I see a lot of DIY project around the web, but few are as cool, and actually quite useful as this one. Jamie Matthews on his blog shows us all how to turn an external device into a Gmail notification lamp. The article is fairly detailed, but I think if you put in some time and effort you should do fine.

What really got me going was the extent where this tech could be taken. Although physical electronics and me go together like a balloon in an iron maiden, but I think extending this to go bluetooth is just a step higher and that is just awesome. Imagine getting a small bracelet or ring which vibrates or lights up in a cool ambient way when you get an email. I’ll grant you that effective bluetooth distance is about 10 meters, but you could be roaming around in your room for example remodeling, and never missing an email.

If you take it even one more step further, you can take it to Wifi. I have a router here at home which is in my room, but extends all the way to the edge of our back garden, which is a floor down and a good 2-3 rooms ahead, across at least 4 walls. If I would get a huge booster antenna I could even extend it to the end of the garden, meaning I would be in range when inside about 200 feet. Anytime I’m home I can see when I get an email, without having to manually check it.

Let’s take it even further with the actual internet, and/or mobile technology. You can create a program which calls your mobile when you get an email. You could also mod your phone to resonate in a specific way when the program calls. This means my phone could resonate while in a meeting, and I would know it’s an email instantly. This tech may seem pointless, since on many phones you can check your email right? Think of the following situation. You’re in a meeting, which you absolutely can not get out of, but you’re waiting for a very important email. You could set the application to only call you when specific criteria is met, for example the sender is a specified person. You would only be disturbed with the important email in this case.

Awesome project and awesome technique, and a bit of productivity too, check it out, I’d love some comments from people who managed to make this, maybe with some pics, I would post them for you too!

Adobe Air has quickly become a favorite of mine, and has quite some hype surrounding it, and for a good reason. Possibly for the first time in internet history it brings together the internet and the desktop in a usable, easy, productive and very stylish way. There have been, and are, other projects on the horizon like Prism and Bubbles, but Air provides the best interaction between your desktop and online world. Say hello to some of my current favorite Air Apps, all of which further your productivity in one way or another.

Doomi

The very sexually named Doomi is actually quite misinterpreted if looking at its name alone. It is a very simple, unobtrusive and easy to use to-do list enabling you to take down tasks on the fly, very quickly. My favorite thing about this Abobe Air app is that by default all you see is a bar showing you your to-do items, completed items and number of reminders at the top, and a text area for inputing a task. Just jot and press enter, that’s all. When you need it press the arrow to see the list, and expand further to see old items.

You won’t be getting Remember The Milk style complexity and depth, but it does beat anything else I’ve used in the area of just taking down thoughts. Just today I was in the middle of writing a post and it occured to me that I deleted my contact widget on the blog and I wanted to remember to put it back. I didn’t want to fire up any complex lists, and Doomi proved to be great help. Just jot and continue working. I would recommend this for the management of your daily tasks, very simple, yet very effective.

One weakness I want to point out is that Doomi is not minimizable to the notification bar. Sometimes I have quite a load of applications running and I don’t need the clutter on my tray. If you have a hotkey assigned to launch it, or something similar you can just close and reopen it all the time, the loading time is virtually non existent.

Klok

Klok is a time tracker for Adobe Air and a perfect example of the complexity you can achieve with Air. At first the applications all seem very limited, compared to Outlook for example, or Remember The Milk as I just mentioned. Klok is very different, with a beautifully designed interface and loads of features it can truly be used like a desktop application.

You will be surprised to know that Klok actually operates with one function. Create all your projects inside it, and afterwards all you need to do is double click and select “work on”. Klok will then track the time you are working on the project and log it. Really that’s all there is to it, and that’s all there should be to it, the purpose of the app is to give you reports to help your productivity, not to bog you down with unnecessary actions.

It gives you great reporting options like the week view, which is like a reverse calendar generated from what you’ve done. There is a summary report available, weekly reports and monthly reports, and if you take a few minutes to review these sometimes you can gain a whole lot of time, or see where you have time left.

I haven’t been using Klok for long, but there are two annoyances I found. The worst one, again, was not being able to minimize it, which is a bigger pain here, since closing the app means stopping time tracking. There is a minimize option available, but this only folds most of the window and only shows the status. The second, minor fault, was the estimation of time spent on a project. Since many of my projects are ongoing, it would be nice if these was a weekly or daily amount as opposed to an all time one.

WebKut

This application, aptly named WebKut is designed to take screenshots of webpages. Again, a very specific use, but highly helpful. You type the URL you want to take the snapshot of and when it loads you can choose between full screen capture mode, the whole page capture mode (this is one I see rarely) and selection capture mode.

You can choose between four image extensions, output directory and file naming, and that’s all there is to it, and that’s all I need. I am going to list quite a twofeatures I would like to see, but don’t take me wrong, this is a great tool, it just has more potential in it which is not available yet. First of all, it would be nice if it could automatically load the page active in my Firefox browser, since that’s what I screen capture most. Also, it would be nice if I could select an area and move it around, as opposed to auto capturing what I select instantly.

If you take screenshots regularly this is a great tool because it lets you visualize your selection very well, and is also available without firing up Photoshop or Gimp. Oh also, the tagline on the page “Let’s cut the web! Take away its best parts” is just awesome!

Twhirl

As you can see from my sidebar I am starting to Twitter actively and Twhirl is my perfect desktop companion for that. It gives you all the options, replying, twittering, deleting, managing friends, followers and so on. Since I am new to Twitter I don’t yet know how much advanced tech you might need, but for the average user it will definitely be very cool.

No need to log in or use your browser, just fire up Twhirl and start writing. You also get plenty of options, and a surprisingly large list of themes to choose from, you will definitely find one that matches your OS or taste. I think Twhirl is the best example of what Adobe Air tries to achieve, interaction between your online self and your desktop.

Snippely

If you’re a web designer, or are dabbling in some code Snippely is a great tool for organizing snippets of code you use regularly. Of course you can also use it to record text snippets of any type, like a specific email reply you need to use for 2 days, ideas and so on.

You can create groups of snippets, like a group for CSS, for PHP, or for one specific site for example. You can then add snippets of code, or plain text. What I love about Snippely is that it is very easy to organize yourself in this manner because it is presented very intuitively and in an easy to access way.

The only problem with it is that on the other hand it is not easy to use, at least at first. You will be clicking around for quite some time, since the interface usage is not very well done. Just a quick tutorial, click on the bottom right to create a group, and then a snippet for the group. Then name the snippet and add code. You can set the type of code by clicking on the default “plain text” with the right mouse button and setting appropriately.

Overall, this is a very good application, but is in need of some usage rethinking. A menu bar, or a more intuitive double click interface would be awesome, and maybe a way to share would be great too!

If you take the internet out of context and forget about all the obvious productivity advantages it has given us, like email, skype and so on, it’s still not anywhere near to being as much of a time saver in productivity as it could be. Let me explain.

Take a look at the average internet user for example. He loads up gmail, sends and email, browses for an attachment, sends it. Then he logs in to his blog, writes an article, fires up GIMP and makes an image for the post. He simultaneously logs on to Twitter, to let the world know he’s writing a blog post, and so on and so forth. Much of our time is wasted on switching between apps, and overall, using too many application to accomplish our goals.

Services and technologies spreading like wildfire on the net are constantly changing this, and making us more productive. For once I’m not talking about Remember the Milk, or even Gmail, but the applications that serve to bring these all together.

Prism, Adobe Air, Google Desktop and a whole host of other applications are working together to serve us a dish which we can eat all at once, not bit by bit. Using Adobe Air you can use the much quicker interface of your desktop to control applications like Twitter, Chat clients, and almost any other web service. Using Prism you can integrate services into your desktop better, and Google desktop search brings together various web services with the power of Google Search on the web and on your desktop.

In my opinion this is all just the beginning. Prism in reality doesn’t give us a huge productivity boost, it’s just more convenient and browser independent. Adobe air is a better example, since this way we can customize better to our tastes and use our desktops speedier environment. The future lies in these technologies though, imagine an Adobe Air like software for bloggers, joining Wordpress, Splashup, Flickr, Twitter and News sites. It would be an online suite of the tools I use for blogging saving content online and on my hard drive as well. It could automatically create databases for me with post contents, titles, categories, pics used and so on. It could also automatically post to Twitter, notify me of comments and so on.

As you can see there is a great deal more that can be done, but I think what I described above is technologically very possible. What remains perhaps is an easy way to connect all these services, so users with minimal amount of programming knowledge can custom-tie apps together, to serve their own productivity.

As I was happily updating my theme on Hack Your Day I managed to overwrite the index.php file of my website danielpataki.com instead of the one for Hack Your Day. I only noticed now, so I had no undo option and no local copy, since I just made that page 2 days ago and hadn’t backed up yet, stupid, I know.

I a last desperate attempt I looked up the page on Google and clicked on cache to see Google’s view of my site, which luckily was the one I designed earlier. Instead of spending 5 hours pulling out my hair and shouting I managed to restore everything in 5 minutes.

If you’ve lost some website related code and you found out in about 24 hours you have a very good chance of recovering the data with Google’s cache. It depends on when Google’s spiders get to you, but if you get lucky you can retrieve everything.

A quick update for all of you on the new commenting system and Hack Your Day in general. I have implemented Open ID registration for the blog, so you are now free to use your Open ID. If you don’t know what it is, take a look at OpenID.net where you can find all the info needed.

Just so even this post digs into productivity a bit, I’ll quickly tell you that you might have long had an Open ID and not even know it. If you use Blogger, Flickr, Yahoo, Wordpress.com, Technorati, AOL, LiveDoor, Orange, SmugMug, or Vox, you can already use you identities there to sign up and use any service that is Open ID enabled. To get started you need to use your profile page URL usually, take a look at the list of Open ID URL’s you can use.

Your username will be that horrible long URL though, so please take a moment to put down a nickname in your profile, which can be found by clicking on the profile link to the top right of the Wordpress admin panel when you log in. You can also add any other info you want, I would appreciate an email address, but in no way is this necessary.

Happy hacking, productivity and organization to you, I hope you all join the community and get it going. There seem to be all sorts of extras coming your way if you do…

Hello to all of my readers, a new updates is almost ready for you guys. Chances are most of you already see the new design, which is not radically different, but I think it looks better. The first thing you’ll notice is the bar on the left side which will be a staple of all my websites.

The biggest change I made was in the commenting though. It now looks much better, and it now looks the same on IE and FF. From now on commenting on Hack Your Day is only available to registered users. My reason is that this way it will be just that much easier to stop spam, and also, I want to create a nice community of my awesome readers.

Entering your email address is perfectly safe, I won’t sell it, lease it, eat it or steal it, all it does is enable me to contact you personally if you have a problem. In the future it will also allow me to contact the readers who do the most commenting so that I can maybe give them elevated privileges and so on. All in all, registering is super easy and from then on you only need to login once. If you feel like joining the Hack Your Day community, please register here. There will be all sorts of goodies later on!

I hope you all like the new design, I may be polishing it a bit still, but this one looks final too me. If you have any comments please share!