Hi all, I've long been a reader and follow the site, but I've recently just got a simple idea for an app that I think could be really useful to people. My hope is that if it's good, that someone would like to code it. I'm not sure if this is the right place/site, but I figure you guys would have some good ideas/feedback.

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On the mac there are plenty of apps for time management and keeping track of what you need to do in the day. Being a terrible procrastinator I've probably tried them all.

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Sort of an add-on to the New York Times piece Merlin linked the other day about Scrivener and its cohort of new writing applications, Jeffrey MacIntyre at Slate coins a new term for programs that eschew the familiar, bloated twiddliness of Microsoft Office for simplicity:

There’s an emerging market for programs that introduce much-needed traffic calming to our massively expanding desktops. The name for this genre of clutter-management software: zenware.

The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence. There are several strategies for achieving this, but most rely on suppressing the visual elements you’re used to: windows, icons, and toolbars. The applications themselves eschew pull-down menus or hide off-screen while you work. Even if you consider yourself inured to their presence, the theory goes, you’ll benefit most from their absence.  read more »

An Interface of One’s Own

I was delighted to see my favorite OS X writing app, Scrivener, turn up in today’s “The Medium” column of the New York Times Magazine. I reviewed Scrivener about a year ago, and still use it whenever I have to research, plan, and draft anything more complicated than a blog post. In fact, as luck would have it, I was actually working on my upcoming Macworld talk in Scrivener when I took a break to read the paper and saw this article. Kismet or something.

Columnist, Virginia Heffernan, notes the app’s beloved full-screen capability:

To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

High fives to other great apps mentioned in the article, including Ulysses, WriteRoom, and Nisus Writer. Slightly lower fives go to Microsoft Word, which, once again, takes its usual drubbing as The Application Everyone Wants To Get Away From™. Poor Microsoft Word, the mascara-smeared Gloria Swanson of word processors.  read more »

Does anyone know of any software/freeware that can be used to manages lists for GTD on a Windows Mobile 6 Standard aka smartphone device?

I’m sure many of you are already aware and using Anxiety and the same goes for OmniFocus so I won’t go there.

Last night I found that these two apps just go together like wine and cheese. Whatever you do in Anxiety can be synced with OmniFocus through iCal as a bridge since they both sync with iCal. I love OmniFocus but have wanted some sort of a HUD for it so I don’t have to switch back and forth between my work and action list.  read more »

Sometimes surprises come from unexpected places. (Um, I guess that’s part of why they’re surprising.) Case in point, yesterday I opened Sciral Consistency as I’ve done several times a day for the last five years. This time, however, something happened that hasn’t occurred since sometime in 2005. A notification window announced that a new version of the application was available for downloading.  read more »

Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper was recently released in a completed 1.0 version (previously), and if you’re the sort of person who casts about for a simple way to manage projects and tasks from a Mac, this just may be your app.

But, even more significantly, if you’re not looking for a simple action management system — if you’re that particularly pathetic sort of character who’s convinced that features like tagging, syncing, collaboration, graph paper generation, and the introduction of an onboard artisanal breadmaker are all that stands between you and getting your stuff done — well, you may need TaskPaper more than anybody. Because, friends, TaskPaper is just about fiddle-proof, and, frankly, I know a lot of people who could benefit from that today.

Here’s what a simple document looks like in TaskPaper:  read more »

Do you have a set of apps that do it all happily, or do you tinker with shiny new things?

I’ll admit it, I’m an applications tart. I started off with Mac Mail, then heard good things about TBird, got annoyed with that… now I’ve switched to Entourage, and ‘so far so good’. (despite the massive job of dealing with the hundreds of old unprocessed emails)

I’ve been tinkering with Wikis, signed up for BackPackit (no images on the free one….:( )and am beta-testing another funky task organizing ap. Oh, not to mention Sciral Consistency and Scrivener…  read more »

Hi folks,

time for some shameless self-promotion ;-)
Since I work on a couple of different machines at work and at home, I need a tool that I can have with me at each of those places and that is a bit less dorky than having a stopwatch next to the keyboard.  read more »