Toodledo :: A to-do list to organize your tasks.

I think I have posted something here to the effect that I am looking into the best to do list creator for me, if not here is the short version. I have an iPhone. iPhone doesn’t have a to do list, (I know, crazy right?). iPhone now supports applications. I want the best third-party to do list for me.

There are a number of options out there from the ultra lifestyle changing options like the GTD Model and OmniFocus, to simple to do list apps in the iPhone store that simply make a list on your phone and that is it. I got a number of ideas from people about what they use, but more on that later.

My needs for a to do list fall somewhere in between those extremes. I want a to do list that is synced to the web and is accessible whether I have my phone or not.

Toodlelo: What I like

Right now, I am in week two of using Toodledo almost exclusively. I haven’t bought the paid version which will unlock some extra functionality, but so far its free version does a lot to address my needs.

The list lives on the web which means I have access to my to do list wherever I am as long as there is an Internet connection. Toodledo has a fairly serviceable web app page that makes using it pretty good on the iPhone. It is a little sluggish on the phone, but I suspect that that will be dealt with in firmware updates to the iPhone.

Toodledo allows me to categorize my to do list in folders, contexts, and with tags. All of these are handy because they open up uses for toodledo lists that the creators didn’t even think of. That also means that it is flexible enough to meet the needs of different users.

Here is how I am using the folders, contexts, and tags. I have created a folder for each stakeholder to whom I owe something. In other words, all the jobs that need to get done for Jim (Jim is a fictional character, any similarities to existing Jims is purely coincidental.) goes in a folder called Jim.

I use contexts to establish the where. Everyone has to do lists for work or school and home, and very possibly more. Right now I have two contexts. Work and home, although I see adding more in the very near future. Having contexts allows you to focus on what is important at that time, where you are while back-burnering things that don’t make sense in the current context. In other words, I can’t mow the lawn while I am sitting at my desk at work.

As for the tags, here is where you can really get creative. Last week I was needing to be able to classify whether a job was in process or not. There were some jobs that weren’t going to be finished, but I needed to signify that there was work being done, but were waiting on contingencies. Toodledo didn’t have that function baked in, but then it occurred to me that I could use tags. On all the jobs that were in process, I used the tag ‘in process’, I know, clever right? That way, I could do a search for ‘in progress’ and see all those jobs. Tags open up a whole world of flexibility.

Toodledo has another interesting trick. It allows you to print your to do list and using a pair of scissors and some origami, create a neat little business card sized booklet of your to do list. One section is devoted to all the to dos in your list, and the back is devoted to what it calls the Hotlist. Those are the to dos that are due soon or are rated as very very important. It is a cool trick even if it is a little confusing to fold the booklet the first time. For those of you out there who have an affinity for paper and it flexibility, this is a cool option.

Things I don’t like

I know this is picky, and highly subjective, but I would love for there to be a site redesign. I don’t love the current look of the main site. It gets very cluttered when you have everything open. The site gives you the option of hiding notes, and that helps, but honestly, I need to see those. I wish that the interface had a more cohesive, app-like appearance that wasn’t overly colorful. There are color options, but those don’t address the clutter issue.

This is a small nit-picky issue that isn’t driving me a way from the site, but a slick experience would be a big draw for me.

What’s Next?

Thankfully for me, the user, switching costs are low when it comes to to do lists. I plan on giving Toodledo another couple of weeks and then look at the options again and see if there is something out there that works better. I bet using an online to do list for an entire month will illuminate issues I need to take into account when finding my final to do list choice.

Adobe has just released a brand new online word processing application called Buzzword. You can find it at buzzword.acrobat.com. It is a very nice and clean looking interface that fades into the background as you create. That is nice, and it gives you some handy stats as you write. In the bottom left hand corner of the screen, it keeps you up to date on how many words you have type so far, something handy for those columnists who have to come in around 500 words every time. It also keeps you up to date on how many misspellings you have in your document. Something that is quite handy for those of us who are copying and pasting content written by others.

One thing I did notice which I thought was pretty strange. Even though Buzzword is housed at acrobat.com, you can’t save your document as a .pdf. What the…? Come on Adobe! Ridiculous.

My biggest fear for the product is that it may be a little to late to make a big difference. I don’t use online document creation much, but when I do, I use Google Docs. Not so much that it is the absolute best online document creation experience, but rather that they were first, and all my online documents are already there.

Good luck Adobe.

The following is copied and pasted from what I wrote using Adobe’s new online word processor offering, Buzzword.

Hello there you slick little interface. I just wish that I didn’t have such a backlog of documents in Google Docs. You see, this interface is quite slick, but I am not in this world. Flash is getting better and better, but it is so hard to shake those bad feelings I have accrued since the advent of Flash. There were so many sites that used Flash badly. You could use the back button, you couldn’t see the history, and for some reason, the fonts were rendered poorly which led to a ton of illegible, unnavigable sites. Yuck.

In comes Web 2.0 where we go back to standards and get back a lot of the functionality lost just prior to the big web bust of 2001. But, there is a problem a brewin’. With more and more money being funneled into Web 2.0 projects, the market is more and more palatable to larger companies who aren’t as passionate about web standards.

Are we going to go back to an era where tools such as Flash and Flex are used losing the ground yet again that was gained back over the past 3 to 4 years?

Buzzword looks nice, and maybe this rant belongs somewhere else. But is it nice try but too late?

One thing that I am noticing about this tool. There is a word counter and as of this word, I had typed 235 words. Wow that is an eye opener. I figured I had typed much more than that. I wouldn’t work out too good at a newspaper. Writing is like pulling teeth for me, and I realize it is the same for a lot of other people, but the finished product isn’t valuable enough to me to endure the pain on a daily basis.

I like being creative, but just in other ways. Blogging is only a hobby, and one that I don’t believe I will ever pursue much further than that.

Adobes Lightroom 2 beta broadens editing horizons | Underexposed - CNET News.com

CNET is reporting that the next version of Adobe Lightroom will give photogs greater editing capability within Lightroom. In the first version of Lightroom, if you needed to adjust a photo it was an all or nothing deal. All changes were global. We couldn’t adjust the light levels in just one part of the photo. In order to do that, we had to open the photo in Photoshop and mask it off and on and on. This was definitely do-able, but it was an extra step which slowed down the overall photo editing job.

The next version of Light room will allow you to use a brush and adjust portions of a photograph. That is extremely handy and will speed up the work flow markedly. Time is money and the faster you can edit, the more money you make.

I had skipped the first version of Lightroom, sticking to my CS2 workflow because it worked. I am going to take a harder look at Lightroom 2.0 when it comes out.

Finally there is a way to keep your online and offline calendar in sync. This is a big deal if you are like me and have had to enter calendar items manually in two places. What a drag. Google announced today that it has released a little tool that will check your Outlook calendar and synchronize it with your Google calendar. Hip hip hooray!

UPDATE:———————-

I just downloaded the Google Caledar updating tool, and it works great! It is extremely simple. You download it and it ends up in your system tray. Once it is there you can right-click on the icon and go into the options and specify how often you want it to check for updates.

I have been waiting a long time for this. I have a smart phone that doesn’t sync to Google, but I want to use Google calendar and now I can. Thank you Google!

I have started using the new service from Google that allows you to “host” Google Apps on your domain. I started the process of getting it all hooked up on Thursday of this week and so far it has been pretty cool. It was pretty simple. I went to the Google Apps page and signed up. I filled out the online form and that was pretty much it. I had to post some HTML in a specific folder on my site, but doing that was trivially easy. The HTML let Google know with certainty that I was the owner of the domain.

The Killer Apps

Once you have Google Apps set up on your domain,iIt allows you to share a family calendar, or a shared calendar with all those using your domain which, right now, seems like the killer app. Keeping up with all the things your family is up to is a real chore, and having a simple powerful calendar that everyone shares for free is incredibly handy.

I set Megan up with an account, and she immediately filled the calendar up with all our family’s upcoming plans. Super handy.

In addition to a family calendar Google Apps also gives you Google docs. I haven’t found a killer use for this yet, but it allows you to create documents that are available for everyone in your family. I can see where this could be very handy for a business domain, but in the family world, it seems to be fairly limited in usefulness.

If that weren’t enough, it also includes a built in start page based on iGoogle. It lets you set up a personal start page with a ton of different widgets that connect you to the information you need. I don’t use a start page much now that I have started using Google reader to keep up with the news that I am interested in, but I still like it. All the users on your domain that you set up with Google Apps also get a start page of their own.

I was hoping that there would be the option of having a common iGoogle start page that everyone on the domain could use. It could be a great place to communicate, but so far I haven’t found that option if it exists.

My Email Dilemma

It also comes with integrated email which means that my MurDog.com email addresses can go through Google’s Gmail interface which is incredibly handy. Right now however, I can’t get that running. In order for it to work, you have to update the MX records on the DNS server to point towards Google’s mail servers. I know that is pretty technical, but it should be a pretty simple thing if you can get access to it. The Google site has great instructions that make it pretty simple to make the changes.

I have a problem. My hosting service provider, www.thehostgroup.com doesn’t give me access to the MX settings. Or, if it does, I can’t find them. It is enough for me to start thinking about finding better hosting for this site. Having a personal email address that leverages the power of Gmail is an exciting prospect. I have sent a message to my provider in hopes of getting this resolved, but so far I haven’t heard anything from them.

One of the bad parts of having a personal email address that I have to manage is spam. It is a huge problem. I turned off my personal email address years ago because of spam. If I could get this Google apps thing to work then I would have Google’s horsepower behind spam control. It would be a huge help.

If I can’t get the email thing resolved, I might have to look at another provider for my web site hosting.

MurDog.com is just a personal site, and I don’t get any revenue from it so low-cost hosting is a necessity. If I can find a provider that is inexpensive, and allows me to host this WordPress blog I might be interested in switching.

For now, I will wait and see what The Host Group does.

Other than that, it is a pretty cool option from Google that should only get better.

I have been able to do it for over two or three weeks now, but I am able to solve the Rubik’s cube.  What a deal.  I remember fooling around with these things as a child convinced that I would never be able to do it.  But, now I can.

I don’t know what spurred it, but sometime last year, I bought a Rubik’s cube on a whim.  They still sell them at Wal-Mart, believe it or not. Anyway, now they come with instructions. Fantastic.  The problem is that it takes a spatial genius to follow the instructions.  Even with the instructions, it took me around a month of noodling with it to finally do it once.

Once I had done it, I left it alone for over a year.  In the meantime, I received the 80’s edition of Trivial Pursuit.  That came packaged with another Rubik’s cube.  Now I had two, the one I had conquered finally and this one.  I got the second one out of its packaging feeling safe that I had at least one cube standing as a tribute to my Rubik’s prowess. My safety cube allowed me to play with the second one with reckless abandon.

The second cube also came with the instructions.  With those instructions, I set out to beat the cube for a second time.  After about a week of hard core twisting and turning, I finally got to the point where I could finish the cube as long as I had a copy of the instructions around…hardly impressive.

I found that I could memorize one of the steps each day.  The way I do it there are 6 steps, each of which get more complicated than the last. After roughly a week, I had all the steps mastered and now I can do it.

A co-worker of mine also go the bug and purchased a cube at the Walgreens one morning as he was checking out.  He watched the videos on www.rubiks.com to learn how to solve the cube.  You can go there and watch the videos, they are dizzying to say the least.  Now he can do the cube and he does it differently than me.  The next step is to learn his way of doing it.  From the looks of it, it is faster.

I just downloaded a Firefox plug-in (Add-on) called ScribeFire and I am testing it right now. My blog is a Wordpress blog, and it has a pretty good editing interface that comes part and parcel with the software that is installed on my server.

I have been using Wordpress for the last 4 months and have been completely happy with the interface, but today, I was looking at Leo LaPorte’s Wakoopa software feed, and it said that he was using MarsEdit, a blog editing software package for the Mac, and it got me to wondering if there is software available for Windows, and lo and behold, here is software that integrates right into my favorite browser, Firefox.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Hands-on with VUDU’s movies-on-demand STB - Engadget HD

For those of you who don’t have a 360, this little box looks very interesting. It only costs $399 and it allows you to download movies to an onboard 250 GB hard drive. The makers of the VUDU player also promise an undisclosed number of HD movies available sometime “before Christmas”.

The real killer aspect of this box is the ability to add storage by connecting a USB hard-drive. That will allow you to store and infinite number of movies…pretty cool.