Archive for the ‘Online Applications’ Category

If you’re a freelancer, or you have billable side-jobs, your organization and productivity can benefit a lot from a project management and billing application, and today’s offering, Project Bubble, won’t take anything out of your pockets since it’s free.

Project Bubble is an online hosted solution and works like AJAX-heavy applications should (but many fail nevertheless). Data input forms are big, user friends, easy to use, they work quickly and efficiently. If you click in a date field, a calendar pops out unobtrusively, so you can easily choose a date, while also being able to view all other fields. Overall the application is a joy to use, it’s built up in a logical fashion and can actually be used to work, as opposed to just input info and then find it to cumbersome to continue with.

Projects, tasks and to-dos

Project List in Project Bubble

The basis of inputting data into Project Bubble is the project-task-todo method. You add a task, which can have any number of tasks linked to it. Each task in turn can have any number of to-do items linked to it. This structure enables the app to scale pretty well, you will be able to use it with small and large projects alike. In reality you can also add separate to-do items to projects which can be useful sometimes, although I would prefer not to, for clarity’s sake. The way all this information is presented is great from a visual, UX and workflow point of view. A project’s page lists all the tasks, and viewing to-do items is optional. This is ideal, since your workspace won’t be cluttered, but you can zoom in to see the fine detail if needed.

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Last.fm is a great music streaming service, enabling you to create your own radios based on keywords, genre or artists, making it a perfect tool for creating playlists to fit your mood. I tend to listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but when I’m working I usually go for ambient/soothing music. This in itself contains so many sub-genres, that sometimes it’s not the best just to start “Enigma radio”. Here’s how I manage, and listen to my music collection on Last.fm.

First of all, you’ll need an account, and since a year or so back it’s sadly not free. You can get all the Last.fm goodness for $3 a month though, not a huge setback for this service I think. Once logged in, you can start listening to music by starting a Last.fm radio which can be based on artists, tags, or a user. The great thing about the player is that you can opt for a multi-artist, or multi-tag radio, which allows you to enter up to three items. This is great if you want to listen to ambient music with female vocals and piano dominance. You could just input “ambient”, “piano”, “female vocals” as the three tags.

The real fun is creating playlists from your radios. Last.fm will allow you to play a playlist of songs if the playlist has 45 playable tracks from 15 different artists. This means that you do have to do some work to create your lists, but the positive side is that the more work you put in, the better your playlist gets.

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Do you need to work with designs in your professional or personal life? If so, you might find the following quick list quite useful, some of my favorite applications for design, editing images, photos, and just playing around with some concepts.

If you’re new to editing images online, I strongly suggest taking a look at Aviary, you will be surprised out how powerful it is and how much like Photoshop it is.

Also, if you’d like to support the blog, please consider buying the commercial products from our store. It’s an Amazon store, so perfectly safe and secure, and Pixelmator will only set you back $30 or so (and is a pretty awesome app).

Commercial

• Adobe Photoshop – Buy from The Hack Your Day Store for Mac or for PC
• Adobe Íllustrator – Buy from The Hack Your Day Store for Mac or for PC
• Corel Painter 11 – Buy from the Hack Your Day Store for PC
• Corel Draw X4 – Buy from the Hack Your Day Store for PC
• Pixelmator – Buy from the Hack Your Day Store for Mac

Free, for your desktop

• GIMP – available for OS X, Linux and Windows
• Paint.net – available for Windows
• Krita - available for OS X, Linux and Windows
• CinePaint - available for Linux
• Pixen 3 – geared toward pixel art, for Mac

Free, online image editing

• Aviary – a whole suite of products
• Splashup

When creating a task list, sometimes it is hard to input data in an easily digestible fashion. I think a lot of times to-do lists fail because an item is 10 lines long, and while all that text is definitely relevant, and can help you do the task, it can also get in your way. A lot of information can disable the at-a-glance function to do lists should have and also deter you from finishing a task because it seems complicated. I believe that the key in creating successful task lists lies in balancing the list between simplicity and relevant data, and here are three methods you can use.

Use tags to link important data locations

A task created in Todoist

For my list needs I usually use Todoist now, an application I favor because it has the simplest interface, yet is extremely powerful and well structured, and also because it has native Launchy support for adding tasks from your desktop and Gmail support to use in your favorite email client. Take a look at this post on Hack Your Day on how to integrate these services into Todoist.

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Without going into much comparative detail about the pros and cons of cloud computing, I just foun one of the biggest advantages on my end, and it actually has nothing to do with the cloud aspect. I bought an iPhone a week or so ago, and I just had a look at mobileMe, which is great for syncing your iPhone with your laptop and the mobileMe we app and so on.

I am a big fan of having everything in one place, but the only way I can do this properly, is if I organize myself well. I have to have all my contacts nicely in Outlook, I need to have all my bookmarks in IE, etc. You can use different apps, the point is, you can’t go about switching them all the time (or rather you can, but it’s a pain). This forces me (in a good way), to remember to keep my stuff organized, because with cloud computing, everything I do pays off threefold.

When I organize my bookmarks, they sync to my iPhone and the cloud, so I have done 3 separate organization tasks all at once. This makes me much more likely to do it properly, and then, consistently following the same “rules” every day.

Hence I do get more organized because of the fact that all my stuff is in one place, but also because cloud computing eliminates so many tedious and monotonous tasks, I look forward to my organizational tasks.

Todoist is a free online to-do list and task manager that has one of the cleanest and easiest to use interfaces I’ve ever seen. It’s power comes from its simplicity and intuitiveness and also because it allows a multitude of services to integrate with it. Launchy, Gmail, Widgets, Mobile access and a host of others.

I will be doing a full review of Todoist sometime in the future, for now, let’s focus on how you can use it with Launchy to add tasks right from your desktop and how you can create a task from an email with one click.

Launchy

Integration with Launchy enables you to add tasks from your desktop, without the need for a browser or anything else. This is great if you want to quickly add tasks on the fly, since time is not wasted by opening your browser, loading the app, and entering the task.

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