I’ve often played with various to do list incarnations and usually can never find one that works exactly as I want. The problem is a to do list is a rather simple concept, yet most online to do lists are either overly simple or overly complicated. I need something that is in between. Or rather, lets me easily pick how complex I want it to be.
Today I discovered Todoist and I think I’ve found my last to do list app. The basic version (which covers most all you’d need) is free, with some extra features thrown in for a small fee. Things I love about Todoist:
- Nested groups and to do lists
- Tons of keyboard shortcuts to make list entry and management easy
- Built-in calendar system with intelligent date entry (I can type “every Saturday” and it knows what I mean)
- Full export of all your lists via XML
- iGoogle widget is awesome if you use iGoogle as your start page
- Easily customizable views
If I use this service enough over the next month, I might just spring the few extra bucks to get more features such as email reminders. Check it out at todoist.com.
Brian Gardner is holding a contest to give away 3 free copies of his exceptionally designed “Revolution” WordPress theme. The theme is one of the more expensive and well designed themes available. Designed primarily for a newsy kind of website, there is also a sports variation that appears to work quite well.
This post serves as my entry into the contest. Upon discovering this theme, I was immediately interested in using it for my back-burner hobby website LaserRocketArm.com. While I’m still tossing around ideas for the site, the original concept was for it to be a fan site for Peyton Manning. Having the Revolution theme to build upon, I could put together a professional-looking site in short order. There is no shortage of news and interest surrounding Manning. And as it appears the Colts are an even better team this year than last, this fan site could quickly gain traction with the right look, content, and fan connection.
One of the more time consuming (and annoying) parts of doing freelance work is keeping track of time and money. For a long time, I had a large Excel spreadsheet that was broken up by client and project. At first, it worked fine. But, as I added more clients and more jobs, it became a nightmare to keep updated and organized.
For a while, I started using Side Job Track for free. It was leaps and bounds above my Quicken and Excel solution. While I still recommend Side Job Track for people to try, the latest project tracking service I’m using is almost perfect.
FreshBooks is awesome. It automatically does many things I was doing manually in the past. I’ll list my 3 favorite features that keep me a loyal customer.
1. Time tracking and invoicing
Plain and simple, time tracking saves me time and money. Create clients, add projects and then launch the time tracking tool to record your time as you work. When you’re done, the time is logged in the right place. You can even log time directly by telling FreshBooks how much time you spent on any specific project or item. What really makes this feature a time and money saver is the ability to generate an invoice automatically using any unbilled hours for a specific project.
2. Paypal integration and recurring billing
Actually getting paid can often times be a hassle. Especially if you are billing monthly or yearly. FreshBooks makes this easy. For example, if I charge a client $120 per year for web hosting I can set up an recurring invoice that will automatically generate and send that client an invoice. This is a lifesaver considering how forgetful I am. In addition to this, you can link FreshBooks to your Paypal account (or other service) and let your clients pay you online via Paypal.
3. Reports
Having access to all my activity over the past year is quite helpful. I can see where my money came from, how much time I spent on each project, etc. This can also be useful for tax purposes and learning how long it takes you to complete certain tasks, on average.
There are plenty of other great features that make FreshBooks worthwhile. I highly suggest it to anyone who is looking to simplify time tracking and invoicing for their freelancing business. And the best part is you can use it for free (up to 3 clients).
If so, you’ll probably be interested in a website that has just launched called BetaJunkie.com. The basic premise of the site is to connect startup web companies who need people to beta test new web apps with people who enjoy being “early adopters” and beta testing.
The site is still new and building up a list of interested beta testers. After signing up and logging in, you are asked to complete a very short profile page that gives some basic demographic information. That information will be used to help companies better target potential beta testers of their products. The privacy policy for BetaJunkie.com specifies that the info collected is not used to personally identify anyone, but only used in summary or aggregate. The site never asks for your name–or anything more personally identifiable than your email address. Everything else is like gender, household income, technical ability, etc.
I love getting to be one of the first to try out new programs and web apps, so this would be a great service if it could hook people up with quality, undiscovered web startups. And, as a web developer, having a centralized website where I could get a few hundred beta testers to try out my new web app would be a godsend. My guess is there are plenty of small or part-time web developers out there that can’t afford “real” testing or much advertising. Something like this would really help their development process.
Check it out and see what you think: BetaJunkie.com
Apple recently released a Windows version of their internet browser, Safari. While I do love macs, I’m primarily a PC person and a long-time Firefox convert. With only a few laps around the old ‘tubes, I’m quite impressed with the PC version of this “world’s best browser.”
HTML Rendering Speed
The first claim that caught my attention was the HTML rendering speed boost. Being a web developer, I’m constantly paying attention to how pages load and render under different conditions. This is definately not scientific, but using the “one-thousand-one; one-thousand-two” method, I found that Safari loaded and rendered the CNN.com front page and the IndyStar.com front page in about half the time as Firefox 2. It was fast enough to make me say “whoa!” out loud.
Resize Text Boxes
Another simple, but ingenious, feature is the ability to resize text areas on any form you encounter on your journey across the web. This feature is quite meaningful in terms of giving the web user the power to customize and modify their experience on the web to their preference. Web designers often struggle over how tall or wide to make certain form elements. This small feature goes a long way towards web usability.
Anyone who uses the non-WYSIWYG editor in WordPress will love this!
SnapBack
The SnapBack feature could potentially be quite useful. However, I haven’t really used it much yet. Say you run a Google search and click on the first result. You get to the resulting page and click around for a few minutes. You decide that you want to keep searching and click the SnapBack button. Wham. You’re right back to the search results page.
Typically, when I search, I open about 5-10 search results in new tabs specifically so I don’t lose the search results page I’m on. So, if I can get used to using this feature, it could potentially change the way I search and make things easier (less tabs = less memory).
While I don’t have a use for the private browsing feature very often, I can definitely appreciate the ability to—with one click—surf privately from a public workstation. No cookies, no usernames, no passwords, no history—all in a convenient, built-in feature.
Gray… blah
Really, my only complaint so far is that I’m just not a fan of the color scheme of the browser. The dark gray (brushed steel on the Mac) just bugs me for some reason. I’m sure Mac fans think it’s a work of art. I just prefer something a bit lighter, I suppose. It doesn’t look like that’ll stop me from using it, though.
My blog was just activated for a sweet service I recently came across called Odiogo. Basically, the service runs the feed of your blog through a rather robust text-to-speech engine and generates a podcast feed automatically. There isn’t really much to it. You submit your site and wait for an activation email with all the info you need.
Text-to-speech has come a long way from my first experiences with it about 10 or so years ago. Listening to my own podcast, I’m finding that the voice is not annoying and I actually enjoyed listening (being that it was my own content may have helped). I’ve only noticed a few minor pronunciation bugs, such as “plug-ins” pronounced “ploo-gins.” It would be great if I could select from different voices or even somehow create a voice based on my own voice.
An important tip for anyone interested in setting up an Odiogo podcast of their blog. The service reads your RSS/ATOM feed, so if you have your blog set to only show an excerpt of your posts Odiogo will only read the excerpt. I made that mistake and my first few posts are only speaking the excerpt.
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