Productivity

My girlfriend recently took me on a long road trip through rural Canada. We had a blast, but one of the trickiest parts was navigating. Canada is vast, and we had to keep flipping back and forth between differently-scaled maps. If only we had known about GMapCatcher before the trip, things could have been much [...]

I only just covered this bad boy in last week’s Firefox Friday — and now there’s a Chrome version! RescueTime advertises itself as a ‘Productivity Meter’ but really it’s just a cool way of seeing how you spend your time on the Internet. All you have to do is install the extension and it’ll do [...]

I am very impressed with To -> done. Web 2.0 is not easy to get right; I see so many Web apps that either oversimplify or go overboard with visual flair or needless AJAX. Also, “todo lists” are a dime a dozen these days. It’s an extremely competitive market, starting with the big boys like [...]

Think is a pretty basic mind map web app. I’ve played around with it, and here’s my quick analysis: Pros: Non-flash — some people might like that, I guess. Can work on the iPad, for example. Simple — you can’t do much (that’s a con, too, see below). For people new to mind mapping, this [...]

There is always at least two ways of doing something on a Windows PC. If you’ve learnt by doing, rather than from a book, you probably only know one way. Watch your mother use a word processor one day — I bet she uses File > Save rather than hitting Ctrl+S. What about you? Do [...]

I have a thing for full-screen editors. I also have a thing for Markdown syntax. I wanted to start writing some of my texts using Markdown in a text editor. Amazingly enough, I was not able to find a Win32 command-line implementation of Markdown. Well, WriteMonkey saved the day. That’s just one of the features [...]

Nirvana is a new to-do app, aimed mainly at GTD fanatics. If you love contexts, ticklers, “next actions” and various other GTD buzzwords, you’ll feel right at home with Nirvana. The system is currently in invite-only beta, but they were kind enough to send me an invite so that I could review it. After the [...]

View Thru is a neat extension for Google Chrome that lets you instantly see what’s hiding behind a shortened link. You simply hover over the link (say, http://is.gd/bJoc7) and get an instant tooltip showing you where it’s leading. When I tested it, the tooltip really was instant — I did not have to wait at [...]

Email attachments may still be the best way to move small files around the Internet, but it’s extremely limiting when it comes to file size. Until recently, the quickest and easiest options for transferring large files have been services like RapidShare or MegaUpload, but both services have relatively low file size and usage limits for [...]

Panic’s Transmit has been a familiar name in Mac software for years, to the point where that famous truck icon is synonymous with FTP for many Mac users. Even though there’s solid competition out there — Flow, for example, is quite nice — Panic has worked hard to keep Transmit at the top of the [...]