Posts Tagged
productivity
So, first off, a little about me: I live in the UK, I’m from Guildford in Surrey, and currently live near Liverpool with my wife and one and a half year old son, both of whom are amazing. I work in Chester as a Web Developer, which is great fun, challenging and rewarding. For those of you who are interested my language of choice is C# and I do a lot of SQL and ASP.NET.
My commute is an hour and a half each way and I get most of my writing done on the train, so as to not miss out on time with the family. I have recently bought a Samsung Series 9 laptop which is an awesome bit of kit and allows me to work on the train without having to carry a heavy laptop around. Due to using a laptop a lot of the time, and being a developer at work, I love keyboard shortcuts over mouse use as I find it faster, especially when I’m on the laptop.
You’d think it would be easy to make a good to-do app for a platform. After all, paper and pencil have been doing the job for years on end already, haven’t they? Still, it’s proven to be surprisingly hard to find a simple, functional to-do list app for Windows 8. Like Goldilocks, they’re either too clunky to use, too chock-full of features, or too sparse.
My gold standard, as with most PIM apps, is the Tasks app for Palm OS. Though it’s over a decade old, the Palm OS got a lot of things right. The right balance of simple with being full-featured enough to use daily is a terribly hard balance to strike. Minimalist for Windows 8 gets a lot of the balancing right, though.
My name is Sydney and I’m an AppStorm writer, a freelance web designer, a beagle mom and a software enthusiast. I’m flexible when it comes to operating systems. My current setup is a Windows 8 desktop PC, a 13″ MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion, a jailbroken iPhone 4 and a decked out installation of Chrome synced between my computers. I spend a lot of time in my browser and I’m a huge fan of text expansion and shortcuts.
These are the apps that I couldn’t write without.
The good folks here at AppStorm thought it may be of interest to take a look at how each of us works on a daily basis and now it is my turn to provide a bit of insight into what I use on a daily basis. Of course, being a freelance writer means I am not a normal use-case scenario as far a computer users goes, but perhaps some of you will find a few interesting things here that you can use in your everyday life.
The 6 Wunderkinder team are an interesting lot. They seem to me kind of like the A-Team of developers; members plucked from all around the world, stuffed together with the aim of creating something new, something shiny. What did they start with? The To-do list.
..and to be honest, their first shot was pretty good.
Your system is running slow again. Starting up your computer is excruciatingly painful. In fact, it’s gotten to the point that you don’t shut it down for days just to avoid waiting for it to start up. You haven’t cleaned up your registry in a while. You haven’t even cleared out your browsing history since you bought the machine.. You know you need to fix it, but there’s so many problems you don’t even know where to start. Well Wise Care 365 might be for you, because it’ll do everything in one place.
This all-in-one system cleaner can help speed up your computer and clean up your files, leaving you with a fresher and cleaner experience. Read more for the full review and usage walk through.
I love calendars. And when I say I love calendars, I mean I LOVE them. If there is a calendar app for a platform I use, I have used that app. One of my favorite calendar programs happens to be a desktop app for Windows called VueMinder. I used the free trial last fall and quickly fell in love with VueMinder and bought a Pro license.
VueMinder boasts itself as “the best calendar program for Windows” and I tend to agree. Let’s find out what sets VueMinder apart from other calendar apps.
Billing by the hour can be both a blessing and a curse for freelancers and contractors. Although not so common in publishing professions such as web development and consulting live and breath this method.
Long term contracts in particular where the freelancer is basically an employee prefer hour-by-hour billing. There’s many different programs to keep track of the time. The most basic offer little more than a jazzed up calendar while other go the whole hog with automatic tracking and analytics.
Time Cockpit offers individual users and teams a middle-of-the-road solution with their new combination of desktop app and web portal. Let’s check it out.
If you want to write any kind of novel — a literary masterpiece, a potboiler, or even fan fiction — you’ll need all the help that you can get. Applications that have been specifically designed for writing novels exist to make writing them easier.
One such application that has gained prominence on the Macintosh is Scrivener, by Literature and Latte. Scrivener has ported their flagship product to Microsoft Windows.
If there is anything like an addiction to taking notes, I’m right up there in the list of addicts. There are at least 10 different things I regularly use to jot down everything from names & phone numbers to quick snippets to file later, to todo lists and all sorts of random thoughts. Although I’ve been using the good old pen-and-paper to do this for years now, it has always fallen short of what the my ideal workflow should have been. As has become a yearly ritual now, I recently embarked on a hunt for the best minimalistic note taking app that does everything I need and fits perfectly in my workflow.
It’s probably no surprise that the stock Notepad app in Windows falls awefully short of my expectations. There are the high-profile alternatives like OneNote and Evernote, but they are better suited for longer term, heavier duty knowledge archival than for quick and dirty note-taking. I needed something that was lightening fast and has just the right mix of features to allow me to jump in and out of it at the spur of the moment. What followed was a battle of five free Windows apps that came closest to what I was looking for, with a winner that I am committed to skicking with for at least the next year.
