A Backpack full of Ta-Da Lists

I don't know if I every mentioned one of 37 Signals' online tools here already. I started using them a few months ago, then forgot about them again, and now I am enthusiastic about using them once more.

The first one is Ta-Da List, which you are allowed to use without paying anything for it. You can have lots of to-do lists online, so you have access to those from everywhere.

Another nice online tool is Backpack, which is more than only a few to-do lists but different sites with lists and notes and maybe images or links (but only if you pay a few bucks).

The biggest tool 37 Signals has released to be more productive is the Basecamp, which is mostly for business use and may cost up to $99/month to have all available features.

I never used Basecamp because I never thought that the free version makes much sense nor have I private project management to do at all. Would be a better idea to use that at work.

What I use is Ta-Da List, because organizing some lists is a great idea. There are lots of lists you can have: movies you want to see this year, things you have get done before you leave the country, audio cds you want to sell on flea-market next saturday, ...

Maybe you want to publish one ore more of your Ta-Da lists on your website or blog? There is Tada My Site, where you can generate some JavaScript code for every single Ta-Da list (the RSS feed of that list) and paste it into the HTML code of your site.
I tried that yesterday, but I noticed some issues with it. I had an already-marked item on a movie list. It had the title "Star Wars: Episode 3 - Revenge of the Sith" but on my site appeared it as "Episode 3 - Revenge of the Sith" and has not been marked as done yet.

For those who would like to use Backpack and have some Ta-Da Lists, there is a Perl script available at Patrick Gaskill's weblog to migrate your lists to Backpack. (I haven't had the time to test it yet.)

Technorati Tags: 37 Signals, productivity, backpack, tada list

An Evening with Google

Alan Williamson> went to the BayCHI lecture at PARC given by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google). The article is funny and interesting because some interesting facts about the user experience at Google.

1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.


2. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked 'Whats up?' to which they replied "We are waiting for the rest of it". To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

[ ... ]



BTW: It's Google's 7th birthday.

Technorati Tags: google

Google Accounts for Everybody

For all of you who have no Google account yet and where not able to catch an free invitation to Gmail, too: Google accounts are available for everybody now.
You then have access to Google Mail aka Gmail Google Talk and more.

Technorati Tags: gmail, google, google talk

What should I read next?

I stumbled over it over at lifehacker: What should I read next. I just tried a few books, like "High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby and some others. And I have to say, that it seems to be a great site to get some ideas on new books to read next. Some of those mentioned I have read already and I liked them.

Technorati Tags: books, lifehacks

Social Web Browsing

Just read it at TUAW that there is a new browser coming for the Mac user community. We already have a wide choice of browsers: Safari, Firefox, Camino, Internet Explorer, Omniweb, Opera, Shiira and now we get Flock.
Right now it is a closed beta, but it seems that lots of people are getting excited .
Will Pate lists some of the features:

• Social web browser based on Firefox


• Make it easy to talk back to the web as opposed to just consuming information


• Breadcrumbs: save and tag bookmarks, share and see other people's


• Breadcrumbs use social bookmarking to replace traditional hierarchical bookmark organization


• Blog tool: drag and drop images from other tabs, add text from multiple sites to a "shelf" and then organize the text into a post, copies URLs in the text and automatically creates blockquotes and citations in your post. Will support all major blog APIs so you can use it with any blog publishing tool.


• Flickr integration: horizontal scroll bar with drag and drop capability


• Flock has been worked on for two months

I really hope to get a look at it very soon. So, guys at Flock, please give me a a beta...

Technorati Tags: browser, flock, mac, os x, social, software

Guten Tag

One more portal, to look for tagged post, bookmarks, photos, even videos and podcasts, is called Guten Tag.
You can sort your search results by source (faster) or by date (slower). Among the services included, there are del.icio.us, blogmarks, flickr, Technorati and many more.
Nice site.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, flickr, search, technorati, web

Not very delicious

Social bookmarking is getting un-social! I noticed a few days ago, that del.icio.us is unreachable. Later on I notice that it seems to be just me who can't reach del.icio.us.
I wrote a mail to Joshua, because I had no idea how to solve the problem, and he told me that "unfortunately, we did block some of t-online due to severe abuse from that subnet".
Thank you. Yahoo! wants me to switch to a Yahoo! account to use flickr in the future and del.icio.us is blocking me from services. Great!

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, flickr, t-online, rant