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 »

As we come to rely more and more on web-based applications and services, we’ve all probably had an instance when our favorite experienced some sort of outage. While I think we are generally patient with brief hiccups and such, what would happen if a web service you relied on was down for 16 hours? How should the developers handle the situation?

In what has to be a developer’s worst nightmare, last week a “perfect storm” of events led to just that for task management service Toodledo. Thankfully, after what I am sure was a very long day for the Toodledo team, they were able to bring things back online and with no data loss.

As a user of Toodledo, I was impressed with the outstanding job they did not only recovering our data but for the way they communicated with us during what was really an unthinkable situation. Was it an inconvenience to be without the service? Absolutely it was. But in what really should be a case study in how to respond to such an experience, the folks at Toodledo provided frequent updates and explanations during the outage and a thorough debrief after the fact.

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Rumors of a Google Task Manager Application have been circulating for years. ZDNet speculated back in April of ‘06 and again in October ‘07, while we posted our own plea back in April.

The Googlers responded a couple weeks ago with their launch of a Gmail Labs Task Manager, and like any self respecting Google junkie I just had to give it a shot.

So let’s fast forward a couple of weeks and see how they did.

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Last week Mike shared some thoughts on some of the reasons he is thankful he is a Web Worker. With the announcement that popular apps I Want Sandy and Stikkit are to close, I thought I would take a moment to list the acknowledge the tools or services that I am most thankful for.

These aren’t the only ones I use, but they are the ones that make my Web Working experience the best it can be.

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Like many of us, I spend quite a lot of time on the web and come across a staggering number of interesting things. In Clearing The Cache I choose a theme, pull out some of my favorites and share them with you here.

Freelance Switch on Holding Yourself Accountable

Toodledo, the excellent To-Do list manager, releases their native iPhone app

The Execupundit gives us 10 Reasons Used to Sink Good Ideas

Mike’s excellent chat with Laura Fitton about To-Do list alternatives and how to Envision Your Week For Productivity

Nicholas Bate on 7 Things which (paradoxically) will lower your productivity. (via Cultural Offering)

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.

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We’ve talked about Site Specific Browsers like Bubbles in the past and while I have found them to be useful in some instances, it’s only with the proliferation of web applications with iPhone optimized interfaces that I have really started using them.

I have found that setting up multiple SSB windows ,each containing the iPhone view of a web application, allows me to create a dashboard of sorts on my spare monitor. At a glance, I can view my stable of important apps in nice compact, consistent windows.

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