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atMonitor – A System Monitor On Steroids [Mac]

Jackson Chung — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:01:19 +0000

If you own a Mac, you should know that one of the most useful tools is Activity Monitor, found in the Utilities folder. If you haven’t used it before, get introduced to it; it will help get you out of sticky situations when your Mac isn’t responding properly. Activity Monitor is basically Mac’s version of Window’s Task Manager, albeit slightly more concise.

Today, I’ll be featuring a tool that takes the functions of Activity Monitor and pushes them into overdrive. The tool in question is called atMonitor and it’s like Activity Monitor on a ton of steroids. The interface is almost the same. One of the many noticeable differences, though, is the addition of an information panel in the Top Window.

If you find that a particular runaway process, let’s say for example, ATSServer, is constantly using up 100% CPU power in Activity Monitor; the standard response is to perform a Google search and determine whether or not it’s safe to quit the process. Not required in atMonitor. That’s where the information panel comes in. It will display all the necessary information about every process or application that’s selected and allows you to make a judgement on the spot.

If an application is selected, it will query osx.iusethis.com for its description and latest version. It will then compare the latest version against the version installed on your Mac and tell you if an update is available. Besides that, there’s a Version column which displays the current version of every app/process running and an icon next to it that symbolizes if it’s up to date.

If there’s an app which is outdated, just click on its icon in the information panel and you’ll be taken directly to the app’s web page. How cool is that?

Another awesome feature is Reveal. Let’s say you find a fishy rogue process running in atMonitor, you can use the Information Panel to read more about it. Subsequently, let’s assume that you decide that it shouldn’t be running because it belongs to an app which you’ve deleted; you can easily kill the process, then use the Reveal button to display the particular file in Finder – then Trash it!

Another cool function is Renice Process. atMonitor allows you to alter the processing priority of particular apps. You can increase or decrease the priority, providing more CPU power to more important apps. This function will definitely come in handy while performing CPU-intensive tasks like applying layers in Photoshop or encoding video.

atMonitor comes in three different forms of view: in the menu bar (essentially replacing a few of the monitoring menu bar apps I know), a floating window and a Dock icon (can only monitor one parameter). These three views provide you with real-time monitoring and reporting so that you have a general idea of what’s going on and can easily scan for the most memory- and CPU-intensive apps. To be absolutely honest, I’m a creature of habit and I already use iStat Menus and couldn’t be bothered to switch. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try atMonitor’s menu bar view. Personally, I prefer using Top Window because it resembles Activity Monitor.

Those are just a few of atMonitor’s features, there are several advanced functions I haven’t tapped into yet. Triggers, for example, allows you to set up and run a certain script whenever a particular parameter (CPU, RAM, Temp) reaches a predefined level. Just think of the possibilities!

atMonitor is available for free and runs on Mac OS X 10.5 and higher (Snow Leopard supported). Download it and give it a try. Do you think that it has potential to replace Activity Monitor?

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Milpon – The Only Remember The Milk IPhone App You’ll Need

Angelina — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:01:05 +0000

Remember The Milk is one of the most popular to-do webapps on the net right now. While it has an extensive list of ways to be integrated into your daily routine, from iCal exporting to mobile syncing through iPhone, Blackberry, and Android apps, some of these features are only accessible to Pro users.

To users who would much rather not pay $25 a year to access RTM through their iPhone, luckily, there is an alternative to RTM’s own iPhone app. Milpon is the only iPhone todo app in the iTunes store that is both free and functional for managing your RTM tasks.

When you first open the iPhone todo app, it takes you to an overview of the tasks that are due in the next week, as well as tasks that are overdue. Tasks are sorted in order of due date, in alphabetical order. The priorities of the tasks are written under the date. From here, you can complete tasks by touching the square, add tasks by clicking the (+) button in the upper right hand corner, or edit tasks by clicking their entries in the list. Doing either of the latter two will take you to a screen that looks like this:

The first line following the arrow is where you input the name of your task. Unfortunately, unlike the RTM website, you can’t add priorities and other details by using hash tags. To set a due date, click the calendar icon, which brings up a full sized calendar.

This calendar is possibly my favorite feature of Milpon. You can scroll through the months by clicking the left and right arrows by the Month and Year entry, and then pick the exact date you want by clicking the corresponding box on the calendar. This will bring you back to the main Add page, where you can set the other details like which list you want the task in, etc.

Another great thing about Milpon’s Add page is that, when you are assigning tags to a task, Milpon brings up a list of the tags that you have already created, and adds the tag you tap to the task you’re creating.

When you are done creating a task, it will be filed with all of your other tasks, where it will be viewable in three ways. The screenshot above is of Milpon’s home screen. By clicking Overview, you will see a screen like the very first screenshot above, that details all the tasks due in the next week. If you click “List,” you’ll see all of your lists, followed by the number of tasks in that list. If you click “Tag,” you’ll see a list of your tags, followed by the number of tasks that have that tag.

I find the option to sort your tasks by their tags extremely useful, because you can set contexts (such as the location that your task should be completed at) as your tags, and then sort your tasks so that they are location specific. Then, you can view all of your “@phone” tasks while you’re making calls, and call everyone in one sitting.

Since Milpon is a relatively new app, it is still undergoing active development. For example, the latest update features automatic syncing! Instead of having to manually sync like in the previous releases, Milpon now syncs when you open the app. Unfortunately this means that you’ll still have to sync manually after making changes, but that’s still better than no automated syncing at all.

You can sync manually by clicking the refresh icon in the upper left hand corner of the home screen. Syncing usually takes quite a while, which is a bit of a drawback, but you can still view and edit tasks while syncing, so that shouldn’t be too much of a concern.

I’ve been an avid fan since Milpon first launched, and it’s come a long way since its infant days. I foresee it making great progress as it gains more users, and I hope that it will become the RTM iPhone app of choice for non-Pro users.

Do you use Remember the Milk? Give Milpon a shot, and tell us what you think of it, in comparison to RTM’s own iPhone app.

Milpon

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Gantter – The Ultimate Free Creative Project Management Tool

Ryan Dube — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:01:42 +0000

For the most part, I’m a very task oriented and “to-do list” sort of guy. At work I’m able to manage the many projects and even small tasks that I’m responsible for through Microsoft Project – which is, in my humble opinion, one of the most powerful project and task management applications available for desktop PCs.

The problem is that most home users of moderate means can’t usually afford the Office package that includes Microsoft Project. The majority of home computer users will have the standard office package, such as the 2007 Home and Student edition which has Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote.

However, at home I also have a number of involved and complicated projects that I’m trying to manage, as does my wife and if you have any teenage kids at home – project management software could help them tremendously with managing their time between homework, school projects, sport events and everything else life dishes out upon a vibrant and busy family. I am very pleased to present a shockingly free and very creative online project management tool called Gantter.

Free Creative Project Management Software Just By Typing a URL

Here’s what blew me away. I’m accustomed to testing dozens of free applications every month, and most of the time you need to at least provide an email address or some other way to identify yourself. Surprisingly, when you first visit the Gantter website, you’ll see yourself instantly staring at what looks like Microsoft Project. The website itself is the application, and once you visit it, you can instantly start creating your own project management file.

For me, such a creative way to use a project management application is like a dream come true. You can create a Microsoft Project compatible file for any project that you’ve got going on. This application lets you save those files (or even PDF exports) onto your USB flash drive. Later, when you want to make changes to your project, just go to any computer, pop in your USB drive and visit Gantter, where you can open that file and modify it however you wish.

It doesn’t matter whether the computer you’re using has MS Project or not. And if you already use MS Project at work? Even better – now you can take your work anywhere with you and edit those MS Project files remotely, whether you’re working on a computer at an Internet Cafe, a library or anywhere else.

I decided that I would finally start writing that novel that I’ve always wanted to get started on but couldn’t because these MakeUseOf article deadlines keep getting in the way – so why not work on my novel while I’m working on a MakeUseOf article?

My first step was to create my task list for the novel project.

Creating the task list is fast and easy, but the real power of this online application is where you set the predecessors (the work you need to get done before you can start on that task). Just like in MS Project, Gantter automatically schedules out all of your work based on what you need to do and when you need to do it. All you need to think about is one task at a time.

For example, here I’ve clicked on setting up the predecessor for writing the second chapter, which I can start doing the moment the first chapter is done (I don’t need to finish revising the first before I get started on the second.)

Also, on this screen you can add additional notes for this task, as well as assign resources that you’ve configured in the “resources” section of the application. Gantter takes all of this information that you feed it and generates a nice, clear schedule (Gantt chart) for you off to the right side of the screen.

Exploring the software a bit, it’s apparent that this isn’t some cheap, fly-by-night web app – this is a well thought out and very well programmed online application that works fast and efficiently throughout my testing on Firefox and Internet Explorer. The features are many, as you can see from my drilling through the menus.

Saving and Accessing Your Projects

So, what do you do when you’re done planning out your project and you want to save the file? Obviously, you can’t store the data in your account, because you don’t have an account. If you pretend that this application is just like any other desktop application you use, then the answer is simple – just click save!

That’s the beauty of Gantter – it’s like you’re using a desktop application even though you’re using your Internet browser. You can either save the file or export it to MS Project. Saving downloads your file as a “project.xml” file, which you can access later from this same website.

Copy the XML file to your USB drive, and later when you come back to the website (no matter where you are in the world), just click File -> Open and you’ll be able to browse to your USB drive and open up your saved XML file.

Simple. Easy. Convenient. Those are the three words I think about when I use this online application. No sign-up required, no download required and no money required. The application was written by Volodymyr Mazepa, a Ukraine-based IT project manager – one IT manager who clearly knows his stuff. I encourage anyone who uses this application to click on Help -> About and send Volodymyr a hearty thank-you for his excellent work and for offering us this high-quality online application at no cost, a very rare act of kindness these days.

Do you have any online project management apps that you prefer? What do you think of Gantter? Share your opinions in the comments section below.

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Easily Kill Hung Processes on Windows with Super F4

Karl L. Gechlik — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:01:30 +0000

I have been using the Windows hot key combination to kill a running program for a really long time now. For those of you who do not know it is Alt-F4. This will politely request that the open application on your screen is to close. If you have unsaved work, the program might ask you to save it or if the program was really hung it might not do anything at all.

But with this little 116KB download from GoogleCode you can force an application to close with Control-Alt-F4. This will effectively kill the application without any other intervention. The program also offers the option to press the Windows key + F4 and then click on the window you want to kill. These two options make this a handy dandy item for my toolkit.

I downloaded the application and installed it. You have options within the installer to check for updates as well as making Super F4 start up with Windows. Once it is running you will see this item in your system tray:

The icon for Super F4 is the one all the way on the left. If you right-click on it you will see your basic options. You can disable it, hide the tray icon and set the auto-start functionality as well as exit the application.

Normally when killing FileZilla I would get a dialogue box that looked like this:

That means I have to actually click on the box and answer the question. If I want to be swift about it I just need to hit my Control-Alt-F4 and blammo FileZilla is closed with no pop-up. That means I can just continue on to do what I have to do.

I simulated a failure in Excel and hit the Control + Alt + F4 and just like that it was closed! Sweet! Next up I wanted to give the other option a shot. I opened up everything and I wanted to try the Windows Key + F4 to choose the program I wanted to close. The mouse cursor turns into a Skull and Cross Bones. You simply click on the application you want to kill and that’s it.

This is a great program for power users but remember if you have not saved your work in the application and you close it with Super F4 you will lose those changes you made since you last saved.

Do you have another way of killing hung processes? Share them with us in the comments.

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Students: Free Apps To Help You Excel at School [Mac only]

Jeffry Thurana — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:00:04 +0000

School can be one of the best things that ever happens in someone’s life. Or it can be the worst. There are always the teachers who think that their job is to make a student’s life miserable, the boring textbooks which are thicker than Harry Potter’s series, the never ending papers and assignments and pop quizzes and tests… You get the picture.

Luckily, in this digital age, everybody can turn to their computer for help. There are many applications dedicated to improve your study skills, as well as the overall school experience.

And for those Mac-user students out there, here are five free tools to help you survive, and win.

1. Schoolhouse

The first thing to do to achieve a better academic grades is to organize everything into one easy-to-observe placeholder. Schoolhouse, which dubs itself as “The Homework Manager for The Mac“, is built to do just that. Developed by a student who still lives the life, you can expect this application to be as useful as it should be.

You start the application by creating a new term; give name to it and set the time range of the term.

Then you gradually add your assignments, tasks and notes to it. You could choose to view all the items by list, week or month, iCal style.

Schoolhouse also has the ability to link documents and media to the assignments for quick reference, preview all your grades during the term to help you monitor your performance, and automatically publish the assignments to the web so that anyone can subscribe to them.

If it sounds confusing, don’t worry — to help users getting started, this app come with a short PDF manual.

Schoolhouse is like a GTD tool for students, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be useful for non-student users. I find that this app is very useful to manage my writing projects.

2. Genius

One of the biggest traumas of school that still carved in my memory was studying for tests. I was always a “math kind of guy”, so memorizing too many facts and dates always scared me.

I wish I’ve encountered Genius back then. This small app will help anybody with their study skills, particularly how to memorize things easier.

You start with a new blank window. Then, by clicking the ‘+’ button, you can add a question. Insert the answer next to the question.

After all of the questions and answers have been inserted into the Genius window, you can save the window and start the learning process. Click the green “Study” button, and Genius will pop up a window with a question and the answer while dimming out the other parts of the screen. It will ask you to memorize them.

Genius then will ask the question again and you have to write the answer. It will alternate between new facts and questions. Genius organizes your information and carefully chooses questions using an intelligent “spaced repetition” method that’s based on your past performance.

You can use Genius to study foreign language phrases, vocabulary words, historical events, legal definitions, formal speeches, marketing points, religious texts, or anything else you need to memorize.

3. ProVoc

It’s always nice to learn a new language. But there’s one obstacle that usually stops almost everybody from learning any language: memorizing the vocabularies.

ProVoc is a free vocabulary trainer that makes learning a language easy. Just download the application and the vocabulary pack(s), and you are ready to go. There is a mountain of vocabulary packs available ranging from German to Dutch to Polish to Russian to Arabic.

ProVoc has the ability to export to an iPod, so you can learn while on the road. You can also print flash cards, use the free Dashboard Widget, and listen to the audio pronunciation of the words.

4. Buddi

The word “student” is often being related to “starving”. This might be an indication that most students are not good in managing their finance.

To help with the monetary side, students (and everybody else) can rely on Buddi, a simple and free, open-source money management application. Buddi is Java-based so it can run on any operating system with Java environment installed.

With the financial problem tackled with the help of Buddi, students can focus more on the study.

5. Carbon Copy Cloner

“The dog ate my paper” is a classic excuse for not turning in your assignment. Of course, no teacher will buy it anymore. The modern alternative is “My hard drive crashed and ate everything inside, including my assignment.” But that is also not selling well anymore because we have backup utilities.

Carbon Copy Cloner is one free and powerful alternatives. You can “clone” everything to an external hard drive.

6. Bonus tool: G.ho.st

G.ho.st is one of the online alternatives for backing up your files. You will get 15 Gigabytes of free online storage on the system (and another additional 5GB for every friend who signs up from your invitation).

But G.ho.st is not just about file backup. It is a complete virtual, online operating system. So you will also get an office suite, games, browser and everything that you can expect from an operating system. Why will you need this? Simple — you can access your work and files from any place on earth with just a computer and an internet connection.

One of the new features that I like most is the ability to “side-load” files from web location directly to G.ho.st online storage, and the ability to share them with your friends.

The above link will direct you to the G.ho.st page with me as the referrer. If you don’t feel like donating an additional 5 Gigabytes to me, you can go directly to their site.

7. Everything else

There is still so many more applications that can help students to improve study skills and work better. MakeUseOf Directory profiled over 100 tools, covering everything from online dictionaries, chart makers and flash cards to sites for ordering food from take-aways located near the campus.

Don’t forget to check out articles about online tools for students such as:

- 10 Online Learning Tools
- 10 Web Tools To Save Your Butt In School
- Collaboration Suite For Teachers and Students

We’ve also discussed other free file hosts for free online storage services that can be used by students to keep and share their files.

If you could add more ideas to this short list, be sure to write it down using the comment below.

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How To Kill Unresponsive Programs without The Task Manager

Varun Kashyap — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:10 +0000

Windows is generally not known for its stability. Among other things there are frequent “Not Responding” applications. The reasons may vary from less RAM to Viruses to poorly designed applications. So what do you do when an application hangs up?

I bet you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del or fire up the task manager in some other way, reach for the application and choose “End Task”. Now there is nothing wrong with this approach, in fact as long as it gets the job done it doesn’t matter how you do it. However, ever had the situation where the task manager itself takes ages to load up? Of course it can happen because task manager does a lot of other things besides just ending tasks so it requires that much more resources. Apart from that, how about ending the hung applications with just a single click?

Yeah! you can do so. Its simple to achieve. Just follow along:

Right click on the desktop and choose New > Shortcut

In the dialog box that appears just type the following:
taskkill.exe /f /fi “status eq not responding”

Give it a name of your choice

Now just wait for something to start “Not Responding” and let loose your Task Killer!

So what did we do exactly? We just created a shortcut to run a command. The command being taskkill. Whenever you double click the shortcut you will invoke the said command which takes care of the rest. In particular the command we use says that kill all taskes whose status is equal to “not responding” and kill them forcefully (/f).

The /fi switch is used to filter and pinpoint the application to kill. We are using the Program’s status to filter the applications that are not responding and then kill them. You can filter(and thus kill) by memory usage (equal to, greater than, less than or not equal to), cpu time, window title and others.

In case you are wondering that its still not quite “the single click situation”, you can enable single click from within Folder Options, or better still – right click on the shortcut you just created, choose properties and assign it a shortcut key!

Do you know of some similar neat tricks?

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Schedule & Manage Preset Tasks On Your PC (Windows Only)

Joel Reyes — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:01:19 +0000

Marxio Timer allows you to control several aspects of your PC. It lets you do anything from turning off your computer to displaying certain text you’d like to remember later on. It’s a task manager/scheduler, reminder, alarm clock and more.

This app tells your computer to execute tasks specified by you at the time you’d like them to be run. You can turn off, restart, hibernate, suspend, logout, and run other applications on your computer with the click of a few buttons.

How do We do This?

First you’ll have to download the app here.

Now after the app has been successfully installed, you can begin to play around and find out what tasks you’d like to schedule. You’ll need to begin by opening up Marxio Timer and coming to a screen similar to the following:

Within this screen you’ll need to decide whether you want to select a few of the tasks already pre-selected or you can choose the Run Program option and browse through the apps you’d like to run at a selected time.

For the sake of this tutorial I have chosen to run a Display text task. This can come in handy at times when you want to remember important tasks or memos.

Once I’ve entered the selected text I will scroll down and enter the time I’d like the task to run.

Now I can either choose additional tasks to go along with the reminder such as turning off the computer or I can press the Activate button to finalize the task.

As soon as you activate your task a small window will pop-up showing you the allotted time you have before your task is executed. You can easily hide this window and quickly re-open it to check your remaining time as well.

And finally, once your timer has reached its end, the task will be carried out automatically. You won’t need to do anything else but sit back and let Marxio Timer do the rest.

To Conclude:

Marxio Timer also lets you save user profiles for future tasks, and it allows you to create a desktop shortcut so that you’re able to quick-start your tasks without having to fully open up Marxio. Tasks can be virtually scheduled to any time you choose after/before/every few minutes, after your PC is on idle time, once, or on any other pre-selected time periods.

Another quick feature this app comes with is the capturing of screenshots. You can set the timer to capture any area of your screen at whatever time you decide as you manipulate the timer to benefit you. This is a nifty feature that can come in handy for avid users.

Do you know of any other similar apps that can be used to manipulate the PC in this way? If so, let us know about them in the comments.

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4 Alternative Uses For Your Gmail Inbox

Daniel Pataki — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:10:02 +0000

Gmail = email right? Well not any more. With some of these alternative uses, you can use your inbox for a ton of other things, from writing a diary to keeping a fitness plan.

You can also apply these methods to Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other mail client with some similar features. Let’s jump right in!

Writing a diary

Gmail is almost built for this function in a sense. It is private, it can store as many entries as you want, you can categorize using labels, everything is there to make this a great diary application.

Each day, start a new email draft in the morning and either write everything that happened to you that day when you get home in the evening, or add to it as the day goes by. When you’ve written all there is to say, you can save the email, or better yet, send it to yourself.

The great thing about this method is that it allows you to amend any comments, or your friends to comment on an entry too. Just reply to an entry and send it to yourself again to add some additional thoughts, or send the whole message to a friend to get his/her comments. This way all the comments will stay in one thread, so you will have a very organized diary indeed.

Plus, you get all the categorization and search features Google offers you. You can use labels to add your emotional state (happy, sad, etc.) or you can categorize as usual, highlighting the main events of the day.

Keeping your diet

You can also use the power of Gmail to manage your diet and take a look at how many calories you consume daily. This is helpful because you can dedicate a whole inbox to this subject and you can keep track of your progress on a daily (or even more frequent) basis.

I recommend either adding a new message for each meal you ate, or adding one each day. I would write what I ate, ingredients, how it made me feel, was it necessary, and all the additional info you need in the message body, and write the calorie count in the subject. This would give me at a glance info about my consumption if I take a look at the inbox.

You can use labels to flag all the days where your consumption was good, and to highlight the ones where it was not so great. You can also create labels for the amount you consume. Create one for 500-700, 700-1000, 1000-1400, 1400-2000, etc. You can then easily switch to view all the days where you were in these specific regions.

Book & Movie Organizer

Gmail can also help you organize your Books and Movies, or indeed any other items you have a collection of. If we take Books as an example, you can create a new email for each book you have. Type the book title, author and ISBN in the subject, this will help you sort and search very easily later on.

You can write a short synopsis of the book, along with any other info, like publisher and so on in the body, plus you can include an image from Amazon to accompany it. Just we did with the diary you can write down your opinion, your review and so on as replies to that email. You can also send the email off to your friends to get their opinion on the book.

You can create emails for books you would like to read, which will come in handy when you’re shopping (you already have a list of titles with ISBNs you would like), and when you want to decide which one to get (you can send them off to friends who have read them to get their take on the book).

Labels can be used well to mark the genre of each book, but you can also use them to indicate whether you liked a book or not. If you also enter books you would like to read later on, you should also assign a label to separate them from books you have already read.

Google’s search will give you a great way to sort through your collection, all you need to do is enter the title or the ISBN and you have it already. I for one read good books multiple times and I have approximately 30 Terry Pratchett books. Selecting which one to read (again) is no easy task, and this system helps me, and could help you too.

Note Taker & Task Manager

Nowadays when we have Google Notebook, Remember The Milk, Todoist, Zoho Writer or Adobe Buzzword we have quite a few note taking and management goodness apps at our fingertips, but I like to keep things simple and integrated, so I came up with a system to use Gmail for taking notes and managing tasks.

Basically there are two types of emails, a note or a task. Notes are assigned the label “note”, tasks are left without a label. I keep adding notes and I use other labels to categorize them (personal, work, website design, etc), the main thing is to separate needed and not needed notes. If a note becomes unimportant I just delete it, or archive it, depending on the contents. Make sure the subject is to the point and short, so you can sort through your notes in a jiffy.

Tasks are mainly managed using the Gmail Superstars system, which can be enabled in the settings under Google Labs. It replaces the usual Gmail stars with an assortment of different icons like a green tick, or a red exclamation mark. I use the normal star, the blue star, the exclamation mark and the tick to indicate the status of a task.

If I enter a task and it needs my further attention until I can start work I slap the yellow star onto it. If I am waiting for someone else’s input to get it going I apply the blue star. The exclamation mark is used when I need to work on a task and the tick is used to mark finished tasks.

This method enables me to have an inbox where I just keep notes and tasks. All the methods we talked about above like sending a task to someone to get their opinion and so on still apply, you can add more using threads, and of course you have the all powerful search available.

Conclusion

While Gmail is not a management system or a CMS, it can do a pretty good job of organizing anything really. It won’t beat some top notch systems, and is NOT a better note taker than Google Notebook, or other services, but if you just need simplicity and ease of access, these uses may be for you. let us know if you use your Gmail inbox for some weird stuff!

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5 Nifty Applications To Make Your Life Easier In Windows

Damien Oh — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:01:36 +0000

I am not really a Windows person, but when I am on my Windows computer, I always keep a set of small and handy applications on my desktop to automate the repetitive tasks or to make the complicated things much easier to do.

If you are like me, someone who like to be organized and do things the efficient way, here are some applications that I use and recommend:

Windows xKill

How many times have you encountered an incident where the application freezes and when you try to kill it via the Task Manager, it just doesn’t respond? It has happened to me very often, especially on my old Pentium III computer.

When such cases occur, I always use Windows xKill to kill the application quickly and easily.

Windows xKill is s small application ported from the xKill application in Linux. It is only 18KB in size and does not require any installation.

Once you have enabled the tray icon, you simply press the shortcut keys Ctrl + Alt + Backspace to bring up xkill (the cursor will turn into a skull) and then click on the window that you want to close. That’s it.

DropCommand

I know that most of you don’t use the command prompt in Windows, but when you do, don’t you wish that it can be a little bit friendlier, like the Terminal in Linux and Mac?

The DropCommand application allows you to drag and drop files to the command prompt so you don’t have to key in the path to the files manually. It was made using AutoHotKeys and provides a friendlier way for you to use the command prompt.

Fences

If you have a messy desktop filled with dozen of shortcut icons cramping up every single corner of the screen, you might want to use Fences to get your desktop organized.

Fences is a free software developed by Stardock, the developer behind the popular ObjectDock. This application allows you to define various containers on your desktop to place your icons. You can have a container for Internet related stuff, while another one to contain all your Word documents.

You can create as many containers as you like, and when you have no use for the icons, you can hide them by double clicking on the desktop. Any time you need to access your shortcut, simply double click the desktop to bring the icons back.

Just Close Some Task

If you have the habit of opening a lot of applications and then forget to close them after you have finished using them, then JustCloseSomeTasks is the best software for you.

What it does is to associate each task with an expiry time and then close that task once the expiry time is reached. After you have used it for some time, the program will learn your behavior and adjust the expiry time accordingly.

Lacuna Launcher

There are always a series of applications that you use when you are performing certain tasks. Wouldn’t it be great if you could load them all up with just a single shortcut?

Lacuna Launcher allows you to set a group of files to be opened with a single shortcut by creating a text file with the paths to all the files you wish to open. You can set an initial delay time for it to wait before opening files, as well as a pause time between opening each files.

There is no limit as to how many lists (each list represent a group of applications) you can create. You can create a list of applications to be opened when you want to browse the Web, or all the documents you need when you typing a report. It may take some work initially, but once you have it configured, it will work like a charm.

Conclusion

The above mentioned applications are some of the small and handy apps that I used daily. Despite their small size, they are very useful and have helped to increase my efficiency and allow me to do things faster in Windows.

If you have any small handy apps that you use and are not mentioned above, do share it with us in the comments.

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Organize Your Life With Yahoo Calendar

Ryan Dube — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:01:12 +0000

When you maintain a busy lifestyle, with lots of responsibilities and deadlines, learning to organize your life can take a lot of effort. However, you can organize your day more effectively by using scheduling and planning tools that can help you keep organized throughout your efforts toward achieving long-term and short-term goals.

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.

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4 Adobe AIR ToDo List Apps For Managing Your Tasks

David Pierce — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:01:07 +0000

For a long time, I hated Adobe AIR. I never saw the point of accessing things on my desktop, since they are online.

Well, I’ve had my mind changed somewhat. I’ve been downloading and trying a bunch of different Adobe AIR ToDo list apps, and have found a bunch of them that are actually incredibly useful. One of the things AIR is best for, in my opinion, is managing your to-do items and tasks. We need task-management applications that are lightweight, simple to use, and easy to get started with. Adobe AIR has those in spades.

Here are four (well, actually five) great Adobe Air todo applications for making lists with Adobe AIR, simply and effectively:

Doomi

Doomi is about the simplest way to manage tasks that I can think of. Just fire up the application, type a task, and press Enter. Type another, and press Enter. Then, as you finish tasks, check them off and they go away. There’s nothing more to it. You can set reminders and due dates, should you so desire, but you don’t really need to.

When you’re not using it, Doomi sits in your system tray and waits for you, all the while taking up only a small amount of memory. Doomi is awesome for quickly getting everything out of your head and into a list, and is both one of the best and one of the most popular ways to manage all of your lists and tasks with Adobe AIR.

MiniTask

Minitask is much the same as Doomi, in that it’s an incredibly simple way to manage all your tasks. It’s slightly more fully featured, though – you can drag and drop your tasks to reorder them, the ability to print your task lists, and the ability to sort your tasks into multiple lists (Work, Home, etc.).

You can even copy and paste tasks from MiniTask right into Word, Excel, and your email account. It’s as easy as Doomi to add to and edit, but with a few more bells and whistles. In my experience, it also takes up more memory than Doomi- but that might be just me.

Either way, MiniTask is a great, complete task-manager.

Remember the Milk

Many people, like myself, already use an application to manage our tasks. For me, it’s Remember the Milk. If you’re an RTM user like me, there are two great AIR applications- Remember the Milk Notifier and Remember the Tasks. The Notifier sits in your system tray, and reminds you when you’ve got a task due or overdue. You can set how often you’re reminded, and even add tasks to RTM through the application.

Remember the Task is essentially just a standalone version of the iGoogle gadget for Remember the Milk. It sits in your system tray, and is easy to access in order to manage your tasks.

There are no uniquely incredible features to speak of, but I love having RTM accessible through Alt-Tab, and not only in my browser.

KonoLive

KonoLive is designed for people who work in teams. It’s a task manager that works with Google Docs for your documents, Box.net for your files, and all the people on your team. You can create and share tasks, which can be discussed by anyone.

Your tasks are available offline with the AIR app, and also online thanks to KonoLive. It’s a perfect, lightweight and simple solution for small groups and businesses with common files, documents and tasks.

What’s your favorite Adobe AIR todo list app?

Photo Credit: PSD

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Tracks – An Advanced “Getting Things Done” Application

T.J. Mininday — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:01:01 +0000

Whether you are in school, college or becoming an adult and enjoying the family life, everyone is busy. With technology taking over our world, it’s making us even busier. Having open contact with email, phone and several social networking sites, communication is easier than ever which has made life even more hectic.

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?

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3 Tools To Manage Windows Processes Better

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:01:58 +0000

Process Management is at the heart of any modern operating system. While most of the modern operating systems do a really good job of doing so, sometimes you may want to take the matter into your own hands or you may just want to know what is going on in your own system.

Windows Task Manager is the obvious solution that comes to mind which allows you to achieve this. However there are some software that provide additional functionality that is not offered by Windows Task Manager.

Let’s have a look at some of them :

Process Manager for Windows

PMW lets you access some of the Windows Task Manager functionality using the right click menu or the application menu (accessed via Alt+Space).

PMW has options for

setting priorities of the tasks.
changing opacity of windows.
ability to minimize any application to the tray.
Hide an application or all other applications.
Kill the application without having to run the task manager.

If these are too much for you, you can choose to hide some of these options via the Process Manager Preferences.

Prio

If you are an avid user, you must have noticed the set priority setting inside Windows Task Manager when you right-click on any process. What this setting does is that it allows you to change the priority of a particular process so that it gets more CPU time and would thus complete faster or be more responsive (you should be careful while changing priorities, as doing this might cause instability).

One problem with changing the priority is that the next time you run the same application it starts executing with normal priority and forgets your “priority settings”. This is where Prio comes in.

Prio allows you to permanently set priorities of certain tasks according to your requirements. Just set the priority of any task according to your requirement, make sure that “Save Priority” has a tick next to it, and you are done.

In addition to this you can choose to install the Task Manager GUI and Prio Network Driver. These will give you additional information about services, processes and network connections within the Task Manager Window.

Extended Task Manager

Extended Task Manager is like the Windows Task Manager on steroids. It offers a host of information about the current state of the system that the standard Windows task manager doesn’t provide you with.

Here are a few features and additional bits of information that Extended Task Manager offers:

Displays disk input/output activity with information about related applications.

Displays network port activity with IP addresses of external computers.

Displays information about applications that utilized most of the CPU or memory at any time presented on the charts.
Displays all files locked by a select process.

Finds all processes locking a specified file.
Includes “Summary” tab for quickly assessing the overall state of the Windows system.
Allows freezing individual Windows processes.
Offers various visual and functional improvements over the standard Windows Task Manager.

Do you know of some other tools that allows you to view such kinds of information about your computer?

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Show Your Outlook Calendar On Desktop with Desktask

Karl L. Gechlik — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:01:05 +0000

I live by my Outlook calendar and tasks. I guess you already knew that if you read my last article entitled Want A No-Nonsense Web Editable Printable Checklist?

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!

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Use Your Voice To Get Things Done With Dial2Do

David Pierce — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:01:21 +0000

Computer junkie that I am, there are still times I’m not near my computer to enter ideas into my system.

Just about my whole life is computer-based, so when I’m out, emails, tasks, calendar events, and the like can all fall by the wayside.

Or, I can just pick up the phone, dial a number, say a few words, and everything gets done for free, using Dial2Do.

Dial2Do is providing a great way for users to use their voice to do all kinds of things, and interact with all kinds of services – it’s like what Jott used to do, but without the sudden added cost.

Here are just a few of the many things you can do with Dial2Do: add stuff to Evernote, add tasks to Remember the Milk, send emails, send text messages, add calendar events to Google Calendar, listen to your email or RSS feeds, or post updates to your Twitter account. And that’s only a few of the choices.

Once you create a free account with Dial2Do, and associate your phone number with your account, all you have to do is dial a given phone number (the service is available in 24 countries, each one with a different phone number).

A voice comes on the phone and says “What would you like to do?” You tell it, say, “Calendar.” You’re prompted then to speak your calendar event, like “lunch with Bill, today, 2pm.” There’s a brief pause, and that same voice comes back and says “that’s done.” Either hang up or stay on the line to record more. Once you hang up, you’re done! Your event shows up in your Calendar, your Twitter, or wherever you told it to go.

The true usefulness of Dial2Do is that it does interact with so many services – there’s nothing new to learn or check with Dial2Do, because it already integrates with the services you already use.

Even if you’re not a user of all the services though, Dial2Do still offers a bunch of great features. By adding contacts to your account, you can send emails or text messages on the fly without typing a thing. Contacts can be added manually, or imported from a number of different services – Google, Yahoo, Outlook and the like. Texting while driving’s a dangerous, but popular, enterprise – Dial2Do makes that both easier and safer.

The transcription service is one of the most accurate I’ve seen in a service like this, better even than Jott. In all of my first few transcriptions, the only mistake Dial2Do made was to transcribe “parliamentary” as “polimentary.” Apparently polimentary is a word in Dial2Do’s world, but still – the success rate was impressively high.

The biggest drawback to Dial2Do, and one that’s common to applications like this, is that every service and contact you use has to be set up beforehand. If you decide “oh, I need to email John,” but John’s not in your contacts list, you’re out of luck. Same goes for adding to calendars, or checking email, or anything – whatever you want to do, it needs to be done at your computer.

My advice would be to set up every service you might possibly use (they’re simple and quick to set up), and add every contact you can (Dial2Do allows 100) – you’ll be surprised how often you use them, especially given how good the transcription is.

If Jott is any indication, Dial2Do won’t be free forever. For now, though, it’s a totally free, totally useful service that helps you get all kinds of things done with a simple phone call. Use voice-activated dialing, and you may never touch your phone keyboard again.

How do you, or how do you wish you could, get things done with your voice?

Photo Credit: PartsnPieces

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Five Great Online To-Do Lists You Should Check Out

Grant — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:56:10 +0000

A lot of people sometimes find themselves very busy. We get overwhelmed with assignments, projects, deadlines and other mayhem, and at times, a to-do list can really help with managing all those tasks.

Luckily for you, many new and feature-rich online to-do lists can make doing the many tasks you need to do a little more manageable.

When looking through these services, all of them had features that included sharing tasks/lists by email and subscribing via RSS to a feed of your tasks.

Now, let’s get started at looking at a few of the most common Web 2.0 oriented online to-do lists, along with who can possibly use them and some ideas on how to use them:

Remember The Milk

Remember The Milk is an easy-to-use, yet feature-rich and Ajax loaded online to-do list which allows for access from multiple devices, including the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch and integration with Google Calendar and Gmail. It allows for features like tagging your tasks, prioritizing your tasks with different colors and you can also create different to-do lists.

Remember The Milk also allows for emailing tasks to your account, twittering tasks to RTM, viewing your tasks in a Gmail Labs addon, iGoogle gadget, iCal feed or Google Calendar gadget and the ability to add several options to each one of your tasks including completion time, date due and more.

It also supports another helpful feature when you’re not online – offline access with Google Gears. For $25 a year, an RTM Pro Account adds Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone/iPod touch support as well as priority email support and access to their beta-testing program.

Remember The Milk is my personal favorite for to-do lists because of its ease of use and flexibility, and I would recommend it for managing any kind of personal tasks.

Also, don’t forget to check out the recent article by fellow MUO Author David Pierce about many other ways you can use RTM.

Voo2do

Another site that has a lot of Ajax loaded into it is Voo2Do, which seems more broader than just managing simple tasks. It has many of the features Remember The Milk does, and also offers some advanced time tracking capabilities to track time left and time spent on projects that other todo list managers might not have.

Voo2Do, just like Remember The Milk, offers a developer API and each one also offers the ability to see projects that you’ve marked completed.

Voo2do defines itself from other online todo lists because of its more advanced time management features, including a built-in timer (shown by the play/pause buttons in the screenshot above) to track time spent on tasks and would make a great todo list for a worker looking to log hours or use professionally.

Todoist

Todoist is another online task manager which prides itself on simplicity. Todoist has a simple, but intricate interface (that confused me slightly at first) that breaks down tasks under projects (categories). Todoist did take a little getting used to, but after learning where all of the settings were underlaid on the main page (below) it was quite helpful.

You can set todo items, sub-items and even sub-sub items to organize even the most complicated tasks and tag/label each one to your liking. It also has plugins/addons for iGoogle, Netvibes, QuickSilver, Launchy and OS X Dashboard as well as Gmail integration and a Firefox sidebar.

With most of the standard features that other list managers have, Todoist would be a great application for somebody looking for a software that is more flexible than anything, but still offers most standard list features. It also has a $3 a month premium service that offers SSL security, reminders and a more advanced labeling system.

Also check out another article, “Todoist – Simple but Powerful Task Management App” by fellow MUO Author Daniel Pataki for a full review of Todoist.

Ta-Da List

Ta-Da List is a multi-functional to-do list that has a relatively simple user interface compared to Remember The Milk and has browser support for the Apple iPhone.

Ta-da List prides itself on being the web’s easiest to-do list, is more centered around the idea of creating multiple lists for just about everything and also has simple features for sharing your lists. Ta-da Lists are great for a user who is looking for simplicity, and just needs some basic features to manage a couple (or more) tasks.

Bla-bla List

Bla-bla List is another to-do list which operates all off a small Adobe flash window. Bla-bla List also brands themselves as “Lists without any blah blah!” and it sure is – the lists are indeed simple and easy to use like Ta-Da lists and again allow for other common features like sharing lists.

I could see Bla-bla list being used again, like Ta-Da Lists, for somebody who needs simple features, in a simle interface that’s easy to use.

Do you often rely on online to-do lists instead of a piece of paper to keep track of what you need to do? Let us know in the comments what online to-do lists you use and how/what you use them for!

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8 Easy Ways To Manage Tasks With Remember The Milk

David Pierce — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:01:12 +0000

I’m the type of person that has to write everything down. If I don’t write it down, it simply doesn’t get done. It’s not necessarily the easiest trait to deal with, but thankfully there are a number of applications that help me remember everything I have to do, everywhere I have to be, and all the other random thoughts that come into my head.

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?

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Unfreeze Your Windows Computer With AntiFreeze

T.J. Mininday — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:01:16 +0000

Nothing drives a person more nuts then a frozen computer. This goes for technicians, administrators, typical end users, and everyone else in between. You’ve been working for hours, when suddenly your computer completely locks up, and you are relegated to either rebooting your entire machine or simply killing all programs presently running. It typically happens for no rhyme or reason, but more often then not, is caused by multiple applications overloading your PC to the point where it can’t take it anymore.

While rebooting is usually the most effective solution, it’s typically not the most practical. Fortunately, amongst many of their great products, Resplendence Software has come up with an amazing solution to your ‘frozen’ problems, called AntiFreeze.

AntiFreeze is a self proclaimed ‘Emergency Task Manager’ that is capable is suspending all applications presently running, and killing them if necessary. This is how it works.

While AntiFreeze is sitting in your system tray, eating up very little resources, it’s awaiting the hotkey combination of ‘ALT+CTRL+WIN+HOME’. Once this sequence of keys is pressed, the task manager like AntiFreeze is launched and a majority of running applications go into a ’suspended’ mode. Where as it doesn’t kill any particular app, but it places it into an anti virus like quarantine and allows you view any programs that may be the culprit.

As opposed to the Windows Task Manager which doesn’t suspend applications, it forces you to kill applications one by one. The suspension feature of AntiFreeze is what makes it unique. It essentially ‘kills’ any item that may be the problem child, without actually killing it at all. In the screenshot below, you can see that you also have the option of resuming programs, which you know aren’t causing the issue.

The only time that such a great application as AntiFreeze won’t come in handy, is when your mouse itself has become unresponsive and your system is quite literally LOCKED UP. This typically points to a hardware issue, whether it be a driver or overheating. Other then that, AntiFreeze is a perfect solution for software based lockups, which can be quite frequent on Windows based machines.

This can be especially handy on a Windows based server, a server where a reboot cannot be accomplished during production hours. AntiFreeze is compatible with 32 and 64 bit XP, Vista and Server 2003 operating systems.

For the amount of resources that it eats up, and its completely simple ease of use, you can’t go wrong with AntiFreeze. It does everything as advertised. I have yet to discover any bugs or problems thus far, but please let us know of any you already know or discover.

Have you any similar alternatives to AntiFreeze?

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Manage Your Tasks On Your Desktop With Task Coach

Kyle Judkins — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:01:45 +0000

List making is often a very simple task that is done on a piece of paper or with a simple computer program. You usually fill the list up with simple tasks that only take a few words to describe.

The problem with this is that most tasks aren’t as simple as that. They usually take more than one step and might even have several sub-tasks included.

If you only write the final goal down, it might take you days or months to finally cross it off the list. I know that the best part of making a list is to cross off the tasks when they are done. Who doesn’t like the thrill of crossing something off your list? I know it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, but if you have such high level tasks like “take over the world,” you might want to break that down into parts. Like, “form a plan”, “gain followers” then “take over the world”.

Task Coach is an advanced desktop task manager for Windows, Mac and Linux that lets you break down your big goals into smaller chunks and file them appropriately.

Let’s Add Some Tasks

To add a task, all you need to do is click on the little piece of paper with the spark on it. This will open up your New Task window. This window gives you lots of options, so you can customize the task to your liking.

You just need to add a basic description, the dates of the task, a category, a budget (if needed) and any additional notes or attachments. You can color code your task to signify its importance or you can give it a priority number. You can also set up reminders or recurring tasks if you need to.

One of the ways you can start creating a task hierarchy is through categories. Categories allow you to easily organize your tasks for the different parts of your life. You are also able to add sub-tasks to each task. These sub-tasks will help you build your task tree bigger than that redwood you saw on vacation last year.

Managing Your Tasks

Managing your tasks is easy due to color codes and categories. You can easily separate your category tasks by giving a different color to each category, or you can click the check box next to the category to filter out all of the other tasks.

Tasks and all of the information associated with them can be easily edited with a right click on the task. This click will open up a menu that gives you lots of different options to choose from.

As you can see, the right click menu may look a little intimidating at first. You can edit tasks, create new ones and even email the task. Once I became familiar with this menu, I was extremely happy to have all of those options in an easy access right click menu. Another thing I like about this menu is that the shortcuts are displayed. Knowing those shortcuts will eventually make you much faster and efficient within Task Coach.

Conclusion

If you love being extremely organized and have lots of tasks, Task Coach is a great tool. It allows you to make very complex goals and tasks, so you will always have something to cross off your list. However, if you love simplicity, Task Coach may be a little overkill. You can use it for simple tasks, but you can also use your email client or something with a little less horsepower.

What do you use for managing your tasks?

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WIN A Free One Year Subscription To Extensoft!

Laurence John — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:01:09 +0000

Extensoft is a new software company which launched a few months back. They describe themselves as ‘the unofficial Windows upgrade’ and have a growing set of tools and extensions designed to bring a whole lot of extra features to Windows.

The reason they were not initially featured here on MakeUseOf is due to the fact that they don’t offer free products – they cost $49 per year, and typically we only review free products. I did test all the products and was very impressed, so I was glad to see this announcement a few days ago:

We’ve listened to your requests for free products and today we are releasing several free applications that will enhance your desktop:

Free Video Converter – new application for converting and basic editing of home videos, also included in Extensions for Windows as a new update.

Free Screen Capturer – new application based on our Screen Capture Extension.

Free Disk Usage Analyzer – new application based on our Disk Analyzer Extension.

Free Extended Task Manager – new application based on our Extended Task Manager Extension.

Please visit our updated Products page and enjoy!

The Screen Capturer, Disk Usage Analyzer and Extended Task Manager were previously only included amongst the subscription products, so I was surprised to see these released for free – especially considering I found them to be my favourite three extensions of the lot!

The Task Manager is great, and provides a significantly enhanced UI over the Windows XP Task manager and even over the improved Windows Vista version.

The New Video Converter tools are also very impressive, in fact it’s one of the best free video media converter tools I’ve found – it’s simple, looks great and is very functional. It’s also got a great implementation of the ‘Office Ribbon’, which makes this one of the few applications I’ve seen in the wild to do so.

The Disk Analyzer is also great for working out exactly where all the space on your computer is being taken up. Sometimes it’s a little slow during the analyses, but that’s a minor quibble. For alternative, see our previous article on Visualize your Hard Drive Usage with WinDirStat.

For users tired of Windows simple print-screen button the Screen Capturer is a great little tool with a whole lot of useful features.

If you like any of these tools then we have 10 FREE subscriptions for a year to all of Extensoft products. All you have to do is post a comment below telling us the ONE feature you feel Windows is most missing (Make Use Of employees and anyone connected to Make Use Of employees ineligible).

Enjoy!

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Manage & Collaborate Your Projects With OfficeZilla

Damien Oh — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:01:00 +0000

For those of you who are looking for a centralized place to manage your projects or to facilitate collaboration with your co-partners, then OfficeZilla could be what you are looking for.

OfficeZilla is a free project management and collaboration site. It comes with a comprehensive suite of tools and resources that allow you to manage your projects and tasks more efficiently. It is ideal for personal projects or group projects that involve several co-partners. There is no limit to the number of users that you can add, so even if your project involves hundreds or thousands of people, OfficeZilla will still be able to support it.

When you first create an account on the OfficeZilla sign up page, you are automatically assigned the administrator role for your account. Once you are logged in, you can start to invite your colleagues/co-partners into your group (via a custom sign up form) so that they can have access and update to the project resources.

Within OfficeZilla, there is a comprehensive suite of tools and resources that are available for your use. You can find features such as a calendar, chat rooms, contacts, content library, a directory, POP3 email account, files, forums, knowledge base, private messages, project manager, resources, to do List and many more.

Some of the features that I find it useful include the content library, knowledge base, project manager and resources. The content library is where you upload your content such as articles, presentation slides, multimedia files etc and share them with your co-partner.

The knowledge base allows you to create a database of the commonly asked questions and answers, or the history and progress of the current project so that any new co-partners that have just joined the group can learn about the progress and then start work immediately.

The project manager is where you can create and assign tasks for the project. This will give you a good overview of the progress of the project and see who is doing the job and who is not.

When you come across a useful site/article on the Web, you can also make it available by updating the Resources page.

Under the ‘My Account’ page, there is a section that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds for the various components in OfficeZilla. You subscribe to the feed that you want to keep a tab on so you won’t be left out of any update by your co-partner.

Conclusion

OfficeZilla comes with a comprehensive suite of office tools and resources that allows you to manage your work/project efficiently. With a price of free and the ability to add unlimited number of users, there is really nothing to complain about.

One thing that I feel is lacking is the availability of an office suite (word processing, spreadsheet, etc). If they ever include an office suite inside OfficeZilla, it will surely give them an edge over Google Docs or Zoho Office.

What do you think? Do you use OfficeZilla yourself? What has been your experience with it?

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Manage Your Life with Free Online Time Management Tools

Tina — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:01:01 +0000

In addition to offering a wealth of information, the internet also provides us with a ton of tools. Are you taking full advantage of them? For example, how well do you manage your life? Are you well organized, do you easily remember birthdays, deadlines and appointments?

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.

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5 Useful To-Do List Apps For The iPhone

Damien Oh — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:01:08 +0000

A quick search in the iPhone App store can return you more than a dozen to-do list apps. If you can’t make up your mind over which to-do list app to choose, here are five of the best free to-do list apps that I have reviewed.

1. Dobot Todos

If you like simplicity and just want the bare minimum, then Dobot is the one for you. Dobot provides a plain text interface, but with some really useful features. Usage is easy. Simply press the ‘+’ button to add a task. For each task, you can edit the Task name, due date, priority and note. On the front end, you can easily change the task priority by tapping on the blue horizontal bar.

When viewing a list, you can sort by priority, due date, or creation date, and you can opt to view all tasks, just unfinished tasks, or just those tasks due today.

For those who are looking for a simple, decent and free to-do list app, this is the one to go for.

2. Zenbe List

Some users may find Zenbe too simple with only a few functions. However it has two things that other apps don’t have: a backend sync with Zenbe and the ability to share your list with others. You can easily create a list for a collaboration project with your co-workers, sync it with your Zenbe account and email the share link to your partners. When any one of them updates the list, everyone can see the update.

Another use that I can think of is to share your shopping list with your family members so that no one buys any extra items.

For those who wanted to share their lists with others, this is the only app that allows you to do so.

3. iProcrastinate Mobile

Although iProcrastinate Mobile is free, it does have plenty of useful features that are only found in paid apps. You can allocate your tasks under different subjects and assign different colors for each subject. You can also create smart groups to manage tasks that are due today, or to select different subjects altogether. When creating a task, other than the standard priority, due dates and notes fields, you can also add steps required for each task, and if necessary, add team members to the tasks. If you are looking for a to-do list app that has a nice UI and focuses on task organization, then iProcrastinate Mobile is the one for you.

4. Easy Task Manager

As its name implies, Easy Task Manager is easy to use and there are few complicated options around. Simply enter your task and see it display on the screen. Tasks are automatically sorted according to their due dates. Tasks due today will be showed on the top of the screen so you can easily refer to it without much tapping around.

There is also an option for you to perform an online sync with their server. If you are using the EasyTask desktop client on your Mac or Windows, you can also sync your iPhone to-do list with your desktop.

5. reQall

reQall is unique in the way that you can use your voice to add tasks (the voice recording is for the iPhone only, iPod touch users can add tasks by typing). It is similar to Jott, but with more functionality.

Other than task management, Reqall also acts as a shopping list, idea recorder, reminder service, memory aid and also a contact list. In the reQall home screen, there are three sections that you can view: Time, Things and People. Time helps you to group tasks according to their due dates while Things allows you to see the categories where the tasks are located. People allows you to share reminders with your friends and family.

If you are online, reQall will automatically sync your tasks with their online server.

Do you have any other favourite to-do list apps for the iPhone? Share them in the comments!

(By) Damien Oh is an all-out technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at Make Tech Easier where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.

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Schedule & Manage Your Messages With Sendible

Daniel Pataki — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:38:07 +0000

If you need a reminder service, a message scheduler and a generally cool way to organize yourself, I have just found a service that could help you (and me), called Sendible. The main profile is message scheduling, but you can use the tools offered not just to keep in touch with people, but also to manage your online and offline life.

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.”

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Advanced Online Note Taking Made Easy

Tina — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:00:48 +0000

Springnote is a Wiki based online note taking utility.

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.

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Todoist – Simple but Powerful Task Management App

Daniel Pataki — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:03:15 +0000

You possibly already know that I am a huge Remember the Milk fan. Well, a while ago I found a service that rivals RTM, a powerful and simple to-do manager called Todoist. It manages to incorporate Gmail, Launchy, Quicksilver and even mobile support in a seamless way.

After you sign up, you’ll be taken to your task manager with a link to go to the info page. You can easily hide and show this page using the appropriate link on the top right, but take some time to go through it as it has many great tips plus all the help you’ll need to integrate Todoist with other apps, i.e. Launchy and Gmail.

Task lists can be created using the left hand menu and adding a task is as easy as click and type. Todoist lets you categorize tasks into projects. Each project can include as many tasks as you want. Task can have multiple levels and can be easily expanded/collapsed by clicking the arrows. This lets you structure your data in a really helpful way – you can indicate subtasks, things to remember for a task and so on. The uses are endless.

Highlights:

*Prioritizing and visualizing is also done well. You can assign colors to lists, the number of items in the list will take on this color, enabling you to distinguish between work lists and home lists for example. Individual tasks can be prioritized from 1-4, using different colors again. You can of course then filter or search by priority, so it’s not only a visualization aid, but a real productivity tool as well.

*Search functions are also great, you can query by label, date or content, using simple syntax. There is a syntax sheet available in the info page, take a look if you want to do some advanced searching.

You can integrate Todoist into some apps, out of these Gmail and Launchy are the best. Gmail integration works with a bookmarklet which you can drag to your toolbar and click on it while viewing an email. It will be sent to your Launchy tasks and you can manipulate it in much the same way as the others. While this is a great option I can see much room for improvement.

Overall I think Todoist is an awesome task management application, up to par with the best of them. The thing I like most about it is that the interface is very simple, but still allows for great flexibility. I also enjoy the fact that tasks and lists can be manipulated in exactly the same way. Gmail and Launchy support is also welcome, although I myself don’t use either, I just tried them out. I can recommend Todoist to even some of the advanced task jugglers out there and it will definitely be a great tool for just simple task lists as well.

(By) Daniel is a blogger and a musician and thinks of life more like a fun game rather than hard work. His main goal is world domination, but a glass of ice tea and a slice of pizza will do nicely for now. Check out his blog at HackYourDay.com

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Things – ‘Getting Things Done’ simplified [Mac Only]

Jackson Chung — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:17:31 +0000

There are many Getting-Things-Done (GTD) apps for the Mac. Some, like Midnight Inbox and iGTD are just too complicated for everyday use and require too much planning for GTD-beginners. Others, like Actiontastic are very multi-functional, but most of us just want something that simply works. This is where Things steps in and it’s my favorite.

‘Things’ is essentially a straight-to-the-point task manager. You won’t need to compile all of your information, emails, images, PDFs, etc in preparation for this application. Basically, all you need to do is: recall your To-Do’s and start entering them in. Like most GTD apps, new entries automatically go into the Inbox. After you’ve emptied your brain of your daily, weekly and monthly chores, you may begin start to sort them out according to priority, and this is where Things shines.

Priority of your To-Do’s are divided by its due date, which makes it much simpler than color-coding tasks or assigning importance from 1-10. If your task needs to be completed today, just click and drag it into ‘Today’s Focus’. Tasks which you need to complete after the more important ones are done go into ‘Next Focus’. And tasks which you might want to do, but are just too lazy, go into the ‘Someday’.

For every To-Do, you can assign tags, notes and due dates (which I think is just all you need to get something done). Once a task is done, just add a check to its box, and by the next day, it will automatically be transfered to ‘Completed’.Another feature of ‘Things’ is the ability to organize tasks by Projects.

A Project is a group of tasks required to produce a result. So inputs like:

Buy a diary
Buy a pen
Start writing my thoughts
Repeat daily

may be collectively added into a ‘Writing a Journal’ Project.

Besides Projects, there is a broader collection of tasks called ‘Areas’. Let me explain. Let’s say after writing a journal, I’d like to publish it. So, the Project ‘Writing a Journal’ and the task ‘Go to the printers’ may be added to an Area called ‘My Autobiography’. This category is generally for larger, long-term accomplishments.

Currently, ‘Things’ is available as a free preview until Spring 2008. You may download it from CulturedCode’s website. And oh, it’s Mac only.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

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29 Web Apps Perfect for the iPhone

Travis Quinnelly — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:07:58 +0000

I did some research on iPhone specific websites and found out, to my surprise, that there were quite a few out there. Aibek has covered iiPhone web apps before, but here’s a small list of more websites specifically designed for the beautiful iPhone.

Information / News Web Apps :

CBS News: www.cbsnews.com/iphone
Fox News: iphone.foxnews.com
Google: Google.com
Reuters Mobile: mobile.reuters.com
BrainyQuote: www.brainyquote.com/iphone.html

Social Apps :

Digg: www.digg.com/iphone
Facebook: iphone.Facebook.com
Twitter: m.twitter.com/login

Reference:

Wikipedia: www.keishi.net/ipodia/
People Finder: www.2robots.com/iphone/#_ByNumber
Urban Dictionary: www.idotg.com/apps/iwurd.php
Realtor: iphone.realtor.com

Weather Web Apps :

AccuWeather: apple.accuweather.com/widget/iphone1/iphone.html
Weather Underground: i.wund.com
Weather.com: www.weather.com/iphone

Shopping :

eBay: iphone.ebay.com
Amazon.com: www.amazon.com
iCoupie (coupons and deals): www.icoupie.com

iPhone optimized games :

Tetris: iphone-tetris.com
Bejeweled: static.popcap.com/iphone
iBowl: mynumo.com/iphone/ibowl/ibowl.php
Jacks or Better: elenor.net/iphone/poker
Mahjong: 38i.biz/mahjong/

Productivity / ToDo lists :

Tada List: tadalist.com
iNozbe: www.inozbe.com
Remember the Milk: i.rememberthemilk.com

Chat Messengers (MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, GTalk etc.) :

Meebo: www.meebo.com
Beejive: iphone.beejive.com

Just Neat:

Guitar Tuner for iPhone: iphoneguitartuner.com

Are you an iPhone user? Have any more great iPhone websites for us? Leave them in the comments and we’ll be sure to update our directory.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, visual communicator, web developer and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com

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Stay Organized with Rainlendar Calendar

Tina — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:04:46 +0000

Rainlendar2 is an easy to use and lightweight desktop calendar for Windows and Linux computers. Although, it’s available both as lite (free) and pro (€15) version, here I am only looking at the lite version. With the lite version you can:

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.

(By) Tina

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GTD (Getting Things Done) Roundup – Time To Organize

Daniel Pataki — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:20:45 +0000

As you will see once you get to know me, I am quite the productivity and organization junkie. This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m productive and organized, but I know how I could do it.

Today I have decided to show you some free online (and one offline) GTD apps (Getting Things Done) so you can organize yourselves like true productivity ninja’s. While I am not saying GTD is the best method for everyone (despite its popularity), I think the groundwork is solid and the apps that have been developed are great for non GTD followers as well. I believe that only you can develop a truly good method that works for yourself. I hope you will find some of these tools useful.

Simple GTD

The name pretty much says it all. The bare-bones of GTD. A very clean, uncluttered interface, coupled with intuitive functions make this tool the best for you puritans out there. For my taste it’s a bit too simple, but I’ve heard around the net that this is exactly why people like it.

You can add projects, assign contexts to them and then view them in the next actions view. That’s about it, and for many people this is enough, no bells and whistles, but then no complications either. What I love about Simple GTD is that you can run the whole thing through the next actions view. You can add an action to any context, assign any project to it (or create a new one), and best of all, you can drag and drop between contexts.

Summing up, Simple GTD is a no frills but very solid and very usable platform to manage your tasks. If you don’t mind the simple looks I think you will love it!

Task Toy

Task Toy is an application that is much like Simple GTD in looks. To me it looks like one of those sites I wouldn’t trust, but I think that’s just the looks, underneath it’s nice and GTD.

The great thing about Task Toy is that it has a customizable link pane. Yes, this has absolutely zilch to do with getting things done, but I would definitely use it a lot. I go back and forth between my Wordpress Dashboard, my project management app, and Google Analytics sometimes and it would be handy to have the links there, since I do actually close the browser occasionally.

It also has a projects pane and current tasks pane on the same window. I always value the ability to overview data, since that is sort of the point. If you would have a reference to all the data in the universe, but no way to actually find what you want, then you have no information.

In Task Toy you can add tasks in multiple places as well. The current tasks pane and the projects pane and best of all, you can also add tasks in bulk, or with much more detail. While this adds some extra over Simple GTD for example, I like it less for some reason. The three pane idea is good, but I think it could have been done in a much more streamlined way, for example why does the links pane take up 50% of the space, when it would need about 10%?

All in all, Task Toy has some added functionality, but feels more cluttered and navigation seems much slower. The effort to add extra info seems too much in this app to be worth it, even though you may need it.

Thinking Rock

Australian-based Thinking Rock is possibly one of the best of the bunch from the functionality viewpoint. It looks, feels and acts good, and I really like the logo (the absolutely most important thing when organizing).

Thinking Rock appeals to me a lot because right from the start it feels as though you’re not managing your tasks and projects, but your whole life. This is probably due to the way you can enter tasks, the closest any app so far has come to the essence of GTD.

That essence is that you should get everything out of your head. Where most people go wrong (or where I don’t agree) is that this doesn’t mean that you should get everything out of your head, organize it, file it at once. Thinking Rock lets you collect your thoughts. Just type in a thought, type in the next, go off and drink a coffee, work a little, and type in others as they come to you. Processing these thoughts is a separate step altogether.

When you click on process thoughts, the first one you entered pops up and you can edit the details as you see fit. It is very true to the book, you can assign it to be done ASAP, or defer it, delegate it, store it as information, etc. You can view your info in any way you wish, export it, create reports (by project, by context, by date…) in pdf files. This piece of software works so well, is so elaborate, I’m very surprised it’s totally free.

I would recommend this to people like me who can’t stand if their system has a fault. If I can file and store 99% of my info I’m better off not storing anything, it just bugs me. With Thinking Rock, you will not be disappointed, if simple task management is not enough, I heartily recommend this.

Vitalist

Vitalist is an online application that is again, very close to the essence of GTD. It is an improved version of Simple GTD and Task Toy, with a much improved interface (in my opinion), faster navigation and much more options.

My favorite feature in Vitalist is the Inbox (it seems adding tasks is a cardinal question for me). You can add tasks quickly and easily assigning context, project and due date. What I don’t like about it is that you can’t add projects here on the fly, you need to create them separately in the projects tab.

It features Actions, Waiting, Someday, Ticklers, Reference and Search, plenty of options to categorize and sort by importance. I find it useful to be able to view these separately, since my important actions should not be cluttered with stuff that I may or may not want to do, or things that are in that project, but will be done in October 2040.

Sadly, Vitalist is not totally free for unlimited use. You get a lot for free, 10 projects, contexts and contacts (each) and functionality like exporting to ical, emailing tasks an so on. Without upgrading you miss out on uploading files, sharing, support and SSL security. Check out the full features and pricing, but I assure you the basic free account is still very much usable.

Remember The Milk

This unique online app (my favorite web 2.0 app of all time) is not a GTD tool as such, but it can be used to manage yourself in that manner in an instant.

Remember The Milk has some great features like geo-tagging tasks, easy sharing of whole lists or just tasks, email reminders every day, and so on. The best feature is the Smart List option. If you search for all tasks tagged with “Work” for example, you will be shown all these tasks. You can save this generated list as a smart list and you will always be able to view them. It will be dynamic, so all tasks deleted and created with the tag “Work” will be shown accordingly here as well. You can also create tasks in a smart list, these tasks are then automatically tagged with “Work”.

If you need to have the GTD feel, you can treat your lists as projects, your tags as contexts and importance as a way of sorting by date. This way your tasks will be color coded, as well as being ordered by importance, how cool!

Remember The Milk is for those people who like the idea of GTD and want to follow it, but don’t necessary need @ symbols, ticklers, delegation, information and so on.

So what should I pick?

If you want me to answer that question you better have a gun in your hand. I think you should try them all and see which works best. The simple ones are not really fit to handle large amounts of tasks and a large variety of task types, but elaborate management systems like Thinking Rock and Remember The Milk manage simple tasks and projects fine.

These are all fine pieces of software and picking on will depend largely on personal preference. If you don’t feel comfortable, just switch, and share with us your thoughts and experiences!

(By) Daniel Pataki

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