Productivity

Over the years, odds are you’ve accumulated more contacts than you know what to do with. What’s more, those contacts are spread out across an array of applications and services. There’s your Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail contacts. There’s the contacts stored in Outlook on your desktop. And then there are your social networking contacts on sites like Orkut and LinkedIn. Keepm lets you import all of your contacts from each of those locations and store them online in one place.

When you need to find an email address or phone number, you can then just login to Keepm and find it, no matter where you had initially stored it. You can also share individual contacts with others by sending an email from the site. And of course, you can export your contacts as V-Cards or CSV files.

While we’d be much happier with Keepm if it were actually integrated with an application that lets you use your contacts like Gmail or Outlook. Give us a tool that lets us combine all of our contacts and make phone calls or send email from that application and you will make us very happy.

Note that Keepm also needs your Gmail, Yahoo! or other email passwords to import your contacts. The site says it won’t save your login information, but you do have have to trust the site before using it. But that should go without saying for any web-based contact manager.

[via CyberNet]

Tired of sending emails back and forth trying to decide when to hold your next team meeting, video game night, or birthday party? Well, while we generally recommend having your birthday celebrations as close to the actual date of your birth as possible, Jiffle can help with the rest.

Jiffle is an online scheduling service that lets users pick the times they’re free and then share their calendar with other users. In other words, it’s a lot like When is Good, but with a desktop client that works with Outlook to let you share your existing calendar online. A new version will add Google Calendar compatibility.

You can sign up for Jiffle for free, but we found that when we tried to download the client today we were instead greeted with a message letting us know that a new version would be available next week and we’d be notified when it was available. Jiffle is a commercial application, but there’s a free version that will let users schedule up to 10 meetings per month. For $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, you can schedule unlimited meetings. A few bucks more gets you a version with your company branding, and for $99.99 per month you can get the corporate edition with licenses for five users and no advertising.

[via TechCrunch]

DarkCopy is a web-based alternative to programs like WriteRoom and DarkRoom that lets you compose text files in full (or almost full) screen to eliminate distractions like instant messages, Flash games, LOLcats, etc.

You can type in a regular browser window, or go full screen to make most of your screen (except for the browser’s toolbar) black with greenish text. When you’re done writing, you can save the file to your computer as a plain ole’ .txt file.

This is handy if you want to work on a blog post, business idea, school paper, or love note without your attention being lost to something less significant.

[Via del.icio.us]

How many of the applications you use on a daily basis are web-based as opposed to locally installed native applications? For me, the answer is way more than I ever would have expected.

Had you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have vehemently denied that the future of development is on the web. As much as I could see and understand the value of a ubiquitously available web-based application, there’s just no way to approach the level of power and integration (not to mention the ability to be always-available) that is possible with well conceived and developed desktop software.

Of course, back then I didn’t imagine that web applications could become as useful as Google Calendar or Remember the Milk. I also didn’t imagine that light - yet still useful - versions of these apps would be available from my mobile phone almost wherever I was.

In fact, and much to my surprise, today most of my personal data today is tied up in online services: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Backpack, Remember the Milk, Facebook, Newsgator, and Evernote to name just a few.

Most of these are probably pretty familiar names, but one is a newcomer in the web space: Evernote. Still in beta, the new version of Evernote contains a full-featured web version, but synchronizes seamlessly with desktop software on either Windows or Mac platforms. And it’s a breath of fresh air.

In fact, there are currently four distinct ways of accessing your Evernote data: Windows client, Mac client, Web, and mobile web versions. Instead of falling into the trap of trying to make four interfaces that look alike, and therefore compromising on the strengths of each one’s platform, Evernote took the more challenging route of building distinct versions for each platform that play to the strengths of the platform. And it works. Boy, does it work.

This got me to thinking - what other software do I use that has the satisfying element of great natively installed local software that integrates with an online system offering its own interface? I came up with only three: my email, my blog composition tool, and my RSS reader. On the other side of the break, I’ll explain what they are, and what I think all this means with respect to the future of software.

Email

For email, I use Gmail’s IMAP feature to allow me to use my Mac’s Mail application to interact with my email in a local native way. This means that I can use hooks from other programs that tie into Mail, yet still take advantage of Gmail’s many attractive features. Plus, if I’m ever not at my computer, I can use Gmail’s superb web and mobile interfaces to access my email. There’s even a native application that installs on my mobile phone to make using Gmail on a mobile device more pleasant. For me, this combination simply rocks.

Composing blog posts

I have a number of personal blogs on various platforms, and while all of them have web-based composition interfaces, they all basically suck. There’s nothing like losing your internet connection in the middle of an 800 word essay and having your work disappear to make you wary about trusting your work to an online tool. While some blog platforms have introduced the ability to automatically save drafts, there is a better way.

I use MarsEdit to edit my blogs, and the beauty of it is that it performs a form of synchronization that allows me to go back and edit published posts from the comfort of my native application. It handles multimedia gracefully whereas the web interfaces uniformly stink at multimedia. Yet, if I’m stuck at another machine, I can still have access to what I need through the web interfaces. There are other great offline blog editors like Ecto, ScribeFire, and Microsoft Windows Live Writer. If you’re frustrated with your blog writing experience, I suggest giving one of these a try.

RSS reader

My RSS reader of choice is NetNewsWire. Not only is it a best-of-breed news reader on the Mac (and recently made free, as in beer), but it is owned by NewsGator, a company that offers a full online back-end. NetNewsWire synchronizes my feed subscriptions and read-states seamlessly back to my NewsGator account, which means that I can use their NewsGator Online web interface, mobile web interface, or even native mobile applications on either my Pocket PC or Blackberry mobile phone - and it all stays in sync. In fact, I can even use FeedDemon (in my opinion the best-of-breed Windows feed reader, also free) on a Windows machine, and it also synchronizes to my account.

While it might sound fantastic or over-the-top, these experiences are what I expect from modern software. In all cases I have access to my data locally in an application that integrates with the other software on my computer, and I can get to it even if I don’t have a network connection. At the same time, if I don’t happen to be at my own computer (or it unceremoniously dies), I have access to all of my data from web interfaces.

For some of the other web services that I use (for example, Google Calendar) there are no natively-built synchronization tools available. In some cases this can be worked around by using 3rd party tools such as Plaxo to synchronize to a local application like iCal. Unfortunately, in my experience keeping things synchronized using a 3rd party tool is a recipe for heartache. Building solid synchronization is not an easy task, and when you don’t control both ends of the equation the level of difficulty approaches infinity.

One common thread links all of the applications discussed here: for me, they represent personal productivity applications. Email, calendaring, blogging, feed-reading - all of these are things that I need to work right, and need available at all times. So what’s missing? For me, it’s task management.

My two absolute favorite current task management tools are OmniFocus, and Remember the Milk. OmniFocus is an incredibly well done native Mac application, and Remember the Milk is an incredibly well done web app. Right now I’m using both of them, and it’s driving me crazy.

I can’t seem to let go of OmniFocus because it feels like it belongs as part of my Mac’s operating system. It integrates seamlessly with Mail, is so fast as to be essentially instantaneous when making edits, and the native user interface allows for some pretty fantastic on-the-fly sorting and filtering functionality.

Remember the Milk has none of these features. But, I can’t let go of it either. What RTM has going for it is ubiquitous accessibility; if I have a web connection of any kind, I can get to it. It has a mobile version, and from what I understand a beautiful enhanced mobile version if you are an iPhone user. It even has a Firefox extension that allows you to put your RTM task list in the sidebar of your Gmail account. Some will argue that it also has an offline interface, since it uses Google Gears to allow you to continue to access it if you are not online.

While I love the concept behind Google Gears, it has two very big strikes against it at this stage. First is that in testing, I’ve yet to have it perform correctly with Google Reader. That scares me, since Gears is a Google product that was initially developed with Reader. My second beef with Gears is that it requires Firefox, and as much as I love Firefox, it’s a bit of a pig on the Mac. (I’m hoping of course that Firefox 3.0 rectifies this situation when it is released).

Right now, RTM and OmniFocus are in a dead heat. So what’s it going to take to break the tie? One of them will decide to branch out into new territory. If OmniFocus seamlessly synchronized my tasks to an online equivalent with mobile access, the game would be over. Unfortunately, building a web service to support an application is arguably more complicated than building a desktop client to integrate with an existing service, so my money is on Remember the Milk to win this race. If they were to build native Mac and Windows clients, and make sure to take full advantage of each platform’s strengths, they could take over the world, or at least win a lot of mindshare.
The future of offline access to web services is not in the browser, it’s in fully functional local applications. Imagine having a client as powerful as Microsoft Word to edit your documents, but have them seamlessly synchronized to an online account like Google Documents, which has an online editor that is still useful, but has less features. Now imagine that for every web application you use, or an online service for every local application you use.

That’s the computing future I want to see.

Flow has been in the works since the days of OS X Tiger, but the freshly released version takes things up a notch with a slick UI and a feature set that takes advantage of the power of Leopard. Flow is an FTP client, a text editor with a useful live preview feature, and a bookmark generator for drag-and-drop uploading. Add tabbed navigation and phenomenal ease-of-use, and it’s got everything we want out of a new Leopard app,

Flow does have some neat extras, but first and foremost, it’s an FTP client. When we tested it, it smoothly handled multiple connections to FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and even the often-criticized .mac service. The only thing we would have changed about the interface: a “recent connections” button or menu item would be nice. The bookmark button in Flow is easy to find, but sometimes we just forget to use it. Speaking of bookmarks, Flow has a unique feature that lets you save any bookmark as a droplet - a tiny app that quickly uploads anything you drop on it, without even opening Flow itself.

Once you’ve got some files on the server, Flow really sets itself apart from other FTP apps. You can edit your html and css files on the fly, and watch the results in a live preview. This is amazingly powerful, and saves a lot of time when you just need to make a quick change. Forgot to close an html tag? Don’t bother uploading a new copy of the file, just edit it in Flow! It even supports Quick Look, so you can preview images right on the server.

For those Mac users jealous of the helpful Portable Apps Suite for Windows, the Free Open Source Software Mac User Group (FreeSMUG) has a similar solution called FSuite CD. The application pack comes with a bunch of portable Mac applications for easy mobility of many necessary programs, and it runs on PPC and Intel hardware.

The FSuite CD image includes the installers of over 40 portable apps. In addition to the obvious programs like Firefox, VLC, OpenOffice, etc., FSuite CD also includes things like Adium, Transmission, Audacity, Nvu, Gimp, and Bean. The individual apps are available for download from the FreeSMUG site as well.

To create a handy launcher, you’ll have to create a folder on your portable drive, drag aliases of each portable .app to the folder, arrange the icons, and adjust the folder view.

[Via makeuseof]

UPDATE: The FSuite CD is merely a collection of recommended FOSS apps recommended by the FreeSMUG group. The FreeSMUG website also has portable apps for download, but the FSuite CD does not include them. The original article combined two separate projects: portable apps for Mac OS X, and the FSuite CD disk image that makes it easy to download a grouping of popular open-source applications.

Sorry for the confusion.