Productive Organizer

Here is an interesting use case: Suppose you have a fixed set of table columns and rows that you want to appear at every print area. This is not the header section. How would you do it?

Apparently Work Your Office have the solution! How great is that! [Guide here]

I still have a love hate relationship with Evernote, mainly because I still have not really make sense of it yet.

But while I complain about it, what you like is to subscribe to a cloud app that is continuously value adding. And this update is rather small but provide something that many would appreciate.

I compose some of my notes on the go and before I actually save and upload the notes, I may stop halfway and get on the bus and my accidentally close the Evernote Android app.

This version of Android Evernote provide a feature to manually save when you are composing really lengthy note.

Small but really helpful.

Now if you were me, you will have this small problem of not liking to create playlists. Rather, the way I play music is to organize them into folders. I can always drag an updated folder in because most of my song folders are theme as

1. 01 Rock
2. 02 Chill
3. 03 Popular
4. 04 Podcasts

But somehow, perhaps influenced by iTunes not many Android music players are like that.

Enter MortPlayer [Android Market >>]. Here is a music player, that not ranked the highest but serve its needs.

Plays music by folders

Instead or artists, playlists, it enables you to scan available music folders. You can let MortPlayer to scan for you or choose a designated root folder.

Equalizer and Bass Boost

If you think this is just a lousy app that only plays via folders, think again. It comes with a range of audio enhancements. I love having an equalizer and bass boost settings.

Lock Screen Controls

Now this is something a lot of third party players do not have. My Samsung Galaxy S2 default player allows me to change track on lock screen, not many can.

MortPlayer allows you to do that! The image above shows a sliding door you can slide up when you are at your lockscreen. You can access most of what you need to do, change tracks, change folder, stop and play there.

When you click the notification bar it will launch a control pop up like this for fast control.

Conclusion

I am very happy using MortPlayer and have not found any faults yet. I hope you can give it a try.

Back some time ago, German based wunderkinder released a to do list app on the web, iphone, Android that took the task management community by storm.

What happens is that we have a to do list that

• looks beautiful and elegant
• works on the Mac, Web, Windows, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone
• simple tasking nothing complex

What I like about Wunderlist is that I do not have to worry about migrating to another platform. Based on my experience with WAToDo! is that if the to do list have a set of generic functionality and looks awesome, people will have time for it.

But what I do not like is that it is just too simple. As a GTD user, I can’t really do much with it.

It turns out that Wunderlist is a test platform for Wunderkinder to each critical mass, as well as to test their idea for the money making app that they intend to release.

What we do know that the open beta of their new task management app Wunderkit will be releasing in early February.

We were updated that they intend to release their web task management platform before releasing for other platforms.

How good do we think it will be?

For one thing it does look very awesome like Wunderlist. And it does have a social element to it. Lets see what we can derive from the very little released

1. Eventually it will be ubiquitous (on many platforms). This means that you can go ahead and buy another platform smartphone without worrying you cannot manage your tasks
2. A separation of notes and tasks seem to indicate that you can clip or take down notes in a manner not like most to do app. Perhaps rich text format?
3. Collaboration through social means. It would seem you can follow your friends or interesting people and build to do list together
4. Inbox concept
5. Priority through starring
6. Repeating and recurring tasks
7. Sub-tasking
8. Single level project

This looks really promising. However, I do see tagging missing. What would really complete it is a good search engine and tagging. I am sure then a lot of people will play around with it.

Advance to do folks like me would love it because we can tinker to match our work flow. As long as you provide

1. Task Description, Notes, Due Date, Status
2. Repeating or Recurring Tasks
3. Sub-tasking or parent child concept
4. Tagging
5. Extensible API
6. Ubiquitous

A lot of advance folks can make it work.

What would really break it for me

For me, Wunderkinder could succeed but could fail as well. They do have a lot of people to learn from

1. The pricing model needs to offer a good freenium that most users can use. Evernote took off in such a way because they went the alternative route to make their base app and smartphone app so usable you do not have to pay for it. Only people who are really attached to it will pay for it. True enough at the end a lot of people grew attached to it because it became their brain.
2. They need to make it a platform. They need to offer ways people can extend it.
3. A search engined and saved search looks very important the more I think about it. What made Evernote and Remember the milk great was the way search can be carried out and saved.
4. It needs to look great and simple for folks looking for a simple list.
5. The smartphone applications must be well invested. Meaning they shouldn’t suck! We have seen so many examples where the main app is great but the rest doesn’t add up. For example I don’t want to see a case where they offer subtasking but on the Android because of api limitation they cannot offer that. It’s a fail for me.
6. It needs adequate funding. Without knowing that this cloud is going to be around for some time not many will adopt it.

We certainly can keep our fingers cross. But personally I do not have high hopes for it.

I chanced upon this Stock Portfolio Manager project from a site that focus on DRIP investing.

I was pretty impress by it but found that it is not as suitable as my Free Stock Portfolio Tracking Google Spreadsheet. But nevertheless I thought that perhaps some folks would appreciate it.

Why need a tool like this

We talk about the importance of planning financially at different stage of your life so that you do not get to a state where you lose financial control (see Frugal Living)

One portion of the plan is to plan for your nested egg or having adequate money for retirement. Investing in stocks is one of the solutions.

There are many tools or websites that does this but not many focus on enabling you to key in transactions and different currencies.

The Use Case for Stock Portfolio Manager

1. A portfolio manager that works on different platforms
2. Able to let the user fill in his own stocks whether US or international based
3. Able to let the user update based on transactions (buy, sell or dvidends)
4. Able to provide graphing to let the users do a portfolio review

I thought this tool does a pretty competent job. What stopped me from exploring further is that there Is limited currency selection and that for transactions I believe there are more frequently encountered transactions other than buy,sell and dividends.

This application is free and if you are interested to try and see if it works for you, you can download it from here.

The topic that Productive Organizer talks about more so then others are task management. In fact I even have a whole set of tutorials to carry out task management the Getting Things Done way (see here)

The problem is that there isn’t much tutorial taught in school how to manage your to do list (amongst other things like finances and keeping healthy)

The Wall Street Journal have a great article today talking about why people don’t complete their tasks.

Among the different problems faced are such

• Kat Nagel, a technical-communications consultant in Rochester, N.Y., used to let her to-do list balloon to 14 pages and "it was never up-to-date," once causing her to miss a project deadline
• Kris Paige, a veterinary technician, used to keep her to-dos on sticky notes, "but the glue failed,"
• Kim Bauer’s long paper lists of all the tasks and goals she hopes to accomplish sometimes "get completely out of hand," says the Vancouver, Wash., writer

The problem with not managing well normally boils down to

1. You do not collect everything in your head outside. You don’t always have your list. When you want to write down you forgot them already
2. Your list is so jumble up that you do not know which one to do first
3. Your tasks are not well describe and are so big that you do not know how to start!
4. When you are at the place you want to do something you don’t have your list with you
5. Your tasks are too vague!
6. You don’t trust your list at all!

Why I advocate Getting Things Done is because I believe it address all these issues. It is not a fad but an education of how you can manage tasks and calendaring.

The smartphone and web is probably the best thing that happen to task management.You can now collect tasks wherever you are because you always have your cell phones (unless like me you work in a situation where you cannot bring camera devices haha)

Do read my Getting things Done Tutorial or To do list review on the side bar

There are more helpful thoughts from experts in the wall street article so do read it as well.

What is your greatest problem with task management?

The first item on a highly successful to-do list: Make a better to-do list.

With the new year comes the urge to accomplish all the things that were meant to be done the year before, and it often starts with long to-do lists. The lists themselves can fuel anxiety, says Sasha Cagen, an Oakland, Calif., life coach and author of a book on to-do lists. She sees many new clients at this time of year and often advises them to put more tasks on their list that they genuinely enjoy. Some 23% of list-makers spend more time making the lists than doing the tasks on them, according to a 2006 online survey of 600 people conducted by Ms. Cagen.

There are, of course, all kinds of ways to stay on top of tasks. Some people like the tactile experience of hand written to-do lists on paper, embellished with doodles or designs. Others think more clearly when they type, sort and store tasks in computers, tablets or smartphones, and they like the mobility of programs that update lists on all their devices.

Even with so many methods, it is still easy to muck up list making. Kat Nagel, a technical-communications consultant in Rochester, N.Y., used to let her to-do list balloon to 14 pages and "it was never up-to-date," once causing her to miss a project deadline. Ran Barton, an operations analyst in Wilmington, Del., wrote his to-dos on pieces of paper—which he sometimes lost.

Kris Paige, a veterinary technician, used to keep her to-dos on sticky notes, "but the glue failed," she says. She started writing up to 20 tasks on her bathroom mirror in dry-erase marker so she would be sure to see them, but the method sometimes caused embarrassment when she forgot to erase the list before visitors arrived. Using a digital app to enter tasks in her phone and computer reduced the mirror list to two items, says Ms. Paige, who owns a Livermore, Colo., llama ranch.

Kim Bauer’s long paper lists of all the tasks and goals she hopes to accomplish sometimes "get completely out of hand," says the Vancouver, Wash., writer. Rewriting and prioritizing them becomes an excuse to procrastinate. Now, she forces herself to condense them into a single, more realistic list, and it "makes me feel more organized."

A well-maintained list is "an essential tool for staying grounded, for saving your energy and for doing things rather than trying to remember what to do," says Julie Morgenstern, a New York author and expert on time management.

Effective to-do lists are limited to specific tasks that can be tackled right away and finished fairly soon, Ms. Morgenstern says. Instead of listing "solve client issue," write, "spend one hour defining the scope of client problem."

A list should reflect a time estimate needed for each task. And it should be integrated into a calendar or schedule, to avoid "planning 17 things for tomorrow which, if you added them up, are going to take 20 hours," Ms. Morgenstern says.

There are strategies for tackling dreaded tasks as well. Ms. Morgenstern tells of a computer consultant who was energized by appointments with clients, but stalled with administrative tasks like paying bills, writing proposals or planning strategy. She suggested he assign start and end times to mundane tasks as if they were appointments, and break them up with activities requiring contact with people. The new approach stopped his procrastinating.

To prevent getting mired in mindless make-work, some software helps people measure tasks against broad life goals. Ms. Nagel, the Rochester consultant, uses Life Balance by Llamagraphics. The software has her start with a master list of goals, such as doing fulfilling and financially rewarding work and volunteering for community causes. These are prioritized and broken into tasks, with details about the time and effort required and where and when they must be done.

Using this data, the app assigns eight to 12 items to Ms. Nagel’s to-do list. She hasn’t missed a deadline since she starting using the software, which has helped her shift plans to balance work demands, singing in a choir and volunteering at a food bank.

[Full article @ WSJ]

Use Case: Some portrait photos look great just like it is being drawn in pencil. How do you do that?

Here is a web application that enable you to put pencil filters and adjust the settings to create a great photo as if you have drawn it

[Go to use Picfull >>]

I never knew why would people want to turn off WIFI background scanning. To me it used to be that you can discover better WIIF connection and you never know when you will go into a local shopping mall and have to discover WIFI connection on the go.

The Benefits

so it turns out I discovered over from NirmalTV.com that there are benefits to optimizing your WIIF connection.

1. It improves latency time of wireless connections.
2. This reduces connection spikes

WLAN Optimizer Software

Here is an app for Windows PC call WLAN Optimizer that starts up everytime you starts in Windows and enable you to Disable background scan.

[Download WLAN Optimizer>>]

The year of 2011 created a poster child for gluten free and processed free food in the form of Novak Djokovic.

Since being discovered by his nutritionist that he is allergic to protein common in flour. Take that off and he starts killing Nadal and Federer. Just coincidence? Perhaps.

But it did raise awareness to a new form of eateries that focus on delivering gluten free food.

I have been off gluten, flour based food and processed food for about a year. Like Novak, I do lost much weight. But the question is what if the things that you lose are essentially bad for you or you do not need them. Isn’t that a good thing?

A lot of vegetarian takes wheat or flour based replacement in the form of mock meat. Some of them become vegetarian for religious purpose others for health.

My question is:What if gluten is really not good for humans. Would that make vegetarian diet less healthy?

The use case: You have 3G mobile data connection on your Windows Phone, how do you share this with your other device which are wifi enable?

MakeUseOf have revealed it is build into the Mango release of Windows Phone 7.5. Yet it was released with little fanfare.

1. Make sure that Data Connection and 3G Connection is enabled in Settings

2. Slide to enable Sharing and specify a name so that other devices can discover your phone’s connection.

3. Go to your device and find this SSID name, key in the password and you should be connected.