RLASKEY: words

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?

It’s pretty hard to think that the Opera browser is somehow going to jump up into first place; it’s taken years for FireFox to get the sort of awareness to compete with Internet Explorer.  Google Chrome is now similarly joining the fray by advertising its free browser via TV and all other sorts of advertisements; and even then, it’s going to take a long while before there’s much market movement at truly competitive levels.

Even so, I’ve been using Opera in OS X for a few months now, and it continues to get better and better.  Today, I tried out Opera’s 10.50 beta 1, available at opera.com/browser/next/.  The difference from this beta and previous stable version, 10.10, is that it is a) much faster, and b) utilizing the native OS X Cocoa system.  Ergo, re: #2, it’s a lot more integrated and “Mac like” than it was in previous iterations.  Integrated light weight IMAP support is still moving along nicely, too: I’m getting all the features I want, without any of the ones I don’t.  It is, of course, a beta, and I’ve had reason to restart the application a bit more often than normal.  With that said, though, the future of Opera looks to be bright, in my opinion, and I can only hope that they continue with such a well-designed, quality product.

Opera version 10.10 launched today.  I’ve only tried it for a short period of time, but from what I can tell it’s about the same story as I had before: under OS X, it runs incredibly well, but in Linux, there are still some memory management and performance issues that still aren’t quite worked out.

Opera’s integrated email client, and Opera Link are two big boons to the browser which are not as closely built in via competitors.  This, and it’s consistently solid performance under OS X and Windows makes me really enjoy the experience.  10.10 from today also launches more support for Opera Unite: a service which adds a lot of wild functionality to the browser.

Opera Unite adds in a web server, file, video, and music sharing, a messenger, and various other services all in a coherent package.  These services are tied together via an Opera account, which is also used for Opera Link.  After tinkering with the options, it seems like Unite is a really interesting and potentially really useful concept, which I feel will most likely not catch on in the numbers that it could.  I personally don’t have a need for it, and I don’t think it’s huge enough to switch people over.  Personally, I wish they would attack the bloat in the Linux platform release rather than adding more features.

I don’t have much in terms of measurable results, though in OS X 10.10 does appear to run a very slight bit faster than its previous version: which is saying something, since 10.0 was always blazing fast for me.  With Firefox slowly creeping up in its share of the market, I don’t have a lot of high hopes that Opera will find any sort of dominance in the browser wars; though in many ways I wish it would, because it really is one hell of a good package.

There are probably plenty of many fine reviews out there already of Opera‘s Mail client, though after a day of use and some tweaking I really am quite impressed. Opera on the whole does not use all that much in terms of system resources, even with an absurd number of windows / tabs open. It’s garbage collection also seems very good, whereby not too much information is stored for the address bars, history, and cache. Firefox does allow for certain config, though it likes to aggregate a fair amount of data, currently requiring other software to clear out.

As to Opera’s Mail client, it is rather bare bones in certain respects, though it is very quick and is insanely accessible. Not having to leave the browser window is a big step up, and it doesn’t seem to hinder the browser experience any. With that said, shortcut keys seem to get confused on occasion, and certain parts of the way it caches data isn’t quite perfect. It seems to me there is a bug or two to still be squashed, though even where it is I really enjoy its low profile.

Email has been around for a very long time, and the same relatively simple systems can be interpreted and used in a variety of different ways. It is refreshing to see it used in new ways, and I hope to continue to use Opera Mail as a primary user interface for some time to come. Whether or not that will actually happen, of course, is yet to be seen..