Web Worker Daily

In the past I’ve been known to speak rashly. I actually declared the BlackBerry the victor in matters of mobile device web working, but a recent development in the iPhone world has me wanting to recant. Those of you familiar with my Apple  leanings will no doubt utter, “Hmph. Figures,” and wash your hands of me, but I beg you to bear with me and learn the reason for my latest team change.

iPhone OS 3.0 brings a lot of new features to the table, but I could’ve easily gone on living without all of them, copy and paste included, except for push notifications. Push is the killer feature that elevates the iPhone platform to a whole new level of usability, both as a standalone device, and as a piece of companion hardware to your existing workstation setup.

The iPhone has taken the place of an entire screen in my current home office configuration, freeing up a whole display for more productive use. Here’s a breakdown of the apps that make this possible, and how I use them. Read the rest of this entry »

There are plenty of great apps out there vying to help the forgetful, from dedicated to-do list and reminder apps like WWD favorite Remember the Milk, to the task and calendar systems in Google Docs and MS Office. New alerts and reminders app task.fm, launching into beta today, aims to be different by providing natural language, semantic text input as a quick way to enter tasks (for example, “dentist appointment at noon tomorrow”). It claims to support alerts sent via email, SMS and phone (through automated text-to-speech technology). Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to justify the time that I spend on Twitter, I am always looking for ways to be able to claim that I use it for more productive purposes.

I am finding that many of the more popular web services have recognized that Twitter is becoming a communication hub of sorts. This leads to some great connection functionality built right into their apps that lets users get at their data from within Twitter. If you’re spending quite a bit of time in a Twitter client anyway, having the ability to quickly access or add to your info without needing to load another app can be significant.

So here are some of my favorite, or otherwise notable, applications that let me tweak every last bit of productivity I can from my Twitter time.

Read the rest of this entry »