Web Worker Daily

The sound of cheers swell across the nation: Today, Vista users can finally dump the clunky and sluggish operating system for Windows 7. Praise for the new version has already started coming in from early adopters and reviewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many web workers, one of my challenges is keeping my data in sync between the various devices and apps that I use. I stopped using my Palm handheld over a year ago, but I’ve continued to use the Palm Desktop application, because it’s one of the easiest-to-use and most mobile-friendly applications ever, even though I now have a BlackBerry. Finding a solution that can keep my data in sync between Palm Desktop, my BlackBerry and the other apps that I use has been difficult.

For a while, I’d sync Outlook and Palm Desktop, and then Outlook would update the BlackBerry (I didn’t actually use Outlook at all, it just acted as the middleman). It worked great. But then my dependence on Google Calendar  grew, because I could access it from any computer as well as my BlackBerry, and it wouldn’t work with my sync setup. Read the rest of this entry »

I like my orange juice freshly squeezed, but there are some good things that come from Concentrate. From the new app, that is, not the distilled juice essence. Concentrate is a new program that seems perfectly designed for aspiring singletaskers. It aims to reduce distraction and boost productivity by doing the work of various other separate applications, united under one well-designed roof. While the smart-looking launch page might have you thinking this is a web app, it’s actually a downloadable native OS X app program; Windows users will have to look elsewhere for help silencing the static.

What Concentrate provides is different than most apps, though, in that it takes as its core philosophy reduction, rather than addition or enhancement. It’s basically like a task scheduler that works similarly to Automator actions in order to provide you with efficiency-boosting shortcuts to setup programs, block web sites, and run and kill apps, all of which lets you focus on the task at hand.  Read the rest of this entry »

There’s less and less reason to fork over the expensive license fee for a full version of Adobe Acrobat these days. The web is littered with free, lightweight options that will allow you to do pretty much anything you’d want to do with Acrobat. Web app PDFVue is a relative newcomer to the field, and it brings a lot of useful PDF editing features to the table for the budget-conscious web worker.

Right away I was attracted to PDFVue because of its Firefox integration. Currently, the feature is still in testing, so you’ll have to have a free Mozilla.org account to use it. You can then download the Firefox PDFVue plugin, which opens PDF links in a new tab in PDFVue, instead of trying to launch Acrobat or Preview, both of which cause headaches and hang-ups on my MacBook from time to time.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a client wants you to transfer a project, including your intact file structure, remotely over the internet. FTP is an easy solution, right? If you have the space, and if your client is web-savvy enough to know what an FTP client is and how to use it.

If, on the other hand, your client hasn’t used FTP before and isn’t the most tech-oriented person in the world, transferring project folders with complicated file structures can quickly become an ordeal for all parties involved.

Zapr attempts to bypass the messy stuff and make it easy for you and your client or business partner to connect and share. The application allows you to share files quickly and easily, and installation is required on the original sharer’s PC only. It allows you to generate web links that direct others to files or folders stored locally on your computer.

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Over at Technologizer, Harry McCracken is in the midst of an experiment that he calls Operation Foxbook. The idea is simple: to forego desktop applications entirely for a period of time, doing everything on a netbook-class machine using Firefox.

McCracken’s initial progress report is encouraging, though as he points out, he’s hit a few roadblocks on the way. Moving stuff like blogging, email, and scheduling into the browser didn’t raise any issues. The tough application for him: image processing, since he’d been a heavy Photoshop user. His writeup includes some notes on the web applications he’s tried as a replacement.

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