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10 Productivity Apps 2013

January 20, 2013 in apple, Productivity, tech by George | No comments

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about productivity tools. With all of the (continued) seismic changes in technology, it seems like a good time to update the list.

As always, my desire for tech is that it as transparent as possible so that productivity is accelerated.

To this end, here’s what I’m using:

1. I cannot stress enough that if you have a pre-Flash based MacBook, you should immediately, swap out your old Solid State hard disk for a Flash drive. It sounds hard, but it’s not, and this hack alone will boost your productivity by leaps and bounds. I detail the process here: Weekend Project: New Mac for ~$200 — Upgrade from HDD to SSD

2. Alfred. I still do miss my beloved Quicksilver, but it’s really gone unsupported in any meaningful way for so long now that (for me at least), it’s just not stable. Alfred fills the void nicely (if not freely when you add the sort-of-necessary Power Pack), and allows you to customize its functionality fairly well (the new Workflows in the Beta version show a lot of promise). Even if you don’t ever customize it to any degree, having an app launcher, calculator, iTunes controller, etc. all at your fingertips does save time.

3. 1Password. We’re bogged down with passwords. Wired recently ran a story about how we need to kill the password, and I couldn’t agree more. Until we get there, however, we’re stuck with the boogers. Therefore, having a great app that not only stores your passwords (across your devices), but also generates random passwords when you have to create new ones, comes in super handy. I use 1Password every day, and it saves me time and stress.

4. Google Drive. Sort of crazy to me that I have to even mention this, but I run into enough people who still aren’t familiar with how great and efficient this tool is that it merits inclusion. Google’s play at dethroning MSFT is at its most articulated in their apps. As companies move from an Outlook-based email solution to a Gmail solution, it stands to reason that the bloated, unreliable MSFT apps are next to fall, and the Google apps are ready to fill the void nicely. Combine the web-based Google apps with the Google drive on your phone/tablet, and you’re pretty well set in terms of content creation/sharing.

5. Speaking of content creation, as we move to more tablet-based content creation, having the right case/input method is crucial. As for me and my iPad, we’ll stick with the Touchtype iPad case (which I reviewed in detail for Paste) and an Apple bluetooth keyboard. Increasingly, I leave the laptop at home.

6. Cobook. With respect to software, Apple seems to be going the way of Microsoft. Apple’s Mail app sucks (replace it, of course, with gmail both on your desktop/laptop and your mobile devices), and so too does their Contacts/Address Book. Unusable, unreliable. Nightmare. Cobook is the first innovation in contacts since…ever. It pulls your social contacts in as well as your contacts from Google, Apple’s iCloud, etc. Their iPhone app is great, too.

7. Tweetbot. One of the biggest issues we face in a world of many screens is synchronization. Viewing Twitter on your home device, and then having to scroll through a bunch of tweets you’ve already seen when you check on your mobile device is a waste. Tweetbot, in addition to its many other great features, keeps your Twitter feed in synch irrespective of whatever screen you happen to be on at any given time.

8. Evernote. Everyone knows and loves Evernote, but it just gets better and better. You MUST install the Chrome Extension in order to really enjoy its full power. Clipping images, web articles, etc., pretty much eliminates the need for bookmarking. Of course, its mobile apps are killer too. Its Skitch integration was a bit rough at first, but the two now seem to play nicely, which makes grabbing and notating screen grabs (with Skitch) as easy as archiving them (with Evernote).

9. Reeder. I still enjoy RSS feeds, though, admittedly, my usage has gone down. In terms of best of breed, there’s no single choice for both laptop/desktop and mobile. While people love Flipbook, it’s never done it for me. On my iPad I use Mr. Reader, on my MacBook I use Reeder, and on my phone, I use the Google RSS reader. I’m hopeful that a more unified solution will emerge (Reeder does have mobile apps, but I haven’t felt compelled to switch). In the mean time, this solution works in so far as that – like Tweetbot – each does synchronize with your Google Reader streams, and therefore marks items as read universally.

10. Notational Velocity and Simplenote. Notational Velocity is, hands down, the simplest, fastest way to take quick notes, and keep them easily organized on the desktop/laptop. It synchs (relatively) seemlessly with the Simplenote app for mobile. I use them both multiple times a day.

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How to Change the Heading Styles in Google Docs

January 21, 2010 in tech by George | 6 comments

So I’m pretty close to never opening any Microsoft Office apps. I’ve moved completely from Entourage to Gmail and Gcal. All of my presentations are done in Google Presentation, the vast majority of my spreadsheets in Google Spreadsheet, and, naturally, my documents are written in Google Document.

With the awesome Manymoon providing a seamless layer of organization to all of these Google apps (as well as being a kick ass product management app), I really don’t miss MS Office at all.

Except for a few minor annoyances, there’s really no reason to open Office. One such annoyance was the inability to change the standard size, color and font choices for the Headings. This irked me, because the supplied heading qualities really look sort of terrible in the context of most docs; too big, too bold, too much deviation between the point sizes from Header 1 (VERY big) to Header 2, (not proportionally big), and so forth.

Here’s a screen grab of the standard headers:

As you can see, Header 4 – at 10pt type – is a smaller point size than typical 12 point body text type. This means it looks terrible.

Happily, Google recently made it easy to alter the CSS of the doc. Go to Edit > Edit CSS, and you’re greeted with a blank screen where you can add any CSS elements you want.

To change the Heading Styles, I added this:

h1
{ font-family: Calibri;
font-size: 16pt;
color: #336699; }

h2
{ font-family: Calibri;
font-size: 15pt;
color: #336699; }

h3
{ font-family: Calibri;
font-size: 14pt;
color: #336699; }

h4
{ font-family: Calibri;
font-size: 13pt;
color: #336699; }

Now the headers look like this:

It’s obviously very easy to change the elements for Headers (or anything else). Do note that all you’re doing is changing the CSS for the document you’re actively working on, and not globally. I have a feeling that option will show up soon.

Another steak in the heart of MSFT.

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George’s Law of the Negative Correlation between Features and Customer Satisfaction

August 21, 2008 in innovation by George | 5 comments

My post on the Coder/Manager dilemma got me thinking about the unintended consequences of feature additions to products (specifically web-based, but not exclusively). I’ve come up with a theorem that is very much a work in progress.

I hereby thus propose “George’s Law of the Inverse Relationship between Features and User Friendliness.” For every added feature above base functionality, user friendliness is reduced by .075 of the existent base unit total for user friendliness.

Let U = user-friendliness. Let F = features.

So, if we assume (for easy math), a base of 10; that is, you have a site/UI where the features (F) = 10 and the user friendliness (U) = 10, and you add a new feature, your features = 11, but your user friendliness = 9.25; another feature added: F = 12; U = 8.55. And so on.

Don’t get me wrong, new features are crucial, and can increase user friendliness, but only if the new feature(s) replace(s) an older feature. In this manner, your feature list doesn’t grow, and thus your user friendliness is not reduced.

The best example I can give of this doesn’t come from the web world. Rather, it’s the Flip Video Camera.

This camera strips away all the features that 99.9% of the video camera owners never use anyway, and takes a dead-simple approach. Customers love it. The NYT calls it “One of the most significant electronic products of the year.” It’s wildly successful. It succeeded because it focused on what the customers really wanted/needed, and worked to give those features to them in the best way possible. Axiomatically, the only way you can give these customers their most cared-about features in the best way possible is to eliminate ALL of the features they don’t care about. Flip’s challenge moving forward is to innovate, and, yes, add features without screwing up what makes their offering so great. This will mean not only adding features, but also subtracting older ones that are no longer relevant.

Want a web example?

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Arrington tells it like is

June 22, 2008 in entrepreneurship, tech by George | No comments

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington discusses and disses on Yahoo/Google:

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Google Tech Talk: Quicksilver

September 6, 2007 in Productivity by George | No comments

Nicholas Jitkoff, The developer of my all-time favorite app, Quicksilver, works at Google (big surprise, huh). He offers up a good introduction on QS in this Tech Talk.

Check it out:

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