Posts Tagged ‘Adobe Air’

I mentioned before that I usually try out and use the most feature packed apps, and as time goes by I start using simpler and simpler things to replace them. MiniTask is about as simple as it gets if you want task management, but that may be its appeal to many people.

It is an Adobe Air application, and it allows you to keep a simple task list on your desktop. It is much like keeping a task list in a text file, but with some handy features like easy reordering, marking as done and alarms. It really is very simple, but this means you won’t loose time organizing.

I don’t really recommend this for project management or keeping of long term to do-s, but for daily and bi-daily tasks this is perfect. I like to be able to categorise, tag, place on the map, add notes and whatnot, but is that all really necessary for day to day stuff where an item remains on list for a maximum of 24-48 hours?

I do recommend this extremely minimalistic app to anyone who feels weighed down by the complexity of  Outlook, or Remember The Milk, all you need to do is add a task and mark done when done. Also, take a look at the MiniTask website for a list of keyboard shortcuts to make your life even easier.

It seems I am trying to write catchy titles now, but don’t take them seriously (unless you’re 20 year old girls). Anyway, all of us have things to do that come up on the fly, and these may be very hard to keep track of since they might not fit into your schedule, they may be to small to enter into your normal task list, but in the end you must do them, so forgetting is not an option. For me this typically happens when I’m working on a site and I think of a new feature while coding something, so I quickly jot it down, using the wonderfully named Doomi for example.

I’ve mentioned this little Adobe Air application briefly before, it’s a very simple task manager, so don’t expect Remember The Milk like features here. Just jot down a task, and set an optional reminder. You can tell that Doomi was meant for daily management because reminders range from 1-24 hours, which is great, since this is what we are using it for. If you want heaps of features, just go with a big online option, or Outlook for example.

The great thing about Doomi is that it requires no brainwork to use. With comlicated systems you have to think about your system, how you’re going to organize with it, but here it really is a no brainer, quickly jot things that come to mind, then mark them complete, or if one turns out to be a bigger task, just transfer it to Remember The Milk.

Doomi is just perfect for its purpose, it has a very unobtrusive, simple interface, but I could imagine 1-2 features to make it better. It would be awesome if it could send a task to Outlook or Remember The Milk because some of our daily tasks might end up there, so an automatic option would be nice. Apart from that everything is where it should be, be sure to try it out and tell us how you liked it!

Twitter is one of the best tools for letting the world know what you’re doing at the moment and Wordpress is one of the most flexible and free blogging systems today. Combining the two you can create one of the most powerful organization systems, all this for free!

Preparations

You will need three things to get going with this system. First of all, you need to sign up for a Twitter account which will take you the best of 3 minutes. If you already have a username I recommend creating another one for this specific task. Since you are using this to organize and manage yourself, you might be sharing some stuff you don’t want to.

Second of all you will need a domain and an installed Wordpress blog. For those of you who already have one of these this is a simple step (since no work needs to be done), but for those of you who don’t this could take some time. If you don’t already have hosting please consider Bluehost, I use it for all my domains and if you sign up using my link I get some money which goes a long way for supporting Hack Your Day and my other sites. You will also need to install Wordpress, take a look at their site, they have excellent documentation. If you need help there, my new service, Blogtastique will install the blog and set up the plugin (see next paragraph) for you for free.

Last, but not least, you will need the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King. This is the tool that will do the grunt of the work, capable of creating tweets from your posts or posts from your tweets, and adding all sorts of functionality on top.

The productivity method

The idea I had which sets the basis for this method is that I wanted a way to keep track of myself, of what I do, what I waste time on and so on, and also a way to easily browse, create statistics and so on. The first part was a given once I started to use Twitter. I can very simply write down what I’m doing, spending no more than 5 seconds on it between tasks. The second part proved a bit of a challenge. Twitter has a history, but nothing really powerful that can give you advanced filter functionality and so on. However, Alex King’s plugin and Wordpress give you excellent ways to manage yourself and get useful information from your day.

The workflow

The workflow defines what you do and how you do it, so please view this as my take, my method, feel free to deviate, explore and share. Basically, when you work, all you need to do is send a quick tweet about what you are doing. “doing marketing presentation”, “writing gHacks post”, etc are good examples, and as you will see the method works best if you document each and every action you do. You can use the Twitter website, but it may be more productive if you use a desktop tool, such as Twhirl, which is a handy Adobe Air application for quick desktop twittering.

You can stop there if you wish, but there is a lot more you can do. Right now you can’t add tags and categories, so what I do is go through all my posts the next day and give them tags, categories and additional notes if I have any more thoughts. Since I opted for the daily summary, I can quickly go through where I need to add tags, delete and so on.

Presentation

That’s basically all there is to the workflow, the other parts of this method just deal with the data presentation. I found a great Twitter-like theme named Bluebird for the blog and I have modified it to show data I need, take a look at my personal organizer. It will only be public for a few days, so hurry!

The great thing about this method is that not only does it give you a great way to present your daily log, but it also enables you to create a customized start page just for you. You can use Wordpress pages like you would on Netvibes and you can use the sidebar for quick links to your favorite site.

Of course your main concern will be presenting your actual tweets. Since the tweet is partially contained in the title and fully in the body, I have removed the titles, and I now only show the tweets, and the dates. There are endless options to modify the look and data volume you show, all you need is a little practice with Wordpress.

Further uses

There are numerous way you can use this method for personal organization. You can organize tasks as well as your activity log, because you can always go and edit the posts later on to add stuff, mark them as done, and so on.

You can also create an email log, so you won’t have to find individual emails you’ve answered for example. Just type “answered John’s email”, or simply “answered email” and you’ll find the answer without actually having to remember more than that.

If you play a lot of darts, poker, pool, or anything else competitive, you can log your progress and then search through it quickly and easily. You can also display results for March, or any other time period.

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!

Recently I joined a Pownce network and I saw a desktop application for the whole site. When I wanted to install it, I had to download something called Adobe Air. At first I was not too happy, why do I need to install stuff, why can’t they just make a desktop app?

Well, as I actually installed and looked into it, I found that Adobe Air is actually very cool. From my point of view it brings together the web and my desktop very well. For example, I can view Google Analytics info from my desktop. It saves all this, and I can save my reports, so it functions like a desktop app, but still gets the fresh data from the net. For Pownce I can see my messages and interact with the webpage as I would. Air is also cross-platform, so any OS user can download it and view the same stuff as I do on my Vsta.

One commonality I noticed was that these apps look extremely sleek and well made. This may be because Air is also great from the programmer’s point of view as it uses common language like HTML and such. This allows them to create a nice interface for us, one that also actually works.

All in all, I am very happy with Adobe Air so far, and I will show you the three applications I use right now, although this will probably grow a bit in the future. The only negative side I see is quite a lot of memory usage. Pownce uses about 22.000K of memory, Analytics uses 33.000K and AirTalkr uses 38.000. Compared to Windows Media Player 11 (7.000K) and Outlook (55.000K) this seems like a lot. It’s not bogging my system down yet, but I think they need to chop down the memory usage a bit. Now let me show you the three apps I tried already.

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