ToDo is not perfect. But I’ll begin with the nice little tidbits that make me keep on using this app, which is the best feature a ToDo app can have: continued usage.

• There’s a keyboard shortcut to quick add tasks, that can be defined in the settings. After the shortcut, just type the task name and hit return or tab, which adds the task and lets you go on typing the next tasks name unless you hit return or tab again. Great feature for quickly adding tasks.

• Clicking on the blue linked day in the calendar filters everything by tasks due today

• CMD + N is the shortcut for a new task, or, if you’ve selected a project or a tasklist-task adds a new subtask. With the arrow keys you can navigate in the list, hitting right or left arrow folds or unfolds projects and tasklist-tasks.

• If you’ve selected a context or tag, you don’t only get the whole list filtered by that tag / context, but also have new tasks get the context and tags automatically selected for the active values. Very nice thing if you’re seperating contexts as work and private and projects as tags.

• I should mention that I only use “lists” for the default one “inbox” and “ideas”. I’m throwing everything into ideas that shouldn’t be deleted, but that I usually won’t want to clutter my list. And you can completely filter out lists from your views, what I did with “ideas”. Additionally, context and tags are kept, so I can scan for ideas very targeted, if I need to.

• Via drag-and-drop you can drag your single or multiple selected tasks to tags, contexts, lists or on a due date (in the calender) to set those on the task(s). Very nice way to easily set stuff on tasks.

CRITICISM:

As I like this app, I want to make some point that could be improved, and if anyone reading this develops this app or knows someone who develops this app, please forward this.

• automatic recognition of context by WIFI-SSID (or place on iPhone)
• keywords for the quick-entry dialog (for example #tagname or @contextname), autocompleted if possible
• more folding levels for tree-like tasks
• tree-like contexts
• more performance after CMD-N: sometimes half the typed name is missing because I didn’t wait for the new task to pop up in the tree

OVERALL:

The app fits my workflow most and keeps me using it – what no other ToDo-list-tool has ever achieved as I’m to much of a GTD freak. Have fun with this app.

photo credit: @superamit

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iPhone		34.3%	(839)
Android		30.4%	(744)
Blackberry		6.9%	(168)
Other Smart Phone		15.0%	(366)
Regular Mobile Phone		25.5%	(624)

The people who answered this survey are pretty smart, they’re all developers who we can agree on being relatively smart. They also all would be able to use and understand complex technology, so features will trump usability in this audience more than in ordinary comsumers. The developers also have pretty good paychecks, so most likely they all can afford all types of smartphones. The list above is not mutually exclusive, so a developer might have an Android, an iPhone and a blackberry device, but added up all percentages are 112,1 … so most likely only ~10% would have two phones.

36.9% are from north america (just to include this AT&T miserablility factor). 7.5% are engaging in mobile development, while many many developers are into web development (from the comments on the stackoverflow post you can see that people were not so sure about this question). Sidenotes:16.1% also have an iPad, 14,4% have a kindle (only 1,6% Nook), 4,7% own an Apple TV. I can’t see any other values play into this, the Java vs. C language proficiency seems pretty equal (they didn’t ask for Objective-C so you can’t draw conclusions from that), well maybe the developers most used operating system is interesting:

Linux		18.2%	(472)
Mac OS X		15.6%	(405)
Windows 7		44.7%	(1,158)
Windows XP		18.3%	(473)
Windows Vista		3.2%	(82)

Is there an iTunes for Linux? From what a quick google search could tell me there isn’t … So are there 18.2% not willing to use an iPhone for that reason?

The only thing I want to add to these numbers is that I would have thought that among developers Android is more common than the iPhone, especially as developers often want to fiddle with the system more. I drew my own conclusions, but as I don’t want to sound like a fanboy again, I just will let you draw your own.

photo credit: Veronica Belmont

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Following definite pros:

• The display doesn’t accumulate fingerprints anymore. Big plus. Wonder how they did that.
• The distance to the screen is lower, as the glass on the screen is not that thick anymore. This feels very good, as it feels more like touching the interface directly now.
• The antenna is definitely better than before. I can make the WiFi drop one bar if I use a death grip that makes my hands hurt, but even with that applied I can’t make the phone signal go down no matter what.
• The camera is just superb compared with my 3G or the half year old nokia of my girlfriend. The pictures now definitely look amazing (HDR also helps picture quality) and the video is just very nice.
• The device is very thin. it’s not any lighter, but thinner than the 3G and it feels much tougher.
• Everything just got faster due to the faster processor and the additional RAM.
• The free Belkin case I got for free is very fine and an iPhone stand was included with it. Nice!

This is what I would call “not so nice”:

• The price is still high
• The battery life seems a bit better, but it doesn’t hold longer than two days no matter what. Okay, I use the device pretty often, but somehow I would have imagined more. Update: when you use no geolocation stuff it holds up a little longer. The GPS sucks the battery dry in no time. Over the last night (10 hours), the iPhone lost only 5% battery. Nice.
• Apps still don’t get a chance to put something on the lockscreen. This now is the sole reason for me to install a jailbreak as soon as it’s released – I just want to see my upcoming calender items and my Appigo ToDo items there.
• Many apps still don’t get the multitasking right or their implementors just don’t publish the necessary updates. To put it straight, I even believe that there are only that many iPhone apps out there, because the possibilities were so limited. But I guess that this is a temporary problem and we’ll see more working updates soon.

Nice apps:

• Radio.de is my new favorite Internet radio app. Background music (that sometimes ends after some songs if in the background) is possible and there are 500+ radios available including the main popular German radios that often have their own (non-backgrounding) apps.
• ToDo is still my favorite todolist app.
• Meebo is the only true backgrounding IM client that’s available and working. The good side is that Meebo is really nice. It supports ICQ, Google chat (that also messages if you get a mail there), Facebook chat and a lot of other services that I don’t use. Meebo works in the background and keeps you logged in 48 hours. If you log out or are logged out due to inactivity, you get a push notification telling you so. For Windows they have a notifier that even recognizes that you’re on a computer now so you don’t get notified on your computer AND your iPhone. If you get pinged on windows, the notifier takes you to your conversation in the browser on the meedbo.com website.
• (There is still no latitude client that supports latitude friends. And I tried them all. Till then only the comparably slow Google mobile latitude page must suffice. I’ll update this post if I find something better.)
• This post was written entirely on the new iPhone using the WordPress app. It was only edited for making the lists and adding tags and a picture afterwards.

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I lately got criticizm for the way I write (in the comments). My content is too unstructured, too badly laid out and sometimes incomprehensible. I think that is true, and I think I have to embrace these comments. So I’ll try to write more clearly, more to-the-point and better structured from now on.

Sadly, my writing workflow is sort of different. When I have the motivation to sit down and write, it usually comes flowing out and I don’t use much time after the actual writing to sort everything or rewrite stuff thats sounds bad. And I also don’t plan much ahead of how the content has to be structured. And I may add, that English is not my mother’s tongue, so I may often pick the wrong words or phrases or might just build sentences that may sound weird.

But never mind my self-pity: I’ll just go on writing, and if people don’t like it – well. I’ll get better at writing at some point in time, even if it’s not now.Thanks for the insights, hope I can get better.
photo credit: Mikey G Ottawa

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Flattr is a service, where you (and everyone else) can spend a fixed value of money (like 2€ per month) for the high quality content you get in the web. Or for the stuff you really enjoy. Or so. By pressing the “flattr-button”, you direct some of your money to the maker of that content. If you’re on the other side and produce content for the web (may it be high quality or not), you can hope that people using flattr direct this money to you. Should you not flattr anything during one month, your money goes to some charity organisation. If you want more exact descriptions, you can find a good introduction on the flattr website and some thoughts of tante about the service.

But why exactly is such a service the future of high quality content on the web? First, there are different models of paying someone for content.

• Not. If someone doesn’t get a reward, he can’t pay the bank loan, he doesn’t feel his work is appreciated, he produces lower quality content or just stops producing content.
• The old way of journalism makes a magazine (this means a website since the last years) pay an autor for his writing. Today, content is free, and people don’t pay for magazines (other than generation pageviews for ads), so the author cannot be paid anymore.
• Another possibility is paid subscription. In this world, not many people would read the New York Times, if they took money, but some will. Sadly, this only solves a small part of the problem, as people wouldn’t pay much, and you can’t pay the authors of the Times with this small amount of money. Additionally, people won’t sign up for every other website they’d read – they would rather switch to free content (there’s enough of that). Also, people would likely want to pay different websites for different well-done posts, and not one site even if not everything on there is really worth it.
• The third possibility is paying the authors directly, giving them a donation or sending them a letter with money by oldfashioned (non-E) mail.

This third way seems to be the most fair, but paying people producing content on the web is a hard thing for multiple reasons:

• You don’t want to send old-fashioned (non-E) mail
• Every online transaction is prey to transaction fees (some are bigger, some are smaller). Usually, there’s also a minimum fee that is taken, so often you cannot give small amounts of money to an autor, as the paying service itself would take the whole pie. An you surely won’t want to pay 10€ for a nice post.
• Every transaction makes you type in sensitive data and needs keystrokes and mouseclicks – a tedious process.

Flattr tries to fix this. They play bank account without fees for you. You might think that paypal (or any other service on the web who can accept money) could have done the same thing – yes, they all could, but paypal (and those others) are greedy and don’t do free transactions. With Flattr, you know how much money you give away (for a good cause basically), but its not much and you can decide who gets it. That its a built-in more meaningful Digg is only a bonus, but it’s a good one after all.

This way, Flattr may be THE way to pay for online content based on free decision. How they’re going to make the service pay for itself isn’t all too clear, but I could imagine it to be the same model that a bank uses – you hold people’s money, so it can work for you till it gets redistributed – a nice model that doesn’t do no harm. The only real problem seem to be the old gatekeepers, like paypal, who want some money of people transferring money to Flattr – but as you can charge your account for 5 month with only 10€, this doesn’t cut in too badly.

Flattr is still in beta, hope you like the idea. You can sign up for a beta invite on their site if you want to try it. And from now on, you may also flattr my posts if you like.

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What it does: It has multiple functions. First, it helps you reusing stuff you copied multiple times, as you can paste stuff you copied BEFORE you copied something else. The combination CTRL + ALT + V (pretty similar to CTRL + V) gives you a list of everything you copied before.

Then, its a keybord helper checking what you write. If it recognizes easy mistakes, it corrects them while you write. This is also localized, my german version works just fine.

While you’re writing, it also recognized abbreviations you write and gives you the opportunity to write them out completely for you if you press TAB. This means while I type “S.” (which is the german abbreviation for “Seite” –> page), a small notification tells me that I can expand this to “Seite” if I press TAB. This all it very nicely integrated and doesn’t distract you.

But the feature I use the most is the snippet manager. This means if the program recognizes that there is a snippet configured for the character sequence you just typed, it gives you the option to expand this to the whole snippet. Besides your own snippets, some preconfigured snippets for your language are already included, like “sgh” that will be expanded to “Sehr geehrter Herr ” which is a pretty long but often used form of addressing the reader of an email in germany. It only expand these if you type TAB (I’ve configured CTRL + Space instead because it feels more natural for me).

A very nice program, and its FREE! So go and get it and try it yourself.

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Windows 7 is Microsoft‘s new weapon of choice. They went back from implementing in C# (–> Vista) to pure old C, as the performance losses of this political descision were accepted with the thought that “hardware becomes faster anyways”. They didn’t think about smartphones and netbooks back then. And got hit by really bad sales. Well, I’m using this platform for about one month now, therefore I thought I should share my experiences with you.

Image by nick see via Flickr

Speed: Its not as fast as XP, but MUCH faster than Vista. The boot process is faster, though a bug slows it down for my machine at the moment. Glad you can hibernate. You should.

Its New!: It looks shinyer than Vista. Well, its REALLY shiny. It has all the drivers. If it hasn’t got the drivers you need, you usually get an URL where you’ll find it. But a system thats new also has some few bugs. But the approximately 50 updates I got so far made everything run very stable. Atm my boot process is very slow due to a bug, and sometimes I don’t have the “txt-file” in the “create new”-context-menu, but thats about it. And as its new, it also supports features that you won’t use now, but that you may want to use in the future, such as multitouch. Homegroups make easier network-sharing possible, even if it won’t help much till other devices use the feature.

It has a good search: As I didn’t use Vista, I’m not sure if Vistas search features were good, but 7′s search is really nice and was officially stolen adaped from OSX‘es spotlight. Just type and you’ll have what you were looking for really fast. If you need something from a not-indexed location, you can declare the location as indexed and will find everything there faster next time.

Taskbar: The taskbar is now merged with the quick launch-bar. This means, you can have quick-launch-links and “open-programs” in the same bar. Well this wouldn’t be a good thing, but if you have a quick launch-program open, you just have a rectangle drawn around it. This also prevents opening programs that are already open accidentally. While you hover over open program-rectangles, you get a small preview of the windows. Shiny. O, besides, the tray: You can define which tray-icon-programs may bug you with annoying messages, and which may not. That a nice feature.

Good feeling: I especially like the gesture-stuff you can do with open windows. Especially dragging a window to the upper border of the screen to maximize it and being able to un-maximize it by dragging the window away from there is a feature I use everyday without even thinking about maximization anymore. I don’t use the “shake-window-to-minimize-all-others” and only seldomly find a use for the drag of a window to the left or right border of the screen, which makes it maximize to that half of the screen. That might be a usable feature when you don’t have two monitors, but you can’t use it on the left side of the right monitor for example – which should be fixed.

Good overview: The system-properties are pretty cleaned up and you can find everything pretty fast. Smart guesses help you finding something you might have looked for that is related to the settings you’re just seeing. Hovering taskbar items gives previews of the respective window. If you have place at the right from the windows explorer, content of chosen files gets previewed (as long as its text, pictures or microsoft-stuff like wordfiles). All pictures and music get shown up in virtual folders called libraries. The desktop widgets now can be dragged around on the desktop, as I have found out just today, when I firstly used a yellow sticky note as ToDo-list. Or am I mistaken and this is an office 2007-feature? Well, perhaps my overview here is blurred.

All in all, Windows 7 doesn’t make me freak out. Its nice, futuristic, and has got a lot of nice new stuff. Thinking about what I don’t like I only can mention that I like to define myself, which are my “my pictures” folders and such, but I don’t have any really negative points to say. Well. Make it cheaper, but I guess that doesn’t count. That said, I would definitely advise EVERYONE running Vista to upgrade. XP users who like their interface don’t need to switch by all means, but eventually, XP will be outdated some time, so wrap you head around something new. Something shiny.

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