes, these bugs are minor and not a nuisance. For the most part the application is in the forefront as a constant reminder, and you can even sync the calendar with your Google calendar account – a cool feature if you’re like me and you’ve tried dozens of calendar apps, at least you don’t have to re-enter all of those birthdays again!

Have you been in search of a free transparent desktop calendar? Does iCalendar suit your needs? Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• esyPlanner – Manage Your Day With This Easy Scheduler & Daily Task Manager (7)
• Tracks – An Advanced “Getting Things Done” Application (11)
• Three Free Desktop Calendar Applications For The Mac (8)
• Organize Your Life With Yahoo Calendar (12)
• How To Show iCal Tasks & Events On The Desktop [Mac only] (3)

We all have our favorites. A browse through this website will throw up many a calendar and to-do app. Schedulers and daily task managers occupy one quadrant of GTD apps. Thinking of which, we also have the option of keeping our time planning offline or taking it online.

I won’t take sides here; I am sure there are takers for both. What I will do is introduce you to a freeware which by the colorful looks of it could find its own legion of fans.

esyPlanner is a Windows only (Windows 2K / XP / Vista) utility which is a calendar based planner for keeping track of your events/tasks. More than that it also allows you to post notes, register your day-to-day experiences in a diary and also  manage your passwords.

The esyPlanner (ver.2.0.09) installer is 2.2 MB in size and can be downloaded from its website.

The first thing you will note is the distinctive desktop-like modeling of the webpage, down to a power button. The site and the software support two languages – Italian and English.

So let’s do a walkthrough of the daily task manager software by looking at the different areas of the program.

The software itself has a colorful, responsive interface. The interface has three panels – the main panel on the left, the centered tab area and the narrow toolbar on the right. The toolbar can be undocked and moved. The buttons are large and fairly intuitive. The balloon tips on a mouseover the buttons makes it easy to know what it is about.

A planner works around events or tasks and follows a calendar. Other features merely support the other information needs of day to day planning. So it is with esyPlanner.

Events in esyPlanner can be set up around categories. Each category has a name and a color which labels it. All categories which are set up get listed under the categories section on the left panel.

Multiple calendars can be setup in esyPlanner, each with a description that identifies it. Calendars can be modified and deleted but one calendar is the required minimum. All calendars are listed on the left panel.

Notes are text files for bits of information. They can be grouped in folders within the Notes panel. They can be arranged via drag and drops from one folder to the other. They can also be ordered by date or title.

All notes in esyPlanner have a calendar linked to it. Other information like category, status, due dates, recurrence, attachments and URL links can be also inputed to further enrich a note. An included screenshots tool can be also used to capture images. An event, a popup alert and even an email can be created from any note from a single click using the toolbar.

The Password area serves as a container for storing different user passwords. A master password is required to open the locked database.

The Settings panel has all the customization options for startup, views and color changes. Using the settings panel, the calendar views can be customized according to the starting hour for the day and the first day of the week.

Planner – A container for all events

Planner is where all the action will take place. All events get reflected in the centrally displayed Planner tab.

The Planner has two views – A weekly view with color coded events (according to the category colors) of the current week and the next. The colored rectangles for the events can be dragged and dropped to new locations. Each shift gets updated in both the monthly and weekly views.

A month view which shows the events spanning over the entire month. A mouseover the color boxes details the events in a balloon tip. The events are grouped in rows with each row corresponding to a category.

A small Diary tab can be used to keep a record of events for the day.

The tracking and monitoring systems

What good would a planner be if it doesn’t serve timely reminders about scheduled events? esyPlanner prods through the pop-ups which appear on cue. Pop-ups can be created from events and notes, hidden or deleted. Choosing Daily Popup from the menu opens a popup window with all the warnings and events of the day. This can put on auto each time the applications starts.

Popup warnings can also be set for individual notes from the Notes panel. The warning can be from a certain date, on that date, on each recurrence or can be switched off.

All warnings set can be glanced through on the Warnings tab of the central panel.

Some first impressions

In my opinion, a planner and scheduler application needs to be simple enough to jump in and use but it should also have enough flexible features that make planning (and changing) tasks a one click process. Essentially, the daily task manager application should be designed around our schedules rather than the other way round. On that score esyPlanner does not disappoint.

• Events can be set up for each unit of time and they can be made to recur as we want it to.
• Events can be dragged and dropped from one date to the other.
• Impromptu notes can be converted to events on the fly.
• Multiple calendars lets us separate work and personal events.
• Alerts are simple through popups.
• The attachment inclusion and screen grabbing utility are a definite plus. Though, the password storage is a bit out of place.

All of this is a nice package of customizable colors and fonts. The software is also not perplexing with the easy to understand balloon tipped buttons and a compact help file.

But a task management application is only as good as the way we exploit it for our productivity. So is it good enough for you? Only you can let us know.

Link: esyPlanner

Image Credit: cmcbrown

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• iCalendar Lite- A Free Transparent Desktop Calendar (Windows) (12)
• Get Rid of Your Overloaded Anxiety With Anxiety – Mac Only (17)
• Tracks – An Advanced “Getting Things Done” Application (11)
• Three Free Desktop Calendar Applications For The Mac (8)
• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)

Synchronizing your Gmail email messages with Thunderbird is a breeze by using IMAP.   Every change you make in Thunderbird is more or less instantly reflected in your online email account.

But what about your Gmail contact book, your Google calendar and Google Reader RSS feeds?    Although Thunderbird offers their own versions, I wanted it instead to synchronize with my Google accounts and keep everything updated as I made changes.    The thought of having two versions, one in Thunderbird and one online, was not very appealing.

Here’s how I finally managed to do it.

Synchronize Your Google Contacts With Thunderbird :

This can be achieved by using an extension called Zindus.   Just install the extension and after restarting Thunderbird, go into the options :

It’s very easy to set up. Just insert your Google account name and password.   Then click the “test connection” button and it will connect to your Google account.    Your contact book will then be downloaded and any further changes in Thunderbird will also be synchronized with your online account.

Synchronize Your Google Calendar With Thunderbird

This one has already been covered by Tina (which is the guide I used) but here’s still a quick summary.   You need two extensions – Lightning and Provider For Google Calendar.   When you install them and restart, you’ll then see your calendar on the right hand side.

To start the synchronization, find the XML link of your Google Calendar (found under the settings on your GCal page), insert it into the Thunderbird calendar settings, and bingo, your events are downloaded and synchronized.

To get the full, in-depth process, read Tina’s excellent how-to.

Synchronize Your Google Reader With Thunderbird

This was the biggie as far as I was concerned.   With over 2000 unread RSS messages, I wanted to be able to browse through the feeds and have it instantly updated online.   I didn’t want to read them in Thunderbird but for them still to be sitting unread online.   That would have led to chaos.    Finally I discovered one possible solution.

Basically what the following method does is install a mini browser in your Thunderbird.   So technically you are still reading them online but inside your Thunderbird client instead.   So it’s not an offline synchronization solution which is what I am really looking for.   But for the moment this will do until I find a better method.

• First download Thunderbrowse and CSLite and install them in Thunderbird.
• Now go into your Thunderbird options and on the ‘General‘ tab, make sure the box labelled When Thunderbird launches, show the Start Page in the message area is checked, and in the location field, enter the URL http://www.google.com/reader/i/.



• Now go into your Thunderbrowse options. On the ‘Content‘ tab, check the option Enable SmartJavascript?, and click OK.
• Open the preferences for the CS Lite extension, and on the ‘Global‘ tab, select Allow cookies globally from the drop-down box.
• Now restart Thunderbird.   You should now see Google Reader in the main browser pane.   Log in and your feeds will appear.



• One piece of advice – place the Thunderbrowse button on your Thunderbird toolbar.  Then when you need to navigate away from the window to read your emails, you can click the Thunderbrowse button to go back again.

Do you have any better solutions to synchronize your Google accounts with Thunderbird? If so, I would love to hear about them. Let everyone know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• How To: Integrate Google Calendar Into Thunderbird (22)
• FeedDemon Can Now Sync Google Reader to the Desktop (13)
• Two Online Services To Clean Up Your RSS Feeds (10)
• Read Your RSS Feeds in a Whole New Light with Feedly (11)
• Newsgator – The Most Complete RSS Solution (11)

Earlier, I introduced MUO readers to my love affair with Excel when I wrote about how you can use it to create an effective household budget. I was also pleased to read some love from other MUO authors, such as Karl’s article about how to split a monster sized Excel spreadsheet, or Eyal’s Excel printing tips.

Today I’m going to share a few additional cool features in Excel that you can use specifically to make a calendar template in Excel.

Make a Calendar Template in Excel – A Step-By-Step Tutorial

The following calendar sheet is an Excel calendar template that you can open up and print each month. You have the option to keep it blank and it’ll automatically update to the correct month – all you have to do is print and fill in the days. Or, you can use the last few techniques described at the end of this article to fill in the sheet with the days before printing. It requires a little extra work, but it looks very cool.

Step #1 – Create The Header And Title

The first thing you’ll need to do is create the weekday header as well as the month title. This step will demonstrate the merge-and-fit feature as well as how to set the width of multiple columns at once.

First, type in the weekdays in a row across the top, but leave one row blank for your title.  Format the text around 12 point and bold. You’ll notice that some of the weekdays extend beyond the limit of the column.

To fix this, just highlight the weekdays that you’ve typed and then select Format -> Column -> Width – and set the width for around 15 to 20.

Now that you’ve got your weekday header nicely formatted, it’s time to add the current month at the top of your calendar sheet. While you could just manually type in the month at the top of the sheet, this wouldn’t be very efficient, as you’d have to change it every time you wanted to print a new calendar sheet. It makes more sense to create an Excel calendar template that knows what month it is and changes the month title for you.

You do this by choosing any cell above your weekdays, and typing in the formula, “=TODAY()” – which tells Excel that you want today’s date in that field. After you do this, you’ll notice that it looks nothing like the month and it’s formatted all wrong. First, format the title with a font of around 20 to 22 and bold. Then, go into the Format -> Cells -> Number tab, select date and choose the format that you’d like for the month title.

Once you’ve got your title formatted correctly, you’ll still notice that it’s not centered properly and exists only within one cell at the top of the spreadsheet. In other words, it looks odd. To fix this, highlight all of the cells above your weekday header (including the one where your month is displayed) and click on the “merge and center” button.

Clicking “merge and center” turns all of the highlighted cells into one collective cell, and then centers your title in the middle of the highlighted region. Now you’ve got yourself a nicely formatted, automated calendar header.

Step #2 – Create The Calendar Days

The next step to make your calendar template in Excel is to once again use the “merge and center” feature, but this time you’ll merge a few empty cells in order to create one larger cell that represents a single day.

This step is where you’ll build the body of your calendar template, but it’s also the easiest step. First, highlight about 5 or 6 cells, and click on the “merge and center” button. This will form one cell the perfect size for one day on the calendar. Then, while this large cell is highlighted, copy it (control-c or Edit->Copy) and paste it into the other days (or just drag the lower right corner of the box over to the right). This will duplicate your box for every day of the week. Do this for five rows. Your calendar should now look like this:

Highlight your entire calendar click on the borders tool, and select the “grid” so that every grid line shows – essentially “drawing” out your calendar for you. Finally, you can either leave your template as it is (so you can write in the days yourself) and move ahead to step 3, or you can add in the days using Excel. Instead of going through and manually typing in “1″ to “30″, you can save a lot of time by using Excel’s auto-fill feature.

Using this technique, you simply enter in a formula for the first Monday and the second Sunday of the month. For example, if the 1st of the month is on Sunday, you’d enter “1″ into the first Sunday box (and of course nicely format it at 14-point and bold). Then, for Monday you’d type “=” then click on the day before it (A1) and type “+1″.

When you’re finished, highlight the box where you’ve entered this formula, and drag it across the entire week – this will correctly fill in all of the days of the week. Then, do the same thing for the following Sunday, but click on Saturday and add 1.

When you’re done, drag this box down each week so that every Sunday has the same formula (adding 1 to the previous Saturday). Drag the formula from the previous Monday down through the month as well – and then drag from Monday across each week. While it may sound confusing, as you give it a try you’ll find that filling in the days only requires a few clicks and less than 5 minutes.

Step #3 – Printing Your Calendar Template

Finally, you’re ready to print out your calendar to a nice clean paper so you can pin it up on your wall. By this point, your calendar should look like this.

While this looks absolutely fantastic within the Excel sheet, it won’t print properly because the edge of the calendar template goes beyond the printable page, so you’ll end up with parts of it on two pages. To fix this, go to File -> Page Setup, click the Page tab, and make sure it’s configured as shown here.

Set the format for landscape, and fit the entire calendar to 1 page wide by 1 page high. Click OK, and when you do a print preview you’ll find that your calendar template is formatted on one sheet and ready to print!

The next month, just open up the same Excel file (the month will already be correct), renumber the days and click Print – it’s as simple as that!

Do you have any tricks that might make creating a calendar in Excel a little simpler? Have you ever created any unique projects using Excel? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use OfficeTab To Give Microsoft Office Firefox-Like Tabs (45)
• Top 3 FREE web-based Office Suites (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) (12)
• OxygenOffice Pro: Enhanced Version of OpenOffice (5)
• How To Split a Huge CSV Excel Spreadsheet into Separate Files (5)
• How To Save Time In Excel By Using The Fill Handle (13)

What does LifeIO bring in the already overcrowded space of web applications? Well, the concept itself is not exactly new, but the implementation is the one of the best I’ve seen so far. Integration is good when it’s done right. Think about Apple products – they all fit together from the hardware to software and support.

It’s much more convenient to have everything you need to manage your online social life in one place, especially if it does a great job at interfacing with all that information; allowing you to sift through stuff that you want to see. Having all the tools you need in a sleek one stop shop – how could you say no to that? LifeIo is the free, complete productivity suite for web 2.0.

LifeIO, like the name suggests, aims to be the bus on which information travels to and from you, hence IO(input/output), by aggregating your email, RSS, contacts, social networking accounts, calendar, tasks and even a basic note taking application. Add another couple of new features and applications in the mix, and you might be on your way to the online operating system.

Even more tech-oriented people will recognize that those types of apps represent 90% of the functionality you need day-to-day. A bit of polish here and there, integration with lightweight OS (Google Chrome OS?) via something like Mozilla Prism and you might have just stumbled on the next paradigm shift in computing.

Now that we’ve built up a bit of excitement about LifeOS, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. The design is simple and straightforward; Mac OS users will notice that someone has been reading up on the Apple User Interface Development Guidelines. A bar at the top contains the list of available applications:

• Now – aggregates information from all the other applications and brings them together into one window. The user can then glance at the RSS feeds, email, upcoming calendar events and tasks without navigating to the respective application.
• Mail – will import email from the major service providers (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL) as well as standard POP mailboxes, so you can check your email online from anywhere. Unfortunately, the wizard will import your Gmail via POP by default, but you can manually set up IMAP if you wish. The interface is rather barebones at the moment, and represents a downgrade for someone used with Gmail’s filters, labels, add-ons and incredibly fast search function. That being said, Yahoo Mail users will be glad to have a responsive, simple interface to check email anywhere. A big plus is the preview function; just hover the mouse over a message and a (small font) text-only version of the message will pop up like a ‘Tool Tip’ or Growl notification.

  

• Calendar – nothing fancy, just straight-up usability. All the important features are covered. If you’re used to iCal or Google Cal, the switch couldn’t be easier.
• To-do – you’ve guessed it, it’s a task management application. While it certainly doesn’t compete with OmniFocus, it has more functionality than Google Tasks. It’s got Due Date fields, importance and categories.
• Notes – a stepchild of WordPad and TextEdit, it hasn’t got the functionality of Google Docs, but works for quick note taking.
• RSS reader – is essentially a clone of Google Reader, complete with the left sidebar and everything else you could expect. One hiccup though, the actual articles will open in a separate window instead of expanding inside the list.
• Social – a bit underpowered for now, the Social application currently will only integrate with Twitter. It lets you see your contact’s tweets and post your own. A few screenshots I saw of upcoming version include Flickr integration, and I’m sure that they will add more services with time.

  

• Shopping – a search + RSS subscribing features will make sure you’ll be always up to date with prices on Amazon, Craigslist, Yahoo, iTunes and Fandango.
• Settings – another striking resemblance with OS X, this app provides quick access to all available settings.

If you‘re like me, you’re getting worried just about now. LifeIO sounds cool, but can I trust it with my login information for Google, Twitter and maybe more? Bruce Specter is not new to the scene; he’s the guy that made Web Cal – Yahoo’s calendar program. Plus, everything is transferred via https.

How about a surprise? The first 50 users to sign up with this link will get into the private beta right now. For more cool web apps reviews, you should definitely check out this page.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 5 Kick-Ass Reminder Services (21)
• “I Want Sandy”- Email Assistant you’ll Like but Can Leave Without (5)
• Zenbe – All Your Emails In One Place (20)
• Things – ‘Getting Things Done’ simplified [Mac Only] (11)
• Stick This On Your PC – Sticky Notes For Your Desktop (17)

One of the students replied, “Yes, but there’s a calendar next to you.”

That bored student might mention the calendar in a cynical tone, but we can’t deny that modern people could never live without it. Almost all of their daily life activities are scheduled according to the calendar.

Mac’s Native Calendar

Along with the dawn of the computer, the calendar also moved to the digital domain. For Mac territory, Mac OS X comes with its own calendar applications as a combination between iCal and the menubar clock.

The clock is activated by default, but you can adjust its properties by going to the System Preferences, choose Date & Time, and then clicking the Clock tab.

But if you want to try a free third-party desktop calendar application, here are three alternatives that you can try.

Dateline

This application will put a linear transparent calendar in your desktop. By default, it will reside above everything else. If you click on a date, it will be opened in iCal.

For some people, the appearance of this desktop calendar might become annoying. But don’t be afraid because you can adjust the appearance by going to the Preferences menu and choose the Appearance tab.

Besides color and font, width and mark shape, you can also adjust the Window level of the calendar.

Rainlendar Lite

This is a well-known customizable, free desktop calendar. At least on the Windows platform. I didn’t know that there was a Mac version until I did the research for this article. Some of the features are various skins to change the look and feel, to-do list and alarms, the ability to open multiple calendars for multiple purposes, and the ability to import and export calendars to and from different computers under different operating systems.

You can add events easily by clicking on any date. A window will show up, just add the necessary details.

There are two versions: the Lite version (free) and the Pro version (not free, obviously). If you want to know the differences, please refer to this page.

MagiCal

This free desktop calendar is an enhancement (or replacement – so they said) to Mac OS X’s native menubar clock. There are three versions to the application: PowerPC, Intel, and Universal Binary.

This app will reside in the menubar. You can open the main window by clicking on the menubar icon.

And you can adjust many things – including showing the date and the clock – by going to the Preferences (click on the “i” sign on the main window of this app).

Double clicking on any date on the MagiCal main window will open that date in iCal.

Do you use a Mac calendar application? Do you have other free alternatives?  Please share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• iCalendar Lite- A Free Transparent Desktop Calendar (Windows) (12)
• How To Improve Your iCal Calendars With FlexCal [Mac Only] (4)
• esyPlanner – Manage Your Day With This Easy Scheduler & Daily Task Manager (7)
• When Is Good – Easily Schedule Your Meetings With Co-Workers (6)
• How To Show iCal Tasks & Events On The Desktop [Mac only] (3)

What I really wanted was to not have to leave my current working program to use Google Calendar. Enter: GMinder, the simplest GCal program I’ve seen yet.

Login with your Google Account credentials to get started. GMinder, by default, imports all of your events up to one month in advance, and updates every ten minutes.

Your default view when the program first starts or when clicking the System Tray icon shows you the next month at a glance; Different options are available with a right-click on the Tray icon.

GMinder also pops up to remind you of the day’s events. Clicking “Open” on these popups will open the event in your default browser for editing.

GMinder is a dead-simple way to keep your Google Calendar handy. There’s a ton more tips for Google Calendar on MakeUseOf, but we’d like to hear from you if we’ve missed any.   Let us know in the comments below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird (17)
• Google Calendar – Organize, Schedule and Share Events (23)
• Best of Google Calendar (Addons + Tips) (32)
• The Essential Keyboard Shortcuts to Tame your Google Calendar (10)
• iCalendar Lite- A Free Transparent Desktop Calendar (Windows) (12)

While everyone has their own favorite system, such as Tina’s list of great free online time management tools, my own favorite is Yahoo Calendar.

The following article outlines all of the cool tips and tricks that will turn Yahoo Calendar into your very own personal and professional assistant.

How to Successfully Organize Your Life

About a year ago, I realized that I was spending so much time trying to finish projects simply in order to make money to pay the bills, that I wasn’t doing anything to achieve any sort of ultimate success.  Without goals, you never elevate your success to higher levels. Instead, you can end up spending your entire life running at full speed in different directions, but never getting anywhere.

Once I realized I needed direction and focus, I turned to Yahoo Calendar, mostly because I already use Yahoo email so I knew about it and it integrates nicely with all of the other Yahoo services.

Create a List of Short-Term Tasks

Yahoo Calendar helps you focus the direction of your daily efforts by providing you with the ability to list your short and long term tasks.  The best way to use this feature is to make a general list of tasks that you want to successfully achieve within the next one to three months.

Obviously, your monthly tasks will include the short term “work” that you need to accomplish, but many of the longer term tasks should be focused on your ultimate dreams and goals.

For example, if you want to become a published author, it’s a good idea to establish a reputation as a writer through blogs, or by submitting your work to writer’s organizations and contests.  Your task list will ultimately organize your goals into bite sized pieces that you can realistically accomplish.

Keep Organized Using Yahoo Calendar Events

The heart of Yahoo Calendar is the “event.”  Whether it’s a project, a birthday or a meeting, events are the small daily tasks that tend to get lost when your list of responsibilities gets too long.

By entering your daily tasks into Yahoo Calendar, you’ll instantly have your own virtual personal assistant that will keep track of what you have to do and when you have to do it.  It will even remind you through email or mobile phone (more on this feature below).

Entering an event is very easy, and it’s a powerful tool with a number of useful features.

The best way to keep organized with this feature is by entering an event the moment you learn about it. This way, you can rest assured that you won’t forget. For someone like me, the less that I have to remember, the better off everyone will be.

Entering an event is very simple – you can simply enter a title, event type (there’s a list of about 27 types), and the date and time. Don’t forget to make it repeat if it’s something that takes place on the same day every month or every year.

Event Reminders – Your Own Virtual Personal Assistant

Or course, my favorite feature included in the “add events” tool is the ability to send invitations to people via email, and the option to enable reminders.

These two features add tremendous functionality to Yahoo Calendar.  No longer must you remember to check your calendar every single day. You can set up this web app to either email you, send you a message in Yahoo Messenger or even send a text message or email to your mobile phone to remind you of your scheduled event.

Are you prone to forgetting dentist or doctor appointments or even birthdays and anniversaries (I am!) – this feature alone will help you keep organized and on time for every single appointment in your hectic schedule.

The other very useful feature is the “invitations” tool. By simply listing email addresses, you can remind family, friends, or co-workers of important events. If you’re working on a project with colleagues and you’ve all agreed to meet somewhere to go over work, you can use this feature to have Yahoo Calendar send everyone in the group an email invitation to the meeting. The Yahoo Mobile feature that’s integrated into the online calendar is very easy to set up.

Just complete the simple “create alerts” wizard to integrate Yahoo Calendar with your mobile phone. This is a feature that I use constantly in order to keep organized and on time – I couldn’t live without it!

Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly Calendar Views

Yahoo Calendar provides four view formats for your calendar. The daily view gives you an hour-by-hour view of your daily schedule. My favorite view is the weekly view, because it provides just enough of an overview so you can plan ahead, while also offering enough specifics so you know exactly what you should be working on this very moment.

Another nice overview is the yearly view, which provides bold dates for those days where events are scheduled.

When you really need to organize your schedule, these four views really offer the perfect solution. You can choose what level of organization you need, and then use just the features that you need to stay organized in your particular situation.

Work Collaboratively in Groups with Yahoo Calendar Sharing

Of course, another powerful feature of Yahoo Calendar is its ability to share events within your calendar, either publicly or just to a select few.

The cool thing about the “sharing” feature is that it’s so easy to customize. If you have a private calendar, but you want family and friends to have the ability to view your schedule, you can create a “friends list” of people you would like to grant access to.  You can even create “special friends” who have rights to modify your calendar.

Organizing Your Life With Online Calendars

There are a number of great online calendars available to help you organize your time and energy. Wendy’s article, “4 Online Calendars To Help You Get Organized” lists four of the most popular online calendars. The smartest approach is to test drive each of them for a week or two to determine which one fits your own style and organizational approach. Once you choose one and use it every day, you’ll notice your productivity and accomplishments skyrocket tremendously.

Do you use an online calendar to keep organized? Share your favorites in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Tracks – An Advanced “Getting Things Done” Application (11)
• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)
• Manage Your Life with Free Online Time Management Tools (11)
• iCalendar Lite- A Free Transparent Desktop Calendar (Windows) (12)

Along with this same technology however, comes many many ways to keep track of what you’re doing and everything else organized as well. Online to-do lists, tasks and several different versions of online calendars has taken the pain off somewhat.

Tracks is not just another version of my aforementioned examples, it adds some very nice functionality and is much more advanced than anything I’ve seen previously. Open source and running on Ruby on Rails, it includes its own web server for use on any Windows, Linux or Mac PC.

Below are some highlights.

You can create several different categories and create your own set of tasks for each. In the screenshot below, you can see that this example includes Office, Email, Errand and Internet. Each with their own set of tasks, which are then displayed in a completed section at the bottom. Re-organization and customization has limitless possibilities as well.

Along with a simple tasks view, you also have project sections that may include their own set of tasks along with them. One ongoing project that almost all of us experience, is maintaining our car, like the example below shows us.

Adding tasks to each category or project can’t be any simpler. On the right hand size of each page, you’ll see a simple Ajax add column, for quick and easy entry. All entries allow you to add the context of each task, project (if applicable), tags and of course due dates. After a task is entered, due dates change color as they come closer and closer to their specified expiration.

Monitor your progress in nice and clean charts. See how well you are keeping yourself consistent and motivated.

Want continuous updates sent to your RSS reader of choice? There are plenty of options for that as well.

Want to keep other members of your family on task? The application is also built for multiple users. Each user will have their own set of projects, contexts and due tasks.

Since Tracks includes a web server, it’s also important to note that you can access your information from any compatible web browser. The proper ports would need to be opened on your firewall, but it is very simple to do, and makes Tracks even more useful.

As I said before, keeping on task these days can be a daunting task. There is way to much to do, to see and to accomplish in our daily lives. In the old days, an appointment book accomplished most of this. Using pen and paper however is becoming a thing of the past and something like Tracks takes care of all that, and much much more.

What are some of your favorite “To Do” or task tracking sites? Do you see any benefit of Tracks over other similar products?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)
• Organize Your Life With Yahoo Calendar (12)
• Manage Your Life with Free Online Time Management Tools (11)
• iCalendar Lite- A Free Transparent Desktop Calendar (Windows) (12)

I sync my Windows Mobile device with my machine and now I can also have a quick overview of my upcoming events and tasks on my desktop. I found this neat little application called DeskTask.

DeskTask is compatible with Windows 2000, XP and Vista. It also needs Microsoft Outlook 2000 / XP / 2003 / or 2007 Beta 2 to function.

DeskTask reads your Calendar and Task information and puts it where it is the most useful. You can think of this as a desk blotter calendar for your computer’s desktop! Are you with me?

So how do you make it show Outlook calendar on your desktop?

After you install it you will see that your Outlook items are now on your desktop like you can see below. Depending on the options you configure – you can click on an item and go directly to it in Outlook, for me this is a HUGE time saver!

You simply install the 570KB file from here (direct download link). When you are finished installing you will have a new system tray icon that you can see in the shot below. By right clicking on this icon you can also hide it, lock its position, restore its last position or open your Outlook, calendar or tasks windows with a single click.

By this time your  Outlook data is already on the desktop. It appears by default in the upper left hand corner of your desktop. But you can customize it and move it around. We will get to that in a minute. Let’s first take a look at the control panel options for our new little app.

Most of the options are pretty self explanatory. But I unchecked the “Do not refresh data if a full screen application is detected”. I always want my tasks/item updated on my desktop. This will obviously use more memory – but if you have it to spare… Why the heck not!

As you make any changes to the font, size, transparency or any of the other options you can see them reflected immediately on the right hand preview pane. I like this feature and think more programs should incorporate a preview like this.

In this next section as you can see above you get to pick what is displayed. So if you use your tasks for personal things and you don’t want “Buy Tampons” or  “Grab Magnum Wraps” to appear on your desktop uncheck the appropriate box!

You also get to choose if you want past items displayed and how many days in the future you want DeskTask to look at.

When you get everything the way you like it and return to your desktop, you will probably want to relocate your new desktop module. It is as simple as dragging and dropping. You just need to catch the calendar icon with a left click and hold it as you move it where you want it to go.

Then let go! And it has a new home. That’s it, now you have your Tasks Outlook calendar on the desktop! Do you a have a creative use for your desktop that you want to share with other MakeUseOf readers? If you do put us on in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Manage Your Life with Free Online Time Management Tools (11)
• Stay in Sync with your Significant Other using free Exchange Server (13)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)
• GTD (Getting Things Done) Roundup – Time To Organize (38)

Seriously.  You’re going to be doing most of the legwork anyway if you’re planning a party.  Why send out precious invitations printed on smooth matte cardstock paper when you can just give friends a heads-up through email?  It’s less expensive, and much cooler to anyone with a laptop or iPhone.

So let’s see how Google can save you a lot of money on your next event.

Telephone Lookup

Whether choosing to hire or fire an event planner, certain research still needs to be done in order to prepare party invitations.

How many of your friends’ addresses do you keep stored in your memory?  Probably not many.  However, calling friends up on a cellphone is as easy as pressing a few buttons.  Why not find their addresses just as easily?  Just type their phone numbers into the Google search box (only numbers, without hyphens), and receive their addresses as search results.  Then, start mailing out your party invitations.

Google Notebook

Once you locate an address through a Google search, you can save it just as easily by bringing Google Notebook into play.  This app can be accessed through your Google account, and the cool thing is that you can download a mini-notebook that can be drawn up at will from the bottom corner of your screen.  Just open it up (without leaving your search page), highlight the address you’ll be saving, press “clip” in Google Notebook, and ta-da!  The info is saved.

Plus, you can even search your notebooks just as you would Google itself, to find any clips that you might misplace.

Google Street View

If you’re going to make a map to send with your invitations, why not use Google Maps?  Furthermore, why not just go the full distance and use Google Street View?

Just type in your own address on Google Maps, and press the “street view” option included in the bubble containing your address.

What you’ll find is a photo-realistic, interactive map that will give your friends a perfect idea of how to get to your house.  If you choose to send a snailmail invitation, you can use the Street View pic of your residence as a reference; however, if you send your invites out via the internet, you can give your friends a Street View pic that they can manipulate with their mouse.

Google Bookmarks

While in the process of party-planning, you’ll probably get distracted quite often.  As soon as you begin to discover interesting sites on the internet, you’ve got to go to work or to run an errand.

Don’t worry.  Google’s Bookmark tool will allow you to save whole sites for future reference.  In order to keep your thoughts organized, you can comment on the sites & even add tags to them.

Of course, your bookmarks are searchable.

Google Calendar

Every event planner needs a calendar, and Google’s got you covered.  Google Calendar is easy to manipulate:  you can plan far into the future, to the very hour of the day in question.

You can even share your calendar with others, and when your friends agree to be at your event they’ll receive confirmation email reminders in Gmail.

Google Sites

Once you’ve planned your party and you’re ready to send the invites, you can do it via Gmail by including a link in your letter to a customized Google Site.

This recent app lets you build your own free web pages.  Save your friends the trouble of having to open up attachments in their mail, and simply upload all of your photos, info, & links to your Google site.  Then, send out a carbon copy email to everyone on your invite list, giving them a direct link to the webpage.

Is Google The Best There Is?

All of the services described above can be accessed by logging into Google & entering “My Account”.  Let us know if you’re a fan of Google’s services.  If not, are there other services that you recommend over Google’s?

A lot of companies seem to be using Google’s apps as a model, and some are creating software that is even more functional than what Google has to offer.

Feel free to comment about any other apps that are worth looking into.

Photo Credit : CleverCupCakes
Photo Credit : Alexander O’Neill
Photo Credit : Pittaya
Photo Credit : brandon.weight
Photo Credit : Derbeth
Photo Credit : Yandle
Photo Credit : Misterteacher

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use Doodle to Make an Online Poll When Planning Group Events (4)
• Three Free Desktop Calendar Applications For The Mac (8)
• The Five Best Things About Google Maps (24)
• Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird (17)
• Plan Your Next Party & Invite Your Guests With Anyvite (2)

Remember the Milk is my task manager of choice, and is one of the most popular task applications on the Web. It’s powerful, it’s simple to use, and does a great job of taking all my tasks, and showing me the ones I need to see.

My favorite feature, though, and the one that helps with the whole “write it down or die” mantra, is the absurdly large number of places from which you can manage your tasks with RTM (Remember the Milk). You can use a number of different applications or methods to manage your tasks, and it’s accessible to you no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

Here are eight of the best ways to manage your RTM tasks:

1. The Web

This one’s the obvious one, but it’s great. With Remember the Milk’s web interface, you can have lists, tags, due dates, time estimates, high-powered search, and a number of other killer features that make RTM worthwhile. Plus, with the addition of Google Gears, you get all the functionality offline.

RTM can serve as a desktop application for those who want one, a web application, or a hybrid of the two- plus, it’s available from anywhere with a browser (including your phone- but we’ll get there).

2. Your Cell Phone

For any cell phone with a browser (all smartphones, plus a huge number of others), you can access RTM through their mobile interface. It’s somewhat stripped down, but gives easy access to all of your tasks, as well as letting you add and edit tasks.

If you’ve got a Windows Mobile phone or a Blackberry, RTM offers an application called MilkSync that will sync your tasks to the native task application on your phone. That way, you can edit your tasks on the phone, offline, and then sync them back to the Web. It’s free, but requires a Pro account, at $25/year, that gives a huge number of other features as well.

3. iProducts

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch, RTM recently released a native iPhone application that is truly a killer for managing your tasks, offering all the features of the web app, on or offline. It has the same search, editing and adding features that the Web does, and also adds a “Nearby” feature that lets you know what tasks you can do near where you currently are- a great use of the iPhone’s geolocation features.

I use it every day on my iPod Touch, and it’s the primary way I deal with my tasks. They do require a Pro account, after a 15-day trial.

4. Google Desktop

Google Desktop is a desktop and Web search program for your computer, as well as a gadget program similar to Dashboard for Mac OS. RTM doesn’t officially offer a gadget, but there is a Google Desktop Gadget that looks like the mobile interface, and allows you to manage your tasks right from the desktop, with only a mouse click or two Shift clicks to bring it up. It lives in the background until you need it, and then provides all the access you need to your tasks.

5. Twitter

RTM’s Twitter bot is one of the features I use the most. Just follow RTM on Twitter, and activate it through your account. Then, you can add or complete tasks through direct messages with RTM.

To add a task, just type “d rtm yourtask.” To complete one, type “d rtm !complete yourtask.” RTM’s smart, which means you can also add due dates, assign tasks to other people, or even request a list of all the tasks you have due today. You can actually manage all your RTM tasks without ever leaving the Twitter window.

6. Email / Gmail

Every RTM account has its own private email address, which you can use to send tasks. When you email RTM, it reads the subject line of the email as the name of the task. Using keywords, you can set due dates, priorities, or almost any other feature to your tasks right in the email. RTM will put the task in your Inbox, where you can process it later.

For Gmail users, there’s also the Gmail Gadget, which allows you to manage all your tasks from the Gmail sidebar (underneath the chat and labels).

For Firefox users, there’s a popular extension called RTM for Gmail that puts a separate sidebar into Firefox with a full-featured task manager, and one that integrates beautifully with your emails.

7. Your Home Page

RTM has modules for both iGoogle (Google’s popular start page), and NetVibes, another popular start page application. They’ve both got all the requisite features- adding, editing, sorting, completing, postponing. With these, you can see and manage your tasks from the minute you open your browser; no remembering to open the page or check your to-do list, as it’s put right in front of you.

You can also use the gadget links on a number of other start pages by manually adding them, though they’re not officially supported by RTM.

8. Adobe AIR

If you’re looking for a pure desktop application from which to manage your tasks, look no further than the Adobe AIR application called Remember the Task. Remember the Task basically puts the mobile interface, the tall rectangle, into a desktop application that you can use just like any other offline app. It’ll have its own window, be easy to find, and be always available to you.

These are only the tip of the iceberg – there are a ton of ways to interact with your Remember the Milk tasks, and it’s a truly ubiquitous way to have a to-do list. It’s also a saving grace for those of us with a lack of remembering skills.

How do you manage your task list, RTM or otherwise?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Tracks – An Advanced “Getting Things Done” Application (11)
• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)
• Organize Your Life With Yahoo Calendar (12)
• Milpon – The Only Remember The Milk IPhone App You’ll Need (6)

The new year is a time to get organized and what better way to help you keep up with your busy life than using an online calendar. An online calendar is better than writing everything down because all you need to do is check them once a day, have them send reminders by email or through your cell phone.

Free online calendar programs lets you keep track of personal appointments, family get-togethers, group schedules, birthdays, holidays, other events (A scheduled activity, such as a meeting, party, appointment, or similar items that you enter into a calendar.) and to-do lists. You can create multiple calendars to share with friends and co-workers and publish your calendars so that anyone can see them and also print them out.

With all of these free online calendars you can see the day, week, month and yearly view and they all send reminders of some type either through email or by phone.

Google Calendar

You can use your existing Google account to create a Google Calendar by clicking on “My Account” at the top right of the Google page. If you do not have a Google account you can set one up in minutes for free at Google. There are no ads on the Google calendar pages so it looks very clean. Syncing is only supported through Windows.

Google Calendar features include:

• 4-day view
• Agenda view
• Importing from an existing calendar such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal Calendar or a Yahoo calendar
• Sync your Google calendar to an existing Outlook calendar or a Blackberry
• Quick add feature for basic event details
• Click and drag of calendar events from one slot to another
• Create multiple calendars under the same account
• Easily collaborate with others
• Share your calendar
• Embed your calendar into a website or blog
• Access your Google calendar from your cell phone’s web browser

Windows Live Calendar

You can use your existing Hotmail or Microsoft Live account to create a free Windows Live Calendar. If you do not have an Hotmail or Live account you can set one up in minutes for free at Live. There are banner ads at the very top of the page but overall it looks very clean. Syncing is only supported through Windows.

Windows Live Calendar features include:

• Agenda view
• To Do list
• Next 4 weeks view
• Import from an existing calendar such as Microsoft Outlook
• Import calendars from sports, movie, and other third-party websites that support the ICS (iCalendar data exchange format. One of the file formats for the iCalendar standard calendar data exchange format. This format allows you to exchange calendar information between different calendar programs. Importing an ICS file provides a snapshot of the events in the calendar at the time of import.) file format
• Quick add feature for basic event details
• Easily click and drag of calendar events from one slot to another
• Create multiple calendars under the same account
• Share your calendar with friends or the public

Yahoo Calendar

The Yahoo calendar works with your Yahoo account. Once again, it is free to sign up for an account at Yahoo. Yahoo tends to have ads placed throughout the page on their calendar. Syncing is only supported through Windows but Windows Vista/Outlook 2007 are not currently supported as of this writing.

Yahoo Calendar features include:

• View Events from a List
• View Tasks you need to do
• Printable option
• Customized your calendar with a photo or logo
• Share your calendar with friends or the public
• Import or export to/from an existing calendar such as Microsoft Outlook
• Sync your Yahoo calendar to an existing Outlook calendar or a Palm Pilot
• Setup a group calendar
• Easily collaborate with others
• Embed your calendar into a website or blog
• Access your Google calendar from your cell phone’s web browser

30 Boxes

The free 30 Boxes online calendar is slightly different than the rest. There are no ads to be seen, it takes up the entire page, is only a calendar, shows the current weather readings under the currently weekly, lets you send Twitter updates, and more. It seems very innovative and uses current technology well.

• Import contacts from Yahoo, GMail, Outlook, Hotmail, Plaxo
• Share with Buddies or publish to MySpace and blogs
• Email and share links that are tracked so you know when people get them
• Receive reminders and invites by SMS/Text Message
• Link to Google maps within calendar entries
• Add your local information like weather
• Embed your Calendar as a widget on your blog
• Put your events list on Yahoo or Google
• Add your calendar to any RSS feed
• Import or export from Outlook, iCal, or Yahoo Calendar, or anything in CSV format
• Print calendar entries or calendar pages

With all of the good, free online calendar choices available, there isn’t any reason why you can’t get organized this year!   Which online calendar do you use and why?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Google Calendar – Organize, Schedule and Share Events (23)
• Best of Google Calendar (Addons + Tips) (32)
• The Essential Keyboard Shortcuts to Tame your Google Calendar (10)
• Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird (17)
• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)

Here at MakeUseOf you will find mentions of three calendar creating websites. These are Free Photo Calendars, Compact Calendar Creator and Printable Calendars. This list gives 10 more ways to ignite the creative Zen.

Printable Calendars

As simple as it gets. Printable Calendars is a free service that lets you download printable calendars in RTF format. Select your calendar date by month or year and hit the create button. Download the RTF file and print a calendar using your printer.

Vertex

A site leaning more towards MS Office templates and Excel calculators also has a calendar tab. Vertex has a fairly good assortment of calendars which can be downloaded in the PDF format and printed.

The calendars though are unembellished with graphics. You get the calendars in both portrait and landscape modes and in varying colours. Most of the calendars also come with U.S holidays marked out though there is the blank option as well so it can be used by anyone.

All calendars are free and the only constraints are the link and the copyright notices which come printed as footers.

PrintFree

This site is hardly anything to look at but it offers another simple way of making simple calendars. The calendars mostly are in monthly formats. It’s all on one page. Some format options like ‘Monthly Vertical’, ‘Monthly Horizontal’, ‘Bold’ and ‘Extra Bold’ are the few you could choose from.

If you like a simple calendar in a jiffy then this website could be one tool to look at.

MintPrintables

This website offers free calendars that become your own with just a printer. You get calendars by week, month and year. A few blank templates are available that you can use for filling up as you like. Six nature portrait based calendars are available which would require a good colour printer at your disposal. Though the choices are limited you can give this site a see through.

HP Calendars

Hewlett Packard has put up a few calendar templates on its site. You can customize them by downloading it in the DOC format and adding your or the company name to it. The templates include – monthly calendars, quarterly calendars, yearly calendars and an interesting 3-D calendars section.

Calendar Labs

CalendarLabs (Alpha) gives you a variety of print-ready calendars. The motley group includes – Monthly and Yearly calendars, Holiday calendars, iCal holiday calendars, PDF calendars, Blank calendars, Astrology calendars, Printable calendars (Customize by paper size and download in MS format) and lastly Photo calendars where you can use flora or fauna images or one of your own.

To print just click on the desired calendar link. Follow it up by clicking the ‘Printable Format’ link which opens a pop-up with the calendar. Use the browser’s print function to take it to the printer.

DLTK’s Free Printable Custom Calendars

This website lets you use your own image or fall back on the plethora of themes to generate your personal calendar. From themes like the 10 Commandments to images of Animals, Holiday Season and Cartoons. You can either use the colour images or its b/w counterpart. The site also covers calendar creation in any of these languages – English, Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian and Latin. The calendars generated are not very stylized but serve simpler purposes.

SpeedyCal

Things get savvier with this web service. SpeedyCal is a free calendar making application which lets you use default images or user uploaded images to create high quality downloadable calendars. You can choose images from a default gallery (or your own images), add borders and select fonts and create a calendar in a 12/18 month format. You can also choose to mark out U.S or South African national events. A more flexible approach by adding your own events is also allowed.

The final stage takes place in the PDF Folder of the program. You can quickly check your handiwork through a ‘Create a Preview Quality PDF’ or adopt the slower approach of ‘Create a Print Quality PDF’. The latter assembles all your data and generates the finished calendar after a delay depending on the data. All that is left for you to do is to download the finished PDF file and print it.

The interface is slick and the web service requires signing in and an email validation.

Disney’s Calendar Creator

In most cases school-going kids require calendars just as we do. Disney Magic Artist is a tool which allows them that. The interface is child’s play. Select an image of a Disney toon…select the month by using the arrows…mark out special days by clicking and dragging the given stickers to the calendar…click on the print button. If you like to save your ink/toner then go for the B/W option provided.

Microsoft Calendar Templates

Last but certainly not least, one of the easiest ways to create a personal calendar is available closer to home especially for Windows users. With Microsoft Office and its online website, users can download dozens of calendar templates. From Asian patterns and prints to a lunar calendar are interspersed between the classic designs. Some the templates are customizable. Also, some templates are downloadable depending on the version of MS Office being used.

There is another caveat for some of the templates – some downloads require a genuine copy of MS Office Suite.

It’s always nifty to have your own personalized calendar hanging on the wall and it’s also not bad to have it for free. Do you know any other calendar making website out there?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• How To Make A Calendar Template In Excel (25)
• How To Create New Design Projects Using Avery DesignPro (2)
• Cool Printables : Ways to Put your Dusty Printer to Work (14)
• 3 Dead-simple Apps For Note Taking & List Making (8)
• Zenbe – All Your Emails In One Place (20)

So what makes Zenbe different? There are a lot of things, but here are the highlights.

First, Zenbe helps you centralize. Bring all your emails in one. It helps you cut down on your account clutter by bringing together in one window your email, task lists, files, and calendar. You can also use Zenbe to manage all your email addresses. It allows you to send from any email address and downloads outside email messages via POP.

Second, Zenbe has awesome features. What other email client do you know of that allows you to use Twitter and check your Facebook updates while reading your latest email? That’s just the beginning, though. Zenbe has a full featured calendar that includes support for iCal subscriptions, and, unlike some competitors (*cough* Google *cough*), the developers included task lists.

The file view is awesome, too. It takes all your email attachments and makes them available in their own separate tab. You can search, tag, star, or sort them by file type. Audio and video files can be played right in your browser, and images can be previewed in a neat lightbox.

In addition, Zenbe has partnered with Scribd for document previewing, so you can view documents without downloading them to your computer. You no longer have to email files to yourself, either, since Zenbe lets you upload files without emailing them. With 4GB of storage, there is plenty of space to use Zenbe as a repository for your important documents and media.

I’ve mentioned only some of Zenbe’s features. There are many more, and everything – from the contact manager to the tagging system – is innovative.

The best part about Zenbe, though, is that it’s still evolving. While other email providers will go months without any updates, Zenbe is constantly adding new features. For example, the Zenbe team is currently testing a unique conversation view, as well as an innovative “favorites inbox” that shows you emails from the people you care about most.

Zenbe really does have some of the best features I’ve seen in an email client. It incorporates them in an elegant way, too, so you aren’t overwhelmed with clutter.

What about you? What features would you like to see in the inbox of the future? Let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Outlook Addons – 6 Ways to Get Social with Outlook (18)
• LifeIO: Check Your Email, Read Feeds, Post to Twitter, Keep Notes & More From One Cool Site (26)
• How To: Integrate Google Calendar Into Thunderbird (22)
• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (23)
• Stay in Sync with your Significant Other using free Exchange Server (13)

Should you struggle with these tasks, don’t worry, most of us are. Fortunately, you are free to change things and make your life a little easier. Here is what you can do to organize your life and reduce the amount of things you have to remember:

Routine

The first and most difficult task is to adopt a couple of key habits. This is crucial since no tool will ever help you if you don’t communicate with it. Whether you’re using a file-o-fax or an online calendar system, none of these tools were built to read your mind.

1. Write everything down – immediately!
If you’re lucky, you already own a portable device that will synchronize with your computer. If not, get used to carrying pen and paper.

2. Integrate the tools into your daily routine.
Both checking and updating them needs to become a routine task. The good thing is you get to choose when and how often you’ll communicate with your tools! And you don’t have to use them all at once. It all depends what works best for you. Just start – now!

3. Hang in there!
This is a pretty universal habit. In the context at hand it means the following:

• give the tools time to work, invest some time and effort to make them work for you
• resist your inner temptation to slack off
• develop a genuine interest in the tools you are using, learn about them, improve your usage of them or find out about different tools that may work better for you

Tools

If you are able to get into the routine described above, you will soon have a lot of free time to fill. However, I have to warn you: relying on any of the following tools means you will depend on technology like never before.

1. Evernote

With Evernote you can collect, sync, search, archive, and share information. The main interface is a website. The desktop client is available for Mac and Windows, further clients support the iPhone, the iPod Touch, Windows Mobile devices, and there is a bookmarklet for your browser.

One of the coolest features is Evernote’s ability to search for words inside of pictures. This makes it a very valuable tool for efficient archiving. On top of that it offers a free option and it’s independent of Google – so far.

Back in April Shankar wrote a thorough review of Evernote.

2. Stickies
If you are the type of person who works best with visual reminders, I recommend Stickies. It works a little like Post-It® notes, but stickies sit on your PC desktop.

Stickies can be fully customized and they can adopt many functions other than holding notes. For example, they may be attached to a website or document, so they will only show in connection with these; network support allows for transfer of notes between machines, for example between computers within a TCP/IP network; and alarms may be set for each note.

I should mention that 3M, the creator of the original Post-It® notes, offers a similar desktop application, however the free version is very limited!

3. I Want Sandy
Sandy is an assistant that you communicate with by eMail. No software, easy to access and easy to program. Sandy relies on keywords in your eMail to her. When you CC someone in your eMail to Sandy, she will get in touch with them for the specific tasks contained in that eMail. Sandy promises she will synchronize with your calendar. At this point she supports Google Calendar. If you like, you can also chat with Sandy through Twitter.

Earlier this year Mark wrote a review about I Want Sandy. For him she didn’t work with Google Calendar, but it looks like the plugin was updated and it worked fine for me.

4. Google Calendar
I already mentioned it in connection with Sandy. As a calendar it does a great job, but I found that it works much better for me when I can access it from my desktop. If you’re already using Thunderbird, see how you can integrate Google Calendar into Thunderbird.

And with GooSync, which is listed in our directory, you can sync Google Calendar with your mobile phone, the Blackberry or the iPhone.

5. Google Mail
While we’re talking about Google, Google Mail can not be missed. Great tool to archive and search mail or documents. If you are actually using the web interface of GMail you should find out about all the plugins and tools that are available for it. If you’re using Firefox, you can integrate Google Calendar with GMail.

6. Remember The Milk
Remember The Milk is a very efficient task manager. First of all it is compatible with a wide range of applications and devices, including Google Calendar, GMail, Twitter, Blackberry and the iPhone or iPod touch. It can send reminders to your eMail, your mobile phone, and many different instant messengers. While for example I Want Sandy is very basic, Remember The Milk offers some great extra features. Create lists or task clouds; integrate maps to make tasks that require you to leave the house more efficient; publish your tasks and lists, share them with your contacts or send out reminders.

A worthy rival to Remember The Milk may be TODOIST, which was tested and reviewed by Daniel.

It goes without saying that there are only two essential tools you need: a calendar and a reminder tool in case the calendar’s reminders aren’t sufficient. I would also recommend a good archiving system.

My personal combination is Google Calendar with Thunderbird because I do not need to rely on mobile devices and usually have instant access to my laptop.

Which ones do you choose and how are you combining them? Tell us in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Show Your Outlook Calendar On Desktop with Desktask (8)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)
• GTD (Getting Things Done) Roundup – Time To Organize (38)
• Tracks – An Advanced “Getting Things Done” Application (11)

Naturally, there is a vast amount of addons and tools to sync, integrate and simply work more efficiently with Google Calendar. For example you can sync it with mobile devices like the Blackberry or iPhone using GoogleSync. Then you can add Google Calendar to Gmail with several different Greasemonkey scripts. Now I will explain how to add it to Thunderbird.

For this you will need two Thunderbird addons:
1. Lightning adds a Sunbird type calendar to Thunderbird.
2. Provider for Google Calendar connects Lightning with Google Calendar.

After installing both of these plugins, you will notice several changes in Thunderbird. First of all there is a new sidebar holding the calendar. At the bottom of the old sidebar that is hosting the folders and address book, you should see three new buttons: Mail, Calendar and Tasks.

To integrate an existing Google Calendar, you first need to fetch your calendar’s address. Head over to the web interface, click the little arrow next to one of your calendars, and select >Calendar settings from the menu.

In the Details window you’re looking for the Calendar / Private Address section at the bottom. I found that both XML and ICAL URLs work, but XML is recommended. Whether you pick the calendar or the private address depends on whether your calendar is set to public or private.

Back in Thunderbird the first thing you have to do is click the Calendar symbol to switch from Mail to Calendar view.
Then click >File >New >Calendar… If the Calendar option is not available, you probably forgot to switch to the Calendar view.

From the Create New Calendar window select >On the Network, click >Next, select >Google Calendar as the format and insert the URL into the >Location field, click >Next, eventually enter your Google >User Name and >Password and click >OK, >Name your calendar, give it a >Color, click >Next and finally >Finish to complete the procedure.

And there you go, you have integrated your Google Calendar into Thunderbird. Editing the calendar works bidirectional, meaning you can add and edit events via the website or in Thunderbird and they will be synced automatically.

The Mozilla Wiki has a thorough page covering Provider of Google Calendar, including a section about bugs and limitations. There also is a Google Group discussing further questions.

(By) Tina is a regular MUO author. In her offline life she’s a PhD student interested in unraveling signaling events that determine cartilage and bone development.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird (17)
• Zenbe – All Your Emails In One Place (20)
• Stay in Sync with your Significant Other using free Exchange Server (13)
• How To Terminally Delete eMails In Thunderbird By Compacting Folders (14)
• How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails (17)

Enter Calgoo, a suite of calendar apps which offers an excellent free solution to syncing and sharing calendars across different platforms. Apart from offering its own calendar software, it offers Calgoo Connect and Calgoo Hub which are meant for syncing and sharing calendars respectively.

Calgoo Connect

Calgoo Connect, as I mentioned, is a tool which lets you sync desktop calendars like Outlook or iCal with online calendars like 30 boxes and Google Calendar. It quietly works in the background synchronizing your online calendar with your desktop calendar and any changes you make on one of them reflect on the other.

It supports the following calendar programs :-

• MS Outlook 2003 Calendar
• MS Outlook 2007 Calendar
• Google Calendar
• Apple iCal
• 30 boxes
• And Calgoo’s own calendar program

It’s important to note that although Windows user have some good calendar sync options available, Mac users still don’t have a free solution to sync iCal to Google Calendar. Hence Calgoo connect should be a useful app for them. This could also help you easily sync your iCal with Outlook calendar if you own both a PC and a Mac.

Calgoo Hub

Calgoo Hub does the more difficult task of sharing your calendars with friends who may not be using the same calendar.

As you can see in the screenshot above, it supports most of the popular calendar programs including Sunbird and Plaxo Calendar. Calgoo Hub is basically an online storage for your calendar from where you can share it with your friends or just publish for public view.

Features

1. Publish Calendar Online

Calgoo Hub, as I mentioned, lets you publish your default calendar online. It supports all the popular calendars with a few exceptions (like MS Vista Calendar ). Google Calendar, 30 boxes and Outlook 2003 require you to download and install a plugin to publish to Calgoo Hub.

2. Support For Multiple Calendar Applications

Support for multiple calendar programs is a big advantage and hence you don’t need to worry about the type of calendar which your friend is using while sharing it. Although Plaxo Calendar, MS Windows Vista Calendar and Calendar Hub cannot publish to Calgoo Hub but they can still easily subscribe to a Calgoo Hub calendar.

3. Easily Share Calendars through Email

This is what makes Calgoo Hub an awesome calendar sharing app. You can share it with anyone who has a valid email address. It sends a preview link to your calendar in the email to your friend and also gives detailed steps to add it to his deafualt calendar program.

4. Subscribe to a Calgoo Hub Calendar

Calgoo Hub assigns a specific address starting with webcal:// to your calendar and hence using that address, one can easily subscribe to it in his preferred calendar program

5. Preview in Cell Phone

And finally, apart from giving an online preview option, you can also preview your calendar on your cell phone which means that it is optimized from the mobile internet as well.

Calgoo is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive calendar software suites which focuses on calendar interoperability rather than just specific tasks like two-way syncing of particular calendars. And since it’s free now, it has become more useful than ever.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird (17)
• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Stay in Sync with your Significant Other using free Exchange Server (13)
• Show Your Outlook Calendar On Desktop with Desktask (8)
• How To: Integrate Google Calendar Into Thunderbird (22)

What you can do with Sendible

With Sendible you can schedule messages to be sent at any time, down to the minute, and I’m not just talking about email here. SMS, Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 and Twitter are the services available and all work without fail. The services are completely new so you will probably see some development in this area but the list is already impressive.

Sendible comes with a contact management system too. The options here are pretty basic (edit, send email and delete), but sufficient for me at least. When you send an email to a contact you do not have in your list yet, the application asks you if you want to add him/her, you just type the name and it’s added, no fuss, smoothly implemented.

My favorite features however are the news feed and calendar. Both essentially show the same information in a different format. The news feed shows all the upcoming events in feed style, chronologically, with the closest first. The calendar shows all your activity in a calendar style and does it pretty well. But I do see some problems which will deter people from using it regularly, especially after Google Calendar.

When you look at the calendar all you see about an event is the time and type – you see nothing about the message body. If you click the event you will get a pop up box which shows all there is to see. This is an elegant way of showing events but I think that showing at least some of the message body in the preview would have been nice.

You can also do some advertising with Sendible. I have quite ambivalent feelings here, so I’ll just tell you about it and you can share your comments. Sendible is monetized by giving you the option to put ads below your messages. You can create some ads and when you send out any email they will be slapped on and sent to the recipient as well. Each ad costs one credit, so every time you send an email your credits are reduced by one. You start with 5 free credits and can buy more for a few dollars. 100 costs $12 and 500 costs $40 for example. This can be a cool way of advertising, but I am not a huge fan of email ads, so I don’t really know what to think of this. For some people this will be a nice feature, for me it’s something I’ll never use.

How you can use Sendible

At the most basic level you can use the app to send emails to your friends, family, Orkut, Myspace and so on so you don’t forget to send a birthday email for example. If someone asks you to get back to them in 6 weeks you can write the email now, schedule it, and just forget about it. I’ve actually had some of this happen to me recently and Sendible would be a great way to remember these things. You can opt to receive notifications when the email is actually sent, so you will be prepared for an answer. This feature allows you to forget about many things without any negative effects, so in a sense it’s a bit like GTD.

You can use Sendible for much more than that though. Just as you can use Sandy as your personal assistant, you can use Sendible to manage some of your tasks for you. Sending messages to people can be a part of that, but you can also send messages to yourself for reminders, to do lists, daily tasks and so on.

The one feature that can provide the most assistance here is the option to send recurring messages. If you have to take the garbage out every Tuesday or your wife will kill you, just schedule yourself an email for 10:00 every Tuesday and you can put a stop to all the killing. If you write a lot of posts to multiple blogs you can send email reminders to yourself each day about which blog you have to write to on that day. The people at Sendible thought about this in advance, since there are message sending options and reminder options. Messages can be sent to other people (although you can send yourself one too), while reminders are the same thing essentially, but the “to:” field is omitted, it will be sent to you by default.

Since there are contact and contact group options, you can actually quite effectively use Sendible for team management as well. Shoot out tasks on different dates to your employees, remind them of tasks, ask for a report automatically in advance for the next 15 years. There have been some more advanced calendar sharing options requested for example which will add to this and event management is already in the works which is another plus.

Is Sendible worth the time?

What you can see in Mark’s Sandy article holds up here too. Sendible is a fast and effective way to work, but in the end it’s only a bot we’re talking about. However I didn’t get too much of the actual feeling of that here. Sandy is positioned so that you feel like she’s real, when in reality you know she’s not so the positioning utterly fails. Sendible however never intends to substitute your personal assistant, so perhaps your expectations are lower. But for me, Sendible seems much better so far even though the options are more limited right now.

There is definitely work to be done, adding task addition by email, maybe even Launchy for example, task listings, and so on. But I think things are shaping up pretty nicely. For me Sendible is worth the time, and I would guess that many of you who have scheduling problems will feel the same way.

“Daniel changes his signature lines all the time because although he has a blog about organization, Hack Your Day, he can be a bit all over the place at times. He also has a Blog management service called Blogtastique which helps newbie and pro bloggers in anything they need.”

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Manage Your Life with Free Online Time Management Tools (11)
• Improve Your Organizational Skills With To-Do DeskList (8)
• GTD (Getting Things Done) Roundup – Time To Organize (38)
• 5 Kick-Ass Reminder Services (21)

Sounds simple and that’s what it is. But even though it’s simple, it’s far from being simplistic! Springnote doesn’t come short in features, yet remains easy to use because all of the functions are useful and smart and ordered in a plain way, instantly making you feel comfortable using them.

Springnote supports OpenID, which you can read about in Dave’s article OpenID Overview and Four Awesome Providers.

Once you’ve signed in and clicked the button to create a new note, you will first pick your Springnote URL and title, accept the Terms of Service, and pick a template for your notes. When picking a template, you will start out with several pages (notes) containing preset templates. For example when you pick the template For Study, your Springnote account will come with a profile page, a monthly calendar, a to do list, a class timetable, and several more pages. You can as well start out with no template and add them as you go, since you’ll be able to pick a template whenever creating a new page.

So here you are, ready to take your first notes. Writing is straight forward. Just click into the document, type and use the standard text editor to give your notes the final touches. Via Insert you can attach files or insert pictures up to 20MB per file, and if you forgot to select a template, here is where you get to pick or change it anytime. Through the Menu, notes can be printed, shared, published, exported and downloaded as HTML. You can Upload documents with up to 5MB, the supported formats are doc, odt, txt and html. Several Plug-ins, for example to create a calendar, list of subpages, and a list of contents are available through Add-ons. Linked pages and Subpages will automatically appear in the Related pages section at the bottom of each note. To easily track down notes, Enter tags.

In the left hand menu all Recent Updates are shown, pages can be organized via drag&drop in the All Pages tab, you can follow your Tags, and view Shared Pages. The right hand side holds your bookmarks, i.e. sites you want to access quickly. You can color code your bookmarks with five different colors.

Nothing much remains to be said, without going into painful details. I will let you discover the beauty of Springnote on your own. But let me tell you, there are so many neat details to be found, the design is beautiful and not a single feature appears superfluous.

How do you organize your notes? Could Springnote become a worthy rival of your habits so far? If not, how does it come short in your opinion? Please share your thoughts!

By) This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Use Your Voice To Get Things Done With Dial2Do (7)
• Things – ‘Getting Things Done’ simplified [Mac Only] (11)
• Show Your Outlook Calendar On Desktop with Desktask (8)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)

I’ve always loved living in cities with big music scenes, but I’ve had problems keeping up with the multitude of shows going on in any given month. Thankfully, the internet has some pretty handy tools out there. I use iCal religiously and consequently it has become the hub of my musical listings. Here you’ll notice the 3 iCal feeds I use, iConcertCal, Sonic Living, and Tourfilter.

iConcertCal is a great iTunes plug-in that generates a calendar of upcoming shows in your city based off of your music library. You’re also able to see upcoming CD releases and share this calendar with others.

After you’ve installed the plug-in, access the calendar by going to view > visualizer > iconcertcal or by using command + t. This will get you into the plug-in so you can personalize it. You can change the city and radius as well as add a show. In preferences you’re able to set your sharing options, upcoming release filters, and most importantly, your iCal exporting options. This is where you’ll see the path to your iconcertcal.ics file to import into iCal.

Sonic Living is a social network based around events and music. It’s probably the most powerful concert tool I use. You’re able to add artists automatically, using its iTunes scanning tool, and by syncing to your Last.fm and Pandora accounts. Once your artists are loaded you have a bunch of different ways to organize the information. The “Shows” page contains all of the different categories in the left hand column. This is where you’ll start.

All of your artists will be located in the Wishlist category. It is here that you can add shows to your confirmed list. My preferred method is to scan my Wishlist, add shows I plan on attending and then subscribing to that iCal feed. You have a ton of other options though. This is where Sonic Living really wins me over.

You are given 5 different categories that contain 8 different feeds. There’s also an iGoogle widget, blog badges, Facebook widget, and an iPhone application that is integrated with the iTunes music store. As if that weren’t enough, you can add Flickr photos of an event by tagging that photo in your Flickr account with a special tag. There’s a lot going on at Sonic Living, so brace yourself.

Tourfilter, the last of my concert tool trilogy, is the minimalist of the group. I started using this website in 2006 and have watched it grow to over 60 major cities worldwide. It’s no-frills but does offer a RSS and iCal feed as well as email notifications of shows in your town. You have to manually add artists to your list, but this can be a good thing for those of you not wanting to sift through a behemoth, automatically generated, list.

After you’ve logged in, the homepage is the only page you’ll ever need. It shows the upcoming concerts in your city, your complete artist list with the ability to add more, and links to other people’s lists. It’s lightweight and very DIY which is why I like it. The data is monitored by humans so if you see an error or have a question, someone will always get back to you.

Of course, my 3 suggestions are not the only options. Last.fm’s events may be all you need or perhaps BeeThere is your favorite. They both offer feeds and some organizational features. If it’s a widget you want, then OnTour is a path you might want to take. Maybe you want more than just music-centered events. This is where Eventful might be useful.

One interesting mention is a website called PodBop. Their concert listings are powered by Eventful. Here you can download a podcast of music playing in your area. It’s community driven and my city isn’t a very active PodBop community but yours may be, so check it out.

My main reasoning for using the above three services is in the instant access I have to the information when I need it most. Sometimes I’m listening to music in iTunes and I want to know if this artist is in town. A quick apple+T and I have the information. Other times I’m in my iCal and need to check to see if a show interferes with something else I have planned. I use Tourfilter and Sonic Living when I’m surfing the web or on a friend’s computer. It’s nice to have a few options.

You may wonder where a lot of these websites are getting their data. Many music websites have APIs available and this is making it easier for developers to create custom applications. Programmable Web’s article, 25 Music APIs, is a great place to start for those of you thinking about tackling your own project or wanting more suggestions. I’d love to hear what some of you use and why.

Written by Renee Valdez, A dot com junkie, music lover and frequent blogger at Shopwiki’s Overlooked, a blog showcasing overlooked products from Shopwiki’s webcrawlers.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Top 4 Sites To Download Free, Legal Concert Recordings (6)
• How To Broaden Your Musical Horizons Online (8)
• Find Out Where Your Favorite Artists Are Playing With Jambase (0)
• Calgoo Connect & Hub – Calendar Syncing And Sharing Made Easy (3)
• 6 Reasons To Fire Your Event Planner & Use Google Instead (14)

Unfortunately my finances are not at the point where I can afford a real live personal assistant so when I found I Want Sandy, I decided “what the hell, what have I got to lose?”. OK, she can’t sit on my knee in a short mini-skirt and a loose revealing top but hey I don’t have to pay her!

After giving her a probationary period, my opinion is that she is good but she hasn’t totally rocked my world. Here’s two reasons why :

1. She’s just a Reminder Bot

Let’s be honest here. She just reminds you of appointments. How many other online services out there do that? Yahoo Calendar? Google Calendar? Twitter? There’s a Twitter service called Timer which reminds you via Direct Message of anything you need to remember. Sandy isn’t much different. She also sends reminders to Twitter if you want that. It’s hardly original is it? Sorry Sandy. Don’t cry. Here’s the business card of my therapist.

So if you need to remember something, you just need to send an email to Sandy with the word “remember” or “remind” in it and the details of what you want her to remember. So something like :

“remember my dentist’s appointment on Friday at 10.00am” OR “remind me to pick up the kids from my mother at 3.30pm”

You’ll then get a message nearer the time reminding you (you can specify how far in advance you want to be reminded).

Plus every morning (at a time you specify) you will get an email with your appointments for that day and any reminders you’ve asked her to remember for you. You can also have it sent to your mobile phone (if your network supports it) or Twitter. It works well but as I said, there ARE lots of other similar services out there.

2. I couldn’t get Sandy to synchronise with my Google Calendar

Despite claims that Sandy “synchronizes with third-party calendaring programs and services (e.g. Google Calendar, 30 Boxes, iCal, Outlook 2007)”, I could not for the life of me get Sandy to accept my Google calendar events. It would not accept my Google calendar iCalendar feed and kept pushing its own feed at me.

This means that you would have to manually re-enter all your calendar entries into Sandy which is irritating and time-consuming. I thought Sandy was supposed to help me? Instead she’s driving my blood pressure UP!

If you can work out a way to get Sandy to synchronise with Google Calendar then you can help her save her job with Mark O’Neill Worldwide Enterprises. Otherwise, I’ll be sending her back to Burger King to flip burgers and clean toilets. Readers, it’s over to you. Save Sandy!

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 5 Kick-Ass Reminder Services (21)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)
• LifeIO: Check Your Email, Read Feeds, Post to Twitter, Keep Notes & More From One Cool Site (26)
• Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar (20)
• Organize Your Life With Springpad (4)

Not so long ago MUO author Dave posted an article on How to control Windows Mobile Phone from the Desktop, today I want to show you how to synchronize your phone with your loved one.

Due to my career and title as “The Admin”, when I am at home the wife expects nothing less than technology perfection, and being an admin I like to be in control of things. I hate outsourcing anything I can do myself; specifically running my own email server, ftp site and such.

Why use other peoples services when you don’t have to? Good Question!

Things however aren’t always all rosy and sometimes you have to rely on other services to get you through the day. When you are in a bind and you need to get something done, you do whatever you have to do.

The situation came about in a normal conversation on a Saturday afternoon in my living room. This is right after my wife missed her maintenance appointment with the Land Rover dealer. I spoke to the guy on the phone, entered the appointment in my calendar and forgot to beam it over to my wife’s phone! These are the problems with the human meat brain, at least mine. It was a temporary out of memory error!

The conversation went like this:

“This would have never happened to one of your executives Karl! You always say you’re all about the 5 9’s and how you can solve any problem, so what about all the stuff we don’t have?”

“Like what?”

“A shared calendar, to do list, contacts, for one.”

“That’s 3 things.”

“Well one if they are all synced to my phone. Shouldn’t you know that?”

Wifey has an Unlocked T-mobile Dash and I have a Do-pod C730, both on Windows Mobile 6. This just might work. Hmm.. I would need to do some kind of wireless syncing.

But to what?

MS Exchange might work. Not from my work account and I am not buying an exchange server for the house just for this! I need a free exchange solution. Nothing fancy. I looked and looked and there were lots of trials and crap but once the dust settled one of them stuck out – it was mail2web.com.

Now here is the scenario.

Mail2Web live is a free service that gives you a hosted Exchange limited access account. Not limited enough to stop us from having our way with it though. We can selectively sync information to and from any Windows mobile device, palm or desktop email client. You can have it sync on every change (push) or on a schedule to save battery life (recommended). Imagine you put a plumber’s phone number in your phone and then it is also in your wife’s and then in your Outlook – automagically. Sweet.

All you need to do is sign up for one account with their free service and then go configure your machines and devices. I already have active sync on my desktop/laptop so I do not need to configure Outlook to sync directly with the Mail2Web server. I recommend this method. So all your information is on your handheld and computer. Now lets get the two handhelds setup as follows

(Instructions are for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, use VersaMail on the Palm or the built in Exchange sync on the Blackberry):

Open up Active Sync

Choose Configure Server

Setup your server information as follows (Make sure you use the mobile.exchange.mail2web.com address!):

Hit Next and fill in your user information that Mail2Web provided you.

Hit Next again and pick what you want to sync. This will combine all of these items with whatever machines you are going to use this account with. I suggest NOT syncing e-mail as it gets messy. But the other items like Contacts, Calendar and Tasks, feel free to select and use them at will.

Click Finish and you are good to go!

This is going to be awesome – real deal wireless syncing is bound to bring the wife and I’s relationship closer. At the very least it will keep our appointments, birthdays, reminders, tasks, to do lists under control!

The possibilities are endless and here I go ranting and raving and you probably want to go check it out. Go ahead, I’ll wait and when it changes your life – make sure you come back and share the article so everyone can get down with the get down.

From their website:

What kind of mobile magic do you do? Let us know! What are you waiting for? That is what the comments are for!!

By: Karl L. Gechlik, A superhero of the IT industry. He runs a global WAN, Cracks the whip at his consulting company and gets the whip cracked at him by his beautiful Wife and Daughter! For more geeky goodness http://www.askTheAdmin.com

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Show Your Outlook Calendar On Desktop with Desktask (8)
• Outlook Addons – 6 Ways to Get Social with Outlook (18)
• How To: Integrate Google Calendar Into Thunderbird (22)
• Calgoo Connect & Hub – Calendar Syncing And Sharing Made Easy (3)
• 5 Kick-Ass Reminder Services (21)

Pocketmod – Create all-purpose, wallet-sized, booklets out of plain A4 sheets in just 1-2 minutes. As it says on the website, “it is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It’s best that you just dive in and create one“.

ePrintable – Web-based calendar generator. No registration required, just select the calendar type and click ‘print’ to generate it. You can also add some image and quotes.

PaperCDcase – Use this website to create a PDF file which can be printed and folded to create a stylish paper CD case.

Sudoku Generator – Sudoku fan? This site lets you generate different level sudoku puzzles which can be downloaded as PDF.

Documents Templates – Once in a while we all need some kind of document, it may be a business plan presentation, rental contract, non-disclosure agreement, or even a name change request form. Here are 3 places where you get them for free.

Big.First.Name – Free online app for printing nametags. Quick and simple. Check out some examples here.

PrintFreeGraphPaper – Web-based Graph Paper generator. Choose one of listed graph paper templates, indicate preferred paper size and measuring units, select paper type, and ‘Print’ it.

Deyey – Neeed a stylish business card ? Maybe nametags for employees ? Enter Deyey, a feature-rich online business card creator. Ready cards can be printed out in high-resolution formats.

PDFpad – Provides a nice selection of handy document templates for work, school, games etc. These include: Calendars, Flags, Graph Paper, Smith Chart, Staff Paper and Sudoku.

Rasterbator – Turn any image into giant rasterized wall-poster.

MyBrochureMaker – Here you can create and print eye-catching brochures and advertising leaflets in minutes. Promote upcoming office parties, create product brochures, location promos, etc.

Notetaker – Create custom notetaking sheets. The custom sheets can be blank (Cornell st.), ruled, or graph style and can include your name and date.

iPaperCraft – Cash Wallet – Customisable paper wallets and card holders.

Paper rulers – Bunch of disposable printable paper rulers.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Simplest PDF Apps Ever: Merge PDFs, PDF to DOC, Convert to PDF (20)
• PDFtk – One App to Collate, Split, Rotate and Watermark PDFs (10)
• Advanced Online Note Taking Made Easy (13)
• Acrobat.com : Work. Together. Anywhere (10)
• 6 Free Office Suites That Are NOT Microsoft (40)

Desktop Blogging Clients

Post to your blog straigth from the desktop.

Windows Live Writer – One of the best. Plugins can be added to increase its power. Check out our review here.
w.bloggar (Windows only) – Available as a full and portable version (can run from USB thumbdrive).
AIRPress (Windows, Mac) – Adobe AIR based blog editor for WordPress blogs. AIRPress requires Adobe AIR beta 2 to work. If it’s not installed already, it will be auto installed with AIRPress.
Thingamablog (Window, Mac, Linux)
Qumana (Windows, Mac)
BlogDesk (Windows) – Optimized for WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine.

Statistics Tools

Monitor websites traffic and other stats.

Google Analytics (AIR) – Check detailed traffic stats from the desktop. Works both on Mac and Windows PCs. Google Analytics account required.
Snoop (Mac, Win) – Track website visitors in real time staight from the desktop. Stats provided by reinvigorate.net
SERPs Finder (Win) – Find where your page lists for a particular keyword on Google, Live and Yahoo! Search.

Screen Capturing Tools

Snippy (Windows) – System Tray Tool for screen capturing. Mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy — and Snipp it.
Clip2Net (Windows) – Take screenshots, add notes and arrows, and save them online.
WebShot (Windows) – One more screesnhot grabber, free version is quite limited, but still does the job.
Camstudio (Windows) – Capture screen activity (vide+audio) and save it in AVI or SWF format.
Windows Media Encoder – Capture audio and video content and encode video captures to WMV format.
SnagIt 7 (Windows) – Powerful screenshot capture and editing tool. Normally it costs $29 but version 7 is available for free. Unfortunately, the promotion period is over.

Image Editing Programs

GIMP (Win, Linux) – Free Photoshop alternative. Also see Gimpshop which even looks like Photopshop.
Paint.NET (Win) – Another open source software tool for your image editing needs.
IrfanView (Win) – Worth a mention here, it’s an image viewer with a few editing capabilities.

FTP Programs

Filezilla (Win, Mac, Linux) – Open Source FTP Client. Read MakeUseOf review here.
FireFTP (Win, Mac, Linux) – FTP extension for your Firefox browser.

Keyword Research

Good Keywords (Win) – Excellent too for finding suitable keywords for your article titles. MakeUseOf review: Get Your Keywords Right.

Microblogging Tools

Pwytter (Win, Mac, Linux) – Cross-platofrm Twitter client.
Twitbin – Firefox Extension for Twittering
OutTwit – Twitter client for Outlook. If you’re interested check out more Outlook addons here.
Pownce Client – Official Pownce clients for Mac and Windows. [What is Pownce ?]

Task Management

Rainlendar (Win) – One of the best desktop calendar apps for Windows.
Essential PIM (Win) – A free personal information manager.

Offline HTML editors

First Page (Win) – Two paned windows HTML editor.
KomPozer (Win, Mac, Linux) – Extremely easy to use and ideal for non-technical users.

Miscellaneous

WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier – Get notifications when there are comments that need to be moderated.

That’s about it. Do you have a must-see program that’s not on the above list? Let us know in comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Post To Your Blog With W.Bloggar (10)
• How To Start A Blog That Gets Instant Traffic (57)
• How to Make a Great How-To Video (14)
• 6 FREE Tools To Get The Best Keywords For Your Site (25)
• 6 Free Blogging Clients for Linux Users (17)

• Schedule events, tasks, and alarms,
• Manage multiple calendars,
• Import / export / backup / restore calendar data sets,
• Change visual skins,
• Print event lists or calendar sheets and
• apply Lua scripts.

The pro version supports network sharing and provides support for Outlook and Google calendars. Actually, you can download and use a fully functional pro version for free with only a small limitation: network, Outlook and Google calendar events will carry the string [Unregistered].

Rainlendar2 runs on the standard iCalendar format also used by Apple iCal, Outlook, Google calendar, Sunbird, Facebook, Lotus notes and many others. Hence, you can easily import and add cool data sets to your calendar, i.e. public holidays, sports events, episode release dates for your favorite TV shows, and lots more. The website iCalShare is an excellent source for this purpose.

Following its installation a calendar symbol will appear in your taskbar and the calendar as well as an Events and To Do list will sit in the middle of your desktop. You best start by dragging the three elements to a preferred location on your desktop and then decide whether or not you want to keep them visible.

Right-clicking on either one of the elements on your desktop or the calendar symbol in your taskbar will open a menu with from which you can: add new events / tasks, choose which elements are visible on your desktop, activate/deactivate various calendars, jump to another month, manage events (edit / import / export / backup), refresh calendar skins, and change options (define its look and behavior, select your language, add new calendars or skins, define hotkeys, etc.)

You will find that for most quick actions you won’t need the menu. For example you can go directly to a certain date and double-click it to add, edit or delete an event.

Once you’re done setting up your Rainlendar calendar(s), you might get interested in customizing Rainlendar’s look. A huge collection of skins is available from the Rainlendar homepage, Customize.org and deviantART. As of version 2 skins carry a .r2skin file extension. In Windows double-clicking this file will install the skin or you can drag and drop it over any Rainlendar window for automatic installation. In any case, refresh your calendar before you go into the options menu to activate the new skin.

Skins developed for versions prior to Rainlendar2 will come as .zip or .rar file. When you unpack this archive file you should have a single folder containing the skin’s ini-file(s). Copy that folder into the skins folder normally found under C:\Program Files\Rainlendar2\.
Old skins should be compatible with Rainlendar2, however in some cases the skin simply won’t load or the To Do list won’t show up, even though it’s supported by the skin. So be patient and play around if you absolutely must have one of the older skins.

The great advantages of Rainlendar2 include its small size, ease of use and flexibility. The application is rather low on system resources (~11.000 K), it’s very stylish and decently reminds you of upcoming events, birthdays, appointments etc. You can even put it on your USB stick and make it a portable applicaiton.

The biggest advantage of Rainlendar2 is also its biggest drawback: the tiny size of the desktop calendar. To see a list of events per day, week or month you need to go into the Manager and even here the list looks quite dull unless you print it. Another point to mention is the previously addressed limited functionality of some skins. Due to a recent upgrade in the software older skins are no longer upward compatible and may show bugs.

Taken together, Rainlendar2 is a great tool for keeping a small, simple and easy to update record of birthdays, holidays, events and things to do. That’s what I love it for. It’s clearly the wrong pick if you’re looking for a software to replace your File-O-Fax. For more ambitious users who need a better overview of their appointments and a few more features I recommend KOrganizer or Mozilla Sunbird.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Show Your Outlook Calendar On Desktop with Desktask (8)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)
• Manage Your Life with Free Online Time Management Tools (11)
• GTD (Getting Things Done) Roundup – Time To Organize (38)
• Advanced Online Note Taking Made Easy (13)

FBLook (for FaceBook)

One of the two new products (still in alpha) from Outlook extension developer TechHit. FBLook (Facebook + Outlook) is a simple toolbar add-on that integrates two key factors, (1) changing your “Status” and (2) notifications for friend requests, messages, pokes and more.

OutTwit (for Twitter)

OutTwit (Outlook + Twitter) is a little more robust than FBLook. With OutTwit you can update your Twitter status, receive friend updates, check messages, assign categories to messages, shorten URLs with TinyURL and archive/search your messages.

Next, let’s move onto the the little more robust and advanced Outlook add-ons.

LinkedIn – Outlook Toolbar

The first from LinkedIn is a toolbar, but it heavily integrates with Outlook. The simple and advanced features include; updating your Outlook contacts with LinkedIn profile information, receive notifications of profile changes, one click invites, mini-profiles in the emails, updates for your “network” and more. If you really use LinkedIn and have Outlook this is a must have.

Plaxo – Outlook Add-on

Similar Outlook add-on comes from Plaxo. Plaxo actually has slight integration with LinkedIn and you are easily able to add your LinkedIn friends to Plaxo, so it’s all a matter of which you prefer (or both). With Plaxo’s new Outlook add-on with Pulse, the new “social stream”, which integrates your “Connection’s” streams from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, etc., makes Outlook your ultimate source for following your friends and news. Like LinkedIn’s add-on, it keeps your address book up to date, but Plaxo’s also syncs your calendar, tasks and notes. This could come in handy to synchronize multiple Outlooks or even multiple calendars, like Yahoo or Google.

Xobni

Xobni, which is still in private beta, but has released plenty of more invites, is a social Outlook add-on without a social network behind it. I’ve been using Xobni for several months now and I love the integration and search functions. Any email I click on, Xobni will bring up:

• nr.of emails that were sent and received from the email address (which determines their rank)
• list of all email conversations (better than Gmail)
• a list of all the attachments for the person
• broken down timelines of when I usually send/receive emails to/from that person
• automatically pulls the phone number from an email
• and the best feature is the almost instantaneous search function.

You can sign up now for an invite here.

FreeConference

Finally, I have to schedule conference calls several times a week. FreeConference, is the simplest and quickest way to setup a free conference call. There are paid options, but I’ve never used them. Just recently they updated their offerings with an Outlook add-on that is literally 3 clicks away from within Outlook to setup a conference call. Clicking “Schedule a Conference” brings up a Calendar Appointment with all the details, select your invitees, and hit send. All the information is automatically included with the calendar appointment.

I love Outlook and I love integration, is there something else out there for free I should be using?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Organise your Outlook emails with SNARF (4)
• Zenbe – All Your Emails In One Place (20)
• Stay Socially Connected Online With Yoono (18)
• Stay in Sync with your Significant Other using free Exchange Server (13)
• Open Two Different Instances Of Outlook With ExtraOutlook (57)

Jott

Probably the best reminder service that can be accessed from any US phone. You simply dial-in JOTT number (1-866-JOTT-123), and as you speak it records your message and sends it over to your email address as text. Messages can be sent to yourself or anyone else.

Highlights include:

• Record and assign messages to different categories (expenses, reminders, ToDos, Work, etc.).
• Communicate with teams and delegate tasks to groups of people.
• Access Jott from multiple phone numbers (Call 1-866-JOTT-123).
• and more …

Check it out in action in the video below

PingMe

PingMe is a mixture between online calendar and task manager with a bunch of useful email alert features. PingMe reminders (aka Pings) can be scheduled from your web account and delivered via email or text message. There are a number of different alert settings you can select from, i.e. option to make alerts recurring (daily, weekly, etc.) or set them to ‘pester’ mode where you will be bugged every 10 minutes until you respond to it (stop, postpone for 2 hours, etc.).

Read more: PingMe – eMail and SMS Reminder

WakerUpper | CallTheFuture – Two really simple services to schedule one time calls, such as wake-up calls, event reminders, etc. No registration required.

LetterMeLater

LetterMeLater brings reminder scheduling to your inbox. Send scheduled emails and set them to be delivered to any desired future date straight from your email window (Outlook, Gmail, …). You can send scheduled emails to yourself or any other email address. If you spend most of the time in front of your email program this is definitely a must-have. Check out full feature list: LetterMeLater – Email Scheduler.

HassleMe

This one lets you set alerts for things you want to be constantly reminded about, ’stop procrastinating’, ‘get back to work’ and so on. The cool part about HassleMe, it emails you at rather random intervals so you never know when to expect it.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• “I Want Sandy”- Email Assistant you’ll Like but Can Leave Without (5)
• Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible (1)
• LifeIO: Check Your Email, Read Feeds, Post to Twitter, Keep Notes & More From One Cool Site (26)
• 5 Contacts to SUPERCHARGE Your eMail (6)
• 15 FREE Useful Services To Access from your Phone (9)