Not another Monday morning! Look at it another way, it’s a new week, a new clean slate in a sense, perhaps this week we can be better, work more, and also have more time for a little rest. In any case, here’s a productive start to the week, enjoy!

Hack Your Day

• Checking up on your hourly rate with Klok
  If you like quoting fixed numbers to clients, checking up on your real hourly rate is one of your most important management tasks. With Klok you can set and monitor your time spent on a project.
• Feed reading evolved with Feedly
  Reading feeds has never been so fun and visually appealing as it has become with feedly. The feature list and extremely awesomeness is just impossible to describe, you just have to give it a go!

Other great blogs

• Readability Extension for Google Chrome – on Lifehacker
• Setting limits with a Super Simple Month – on Unclutterer
• Lammer Context Menu – on FreewareGenius
• Some of the Best and Really Cool Free Media Players – on Technology Bites

If you do any blogging you probably know about Wordpress, if not, then you must check it out, it’s completely free and awesome. Changing blog themes frequently is not an option for most commercial sites, but if you have a personal blog you can find and implement some really cool themes, so here’s a short list of the best places to find them!

Wordpress Free Themes directory

The directory on the Wordpress site has a lot of themes, but the drawback of it is that you might have to sieve through a lot to find the right theme for you. If you have a recent Wordpress version you can also search this database from inside your blog, in the appearances section, making it super-easy to find great looks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Oh how I love to watch an episode of Friends before bed, but oh how hard it is to transfer the thing on to my iPhone! Well, not any more, transferring videos to my iPhone has become a cinch with iPodMe, a minimalist application which converts videos into a format appropriate for Apple products.

Until a few days ago, I always wanted to watch some movies on my iPhone in bed, it’s just easier than to lug my laptop around with me, but I was hindered by the fact that it took me 30 minutes to convert a 40 minute long video. Since I am no codec master I am sure this was my own problem, but with iPodMe I drag and drop my video, press a button, and it spits my finished file out in about 6 minutes.

The codecs and whatnot come with the app which is a single executable, no install required. Once started, just drag and drop your vids in, select a resolution and convert. I’ve been looking for an app like this for a while, so let’s all thank Freewaregenius for finding it for me! (They also have a way better review, so take a look!)

If your job includes design, sometimes your biggest time waster can be waiting for feedback from a client, or from your friends. You spend a whole day to get every detail right, you send out your work, and then you have to wait 1-2 days for any reaction, and in many cases this could be “give me a day or two more to go over it”. By using Concept Feedback you could cut to the chase by showing off your work to the design community, putting your heads together to improve your design.

The site has a rating system, so you can see what people thing in numbers, but generally the more comments an item has, the better it is. Each commenter also votes on design, purpose, originality and engagement, so you can easily see where to improve. Users can also rate comments, so it is very clear what the most important bit of information is. The great thing about the site is that there isn’t really any inappropriate behavior. Weather this is because it is well moderated, or designers are just so cool, I don’t know, but generally comments really are helpful and encouraging.

If you are just starting out, this website is a great tool to use to further your skills. People will generally try to be constructive about their criticism. I recently saw a truly bad illustration, it looked like it was done in MS Paint, in a bad way, and while people did say it’s bad, they weren’t rude, and left tips on what to do.

My first time installing a Google Chrome extension was an extremely positive experience, no restarts, quick install, and an awesome plugin called Feedly. Feedly is essentially a feed reader, but it does its job in such an elegant way, that it rises out of all the other readers I’ve seen.

It’s available for Firefox and Chrome as an extension, and will pull your feeds from your Google account. Once installed you can go to the Feedly page to view your feeds, in a very user-friendly, magazine style view. You can view your feeds in a number of ways, my favorite is the cover view, which shows large thumbnails for most recent items on the left, and smaller thumbnails and excerpts for a list on the right. All the views offer great visuals, and good ways to browse, but where Feedly also excels is the reading/sharing/organization options.

Read the rest of this entry »

Using more than one browser at once is not just the practice of web designers, everyone can reap the benefit of having multiple browser open, instead of multiple tabs or windows of the same browser. You can separate different types of pages more easily, you can keep your workflow in a different space than your personal like, and you can better use the different advantages of different browser.

If you work on the web and/or live an active social life here, you surely have a lot of “accounting” type pages open, or pages you want to monitor regularly. I call my email accounts and adsense account “accoutning” pages, since these are in no way part of my workflow, separating them is a big productivity booster. Firstly, if I take all of these pages and open them in Chrome instead of Firefox, I will be left with a clean environment to work with in Firefox, and quite possibly, less memory usage. Once you have these separated, the less clutter will help you focus, and you can also put one browser on a side monitor, and your main one right in front of you, if you have a dual monitor setup.

You can also reap the benefits of different features if you use more than one browser. I wouldn’t really use Flock for working, but its a great browser for living your social life, so using Twitter, Facebook and such is much easier and faster. If you are more productive in your personal space, it will leave you more time to work, or simply more time to relax.