Getting things done is a rage these days. I’ve been a long standing fan of Remember the Milk for managing my day to day activities. Recently I heard about Fruitful Time Manager and decided to try it out..

I’ve been using it for the past couple of days and suffice to say I’ve been more than impressed by it.. The most important thing is obviously the fact being a desktop software it is always there for you, but that itself is its biggest advantage for people always on the move and that’s where Remember the Milk tops Fruitful Time.

Nevertheless Fruitful is a beautiful piece of software and should be of great use to freelancers and other web workers working from home. Here’s a screenshot of Fruitful in action..

Here’s a rundown through its features :

• Manage your to do list easily and quickly.
• Create / edit / delete tasks.
• Tasks can be split into smaller manageable subtasks like paying telephone bill can be split to paying landline bill and paying mobile phone bill.
• Monitor the progress on each task / subtask.
• Assigning tasks to different contacts.
• Set the priority for each task.
• Set up reminders for tasks
• Assign tags to tasks
• Password protect your tasks such that only you will be able to edit and view it.
• Carry your task list with you anywhere if you install FruitfulTime TaskManager on a USB pen drive.

The absence of online access is more or less compensated by the ability to carry your task list on a USB pen drive, but still the online addition would have been really useful..

Here are a few screenshots of FruitfulTime in action. The Screenshots alone show the raw power of the software.. (Click on them for bigger versions)

FruitfulTime Task Manager is a good desktop solution to manage tasks, organise your life and increase your productivity. FruitfulTime Task Manager is currently available for Windows 2000, XP and Vista and requires Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0.

FruitfulTime Task Manager comes in two flavors :

• Version 1.0- Free for Home and Non-Commercial Use- Download Free Version
• Version 2.0- Improved features than 1.0 , Price $29.99- Download Trial Version

Which apps do you all use to enhance your productivity ?

Adobe continues to tread the path of online services with its latest offering Acrobat.com. With the launch of the online tools, Adobe also launched a tightly integrated version of Adobe Reader 9.0 that works seamlessly with the internet. With the latest offering, I feel Adobe is taking small but significant steps in the online office arena.

Weather or not it can defeat Google, Microsoft in this threeway fight is the big question?

Well Acrobat.com is a mini portal of sorts. It is the combination of their online meetings tool – Adobe Brio, online Word Processor – Adobe Buzzword and online file sharing – Adobe Share. Most importantly Adobe Acrobat 9 now comes with Flash built into the PDF experience.

I’ve been playing around with Acrobat.com for the past couple of hours, so here are personal opinions on each of the offerings…

• Adobe Buzzword

Adobe Buzzword is the word processor of this suite. What strikes most about Buzzword is its lovely gorgeous UI, that just oozes beauty into the experience in using it. Adobe has made the interface so striking that, whether you have a small screen or a big cinema display, the UI is equally friendly.

Well accomplished Adobe on this one!! Also Buzzword is the only Online Word Processor at the moment that supports the Office 2007 file format (.docx) which is an added bonus.

There are other features as well, small but really useful like commenting, pagination among many more. Overall I feel that Buzzword is the most complete product of the suite.

My Gripes about Buzzword,

• Lack of search feature, makes life difficult if you plan to use Buzzword regularly.
• A nifty file preview feature allows you to preview office files in the browser, but the only problem is that everything is rendered in flash, meaning you cannot copy paste or manipulate the text in any way.

• Adobe Connect

Acrobat.com has Connect which is probably the thinned down version of Acrobat Connect codenamed Brio. You can have online meetings with 3 people for free with screen sharing, desktop video, video conferencing, chat etc.

Being platform neutral it works amazingly well on both OSX and Windows.

• Adobe Share

As the name says Adobe Share allows you to share files with others over the internet. Just like any other file sharing platform, Adobe Share allows you to share large files instead of emailing them. You get full control over your documents like deciding who gets to see the file, and what kind of rights they have on the document in question.

The handy document viewer allows to preview PDF files and image files without needing to open the required desktop application. Neat eh!@!

With all said, Adobe has done a brilliant job for Acrobat.com. Its been quite some time since I last saw a web app that was so functional and beautiful at launch. There are some features they need to work on, and here are a few of my suggestions for the Adobe team, I hope they are listening..

• Remove the limit on PDF conversions from 5. Make it unlimited, since all the competitors like Google, Zoho allow unlimited conversions.
• Add Mobile sharing features. Since Flash doesn’t work well with most mobile phones a stand alone HTML version of the site will be useful for mobile users.
• Add Search features both within the documents and throughout the interface to locate a particular file.
• Add support for some kind of content organization like tagging, labels etc..

Having said that, Adobe has done a brilliant job with Acrobat.com, and I believe it is going to be a serious competition to Google, Zoho etc…

Let us know what you feel about Adobe’s latest offerings in the comments…

Everyday I get emails from small startups asking me how to manage time and reduce their expenses. Well I’m not into this startup thingy but I thought I’d do these guys a favor, so I went hunting for the best free time tracking software and stumbled upon actiTIME.

In a nutshell actiTIME is basically :

“A clear and simple way to register time expenses, analyze employee performance, prepare timesheets for billing your customers”

I’ve tried out the demo and the web based app is highly functional and easy to use. You can collect timesheets by customers, projects and tasks. With awesome reporting capabilities and one of the best exporting options actiTIME is a must have tool for startups that are just starting out..

Have a look at this diagram that better illustrates the way actiTIME works..

Here’s a rundown into its features :

• Time expenses are recorded on by-customer and by-project basis
• Overtime and undertime calculations and reports
• Co-workers can share information using daily task comments
• Support of billable and non-billable task statuses
• Explicit reports for billing and management purposes
• Individual access rights management
• Entering/Modifying the time-track of other users
• Integration with Intuit QuickBooks®
• Data export in the CSV format

Because actiTIME doesn’t lock you in with the data like many other apps in this category do, it is championing the cause of Data Portability albeit in a different sense. Features like Quickbooks Integration are killer, since it is one of the most popular accounting softwares used worldwide.

I won’t go into the details into how this works, just head over to the actiTIME website and experience the demo to see it for yourself..

Considering that all this comes at the best price in the world, FREE! actiTIME is a must have tool for young startups that are still learning the tricks

Download actiTIME | View the Online Presentation on How actiTIME works

Imagine how nice it would be if you could launch your favorite application by just clicking the middle mouse button. Well today am going to show you a simple hack that allows you to launch your favorite application at the click of a button.

Before you begin, download and install WinFlog eXtreme on your Windows Vista PC. Once you are done with the installation, have a look around at the app, I’m sure you will find some interesting tweaks. But that is not what we are looking for at the moment, so read on to find out how you can launch your favorite app by just clicking the middle mouse button.

Follow the steps below to launch your favorite app at the click of a button.

• Open WinFlog eXtreme and click the first option (Turn ON Flip3d after the Middle Mouse button / Scroll wheel is Clicked)
• Press Windows Key+R to open the Run Dialog box.
• Press “regedit” in the dialog box and press enter.
• Browse the path below:

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\UnlockForUs\WinFlog

• You will notice the DWORD value: “Mode” is set to 0
• Double click and change it to 2
• Right-Click any blank space > NEW > String Value >> Enter “Mode2App”
• Double click >> Enter the application path:

  Example: C:\Program Files\Winamp\winamp.exe

• To tune the sensitivity (default=300), Change the value of “TrInterval”. It is measured in milliseconds.

Well that is it. Now whenever you click the Middle Mouse Button, Winamp launches for you. How Sweet! Couldn’t be easier than this right?

Via Unlock For Us

I’ve been a long time of Launchy, a app that happens to be just everyone’s favorite application launcher. I decided to uninstall Launchy and give a try to Enso, about which I’ve heard great things. I was reluctant at first, but after about three days of using this, I have to say that I’m completely blown away by it.

First I started off with a look at their Video Demo, which I strongly suggest you have a look at. Impressed after having a look at the video I started to use it, and everytime I used it, I was more and more falling in love with it. I started off with Enso Launcher, and I’m now using the Media controller as well to remote control my Zune Media Player. There are more tools like Spell Checker, Translation Tool and many more..

Using Enso, is a breeze, and the developers seem to have worked very hard with regards to its UI and ease of use. Just Hold the Caps Lock key down and type in the command, and you will begin to see all possible variations of the command in a super sexy looking green modal window. Enso also has a very robust help system, that you can always look upto inorder to get used to Enso. To see a list of supported commands type “command list” while holding down the Caps Lock key.

While Enso can be configured to act like other Application Launchers, I prefer its default settings the most, because they work out the best for me. But you can always change the preferences according to your comfort.

Enso Launcher is really very smart, it allows you to minimize and maximize windows, switch between running programs, shuffle between tabs in a browser and obviously open and close applications in a few seconds. The UI of Enso is too good, and its a pleasure to use. The big font doesn’t strain your eyes and it looks good too. Here are some screenshots of Enso in action.

Overall I’ve been totally impressed with Enso, and I’m looking forward to more productivity boosters from Humanized in the future. Give a try to Enso, and tell me what you feel about it. On a side note, I’ve dumped Launchy for the time being, and I wont be using it anytime soon.

Enso Homepage

Remember the Milk, one of the best Online Task management services is now fully integrated into GMail. The Integration of RTM into GMail is so good that you’ll never again need to visit RTM again. Email integration of this kind is always welcome, because I can do everything from Emails, to planning my tasks, and just about everything from a single interface. On a side note Remember the Milk integrates pretty well into other Google Services like Google Calendar, and Offline support via Google Gears. For other forms of integration that RTM offers, have a look at their services page.

Coming back to the GMail integration here’s what the guys over at RTM had to say about the GMail Integration :

Remember The Milk for Gmail is a Firefox extension that allows you to manage your tasks in Gmail (complete, postpone, and edit tasks), add new tasks (and connect them with your emails, contacts, and Google Calendar events), automatically add tasks for starred messages or specific labels, and much more!

Here are some screenshots of RTM fully integrated with GMail, I have to say it does really look uber cool!!

For more features check out the video of the RTM’s integration with GMail over here. Now that RTM is available on your GMail, and so are your AIM buddies, it sure does reduce the need for you to go on to other services, when everything is available through a single unified interface of GMail. Isn’t it?

Install RTM for GMail from here

The Saddest thing is that Windows doesn’t have an Undo key, so some smart developers, gave it that functionality in the form of this tiny app called GoneIn60s. 

What GoneIn60s actually does is to delay the shutdown of your applications. When you hit the close button, the application is hidden in the taskbar, and it actually won’t close for another 60 seconds. You can adjust that time if you wish to, but the name of the program is too good for the time, isn’t it?

So say you close your web browser when you actually meant to close that Winamp eating up your resources. You now have just 60 seconds to look for the lightning arrow icon in your taskbar, right-click it, and select your closed browser session and voila! it will pop right back up in which ever state you left it in. Now how cool is that?

If there are some programs that you’d prefer to shut down immediately, you can then create a whitelist of softwares to close immediately every time. GoneIn60s is tiny at just 205KB, and it’s free to download and use.

Download GoneIn60s. Via Lifehacker.

There exists a fundamental flaw in the way online Office Systems work, and that is the requirement of a Internet connection to use the online Office Suite. With the absence of Internet connection you just can’t create documents and edit, but that is all set to change with Zoho’s announcement of the addition of Offline Feature into Zoho Office Suite.

To use Zoho Writer in offline mode, just install Google Gears and restart your web browser. Then login to your Zoho account and click the link at the top that says “Go Offline.”

Google Gears browser extension is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Once you click the Go Offline link in Zoho, your browser will download all the documents you have saved on Zoho for offline editing. You can also create new documents, presentations, spreadsheets while you are offline. Once you are done with all the editing of documents, just click the Go Online button and everything will be synced back to your online Zoho document.

The offline mode in Zoho Office will prove very useful in places where Wi-Fi is expensive like in the hotel rooms or the airport lounge – just connect to the internet, download the documents locally and then go offline to edit your documents on Zoho Office.

I am sure this killer feature of Zoho is going to give some tough competition to the recently launched Live Documents founded by Sabeer Bhatia of the Hotmail fame and of course Google’s own Google Docs.

I am sure, Google is working on something similar, but I don’t know when exactly Google Docs will get the Offline Capabilities.

 FlyGesture is activated like Exposé or Dashboard, bringing up a transparent window of “guides” to move your mouse through. Moving your mouse through the guides lets FlyGesture know what action or actions you want to be performed, such as closing a window or opening an application.

FlyGesture isn’t a one trick pony. In addition to actions like “Open Application”, FlyGesture also comes with actions to type text, call command keys, open files or folders, open websites, run Automator workflows, run custom AppleScript, and various other commands.

Here are some screenshots of FlyGestures in action :

So if you are impressed by FlygGesture, then go ahead and download it. Its Free!

Notesake is the easiest way that I have seen to take notes. Its elegant and eye catching interface is a sucker and it pulls you into it. NoteSake allows you to take your class notes completely online, enabling you to access them from any computer, at any time.

With some social features built in like Groups, Tagging etc.. Notesake is a must kitty for any serious college student. Ever Since I found Notesake I have been using it, and it is the place where I draft all my posts simply because of its powerful editor.

With NoteSake, you can take your notes during class, share them with a friend, or groups can work together on the same note, all through your laptop. As soon as you have registered, you will be ready to take notes which can then be searched, printed, and organized at your convenience. It’s easy. It’s helpful. It’s free.

Here are some screenshots taken from the Inner workings of Notesake :

Go ahead and complete this amazing tour of Notesake and I am sure at the end of it you’ll definitely fall in love with it, and I am sure you will use it daily from now on.