It’s been a while since I tried to find out some productivity solutions out there. I spent a few hours trying to find what’s available in terms of open source, web based project management systems. There are certainly a bunch out there, though the majority of them are rather old, with reasonably clunky interfaces. Basecamp still seems to be the king of web offerings, though I’m a sole developer in my projects, and I’ve done well enough without having to pay.
Enough of you who read these pages are probably sick enough of me talking about the Opera browser, though I have herein suckered you into reading yet another post about this system. I’ll keep it short, though.
Opera offers a functionality called Notes, which is built into the browser. There’s not all that much functionality to it; you have notes, which are essentially plain text files. There isn’t any place for a title, etc.; the first line that you type in is shown in the list of notes. More importantly, however, is that the notes can be organized in folders; and folders can contain other folders as well as notes. Ergo, I now have certain main tasks as my primary set of folders, with detailed notes for each sub-part of that system. Most of the time the item is contained in a single line; though for more detailed notes I can just continue typing. Finally, via Opera Link, all changes I make to my notes are automatically synchronized across every Opera instance I open, regardless of the machine. A quick keyboard shortcut (ctrl-6) shows and hides my tasks, regardless of what web page I’m currently viewing. All in all, it’s a very quick yet elegant solution for keeping organized.
What do you use to keep track of your projects?
I just use the notepad on my blackberry to save important things. Used to use Google Notes, do they even offer that anymore?
Have you tried EverNote?
Honestly if I had the need now I’d probably just use a good old OO.org spreadsheet thrown in my DropBox folder. (PS – sign up for DropBox if you haven’t.)
Cool, thanks for the comment! Lots of good ideas.
On my Nokia 5800, there’s a built-in Notes application. For a while now it’s been my fall back for whenever I’m not in front of a computer, and it works very well. It, too, can be synchronized with the web, via Nokia’s Ovi sync. I use the sync more as a backup than for any other purpose.
It does look like Google Notebook is still alive. I think they stopped development on it, though it continues to live on as a service. I used it mostly for vacation planning, though beyond that I didn’t find the interface all that crazy useful.
I’ve heard a lot about EverNote, though I haven’t used it or tried it. I don’t particularly care about indexing other kinds of data (video, audio, etc.), so it doesn’t seem to make much sense for me. Do you use it? Same with DropBox, really; I don’t move files around all that much. When I do, I have my machine at work which is always online, with a static hostname and IP, and, if it’s web oriented, my web host.
I tried EverNote for a while, it didn’t really fit into my workflow. The nerds on Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) are in love with it, though. I have a feeling I’d use it a lot more if the BlackBerry client were useful, instead of just being a link to a trimmed down website.
Dropbox is great. I use it for everything I normally would have stashed in /home/patrick, which isn’t much. But, it’s free backup that I trust, and since I have it on two computers, my worst case scenario would require the service to die along with two of my harddrives (all at the same time) before I had to pull out any DVDRs. It’s also supplemented my flash drive–I don’t have to worry about what files I may need, since they’re pretty much all on Dropbox. I can grab them at any time through their website, as long as I have net access.
Dropbox is one of those things where I didn’t understand how useful it would be until I had already been using it for a while. Recently I was in the living room and needed some data I had upstairs. Under my old system, I would have SSH’d into my box, opened the file in nano, and had the data in seconds. Instead, I just remembered “oh, duh, it’s in my Dropbox dir.” The dropbox client was already on both systems, and already running, which meant the file was already on my PC. Went from a 10 second process to a 0 second process.
Anyway, if you sign up, use this link:
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTIxNTI1NzI5
We each get an extra 250 megs. Not sure how the OSX client is, but they’ve got great Linux support (RPMS/DEBS for the big guys, source for the smaller distros like Arch.)
Right on, thanks :) Will definitely use that link if I go for a DropBox account. Same goes for everyone on the Internet who finds this page and wants to go for it. Hint, hint, to the general Internet.
Re: EverNote, same here, essentially. There’s a third party widget for Symbian out there, though it doesn’t seem all that appealing to me.