projectmanager
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Weave from Intuit is a free and powerful project tracker
Weave is a simple iPhone app (free) for managing those personal and business projects all in one place. It's kind of a super to-do list, and while there are plenty of those on offer both free and paid in the App Store, there is plenty to like about Weave. The app is from Intuit, the company that makes Quickbooks and Quicken as well as other financial apps. Those folks know their way around money and time. Weave can be used for around the home projects and chores. You can share projects with other people through Facebook. You can also track money spent or collected on projects, and prioritize projects so for easy management. The app can also be used to help run your small business. %Gallery-172250% A few features require an account, but that's a no-charge option. The account lets you assign projects or chores to others, share progress and it lets you back up your data in the cloud. If you want to just run the app for yourself, no account is needed. When you first start the app you get a quick tutorial, but really it's pretty simple. If there is any weakness to Weave, it is that I couldn't find any way to allow recurring projects or events. I have a lot of deadlines, and many are regular. With Weave, I have to enter them each time which seems an undue burden. For those events, I default back to the Apple Calendar, but it has no integration with Weave. I'm hoping a future update will fix this issue. Weave is very clever, exceedingly easy to use and worth your attention. The app can increase your productivity without burying you in complexity. Weave is iPhone-only at this point, and is optimized for the iPhone 5. It requires iOS 4.3 or greater.
Daily iPad app: Projectbook
Projectbook is an interesting take on a notebook/diary/todo/task manager for the iPad. It is project oriented, so it's useful for something like building a toolshed, setting up a company meeting or lots of daily tasks. It allows you to have all your notes, photos, audio and documents in one place. New entries are indexed and tagged. Web pages, documents and other items that are external can be 'emailed' to Projectbook. More about that later. The app accepts files from Dropbox and Instapaper, and lets you set up reminders or repeating events. You can write in formatted text, with styles like underlining supported. There are extensive sorting options, and the ability to share files as PDF, HTML or plain text. The workflow needs a little getting accustomed to, but help is extensive, both online and built in. The built-in help could be improved, however. It is several pages long and you can't exit until you reach the end, which is a bit of a pain. Searches are quick, and unless you are exporting or importing, you need not be online to use the app. It's perfect for an airplane trip or places where network connectivity is not available. %Gallery-161660% I especially like the ability to annotate photos or diagrams, and to write a note in freehand and include it in the project store. One thing I don't like is the requirement to set up a dedicated email account for this app. I understand the need to do this, so the only emailed material that comes in is data for this app, but it seems it should be a service provided by the app developers, not something you have to do yourself. The email requirement is for an IMAP account, and of course free ones are available through AOL and others. I just think this is the sort of thing that should be integrated into the app. Having said that, Projectbook is very clever, somewhere between a to-do app and a full and more complex project management app. I like its ability to group many media types together, and to add notes or diagrams to existing files. The app is on sale for a limited time at US $1.99 and then will jump back to $6.99 on August 15. I started a project using it, and found the process intuitive and logical. Finding things is easy and very fast. If you have a need to work on and keep track of a project while mobile, Projectbook is worthy of your serious consideration. I'd like to see a Mac app that syncs so I can have all my data everywhere. The company is hinting that other versions for computers and mobile phones are in the works. With that kind of ecosystem, Projectbook should do very well. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
How an AT&T smartphone comes to life: behind the scenes (part one)
Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes to get a smartphone pushed to market? If you have, congratulations on advancing to the next echelon of mobile geekhood. We've often pondered the same thing ourselves, but the industry has been historically tight-lipped about the ins and outs of designing, testing and launching a smartphone. Fortunately, our thirst for knowledge was quenched by none other than AT&T, which happily loaned us the time of two senior product managers, the folks that make the magic happen. AT&T Foundry innovation center walkthrough On the ground with AT&T's Network Disaster Recovery team Verizon Application Innovation Center walkthrough Dante and Chris (last names withheld, per request) have the ultimate geek dream job: they don't just play with the latest prototypes, they're the ones who make sure they get made. Pretty plush gig, right? They're the ringleaders -- the decision makers responsible for making AT&T's smartphone lineup come to life, and their duty is to do it in a way that keeps the carrier at the front lines of innovation. So what drives these two men? What goes into their thought process, and what exactly happens behind locked doors in order to produce a groundbreaking smartphone? Join us in this two-part series as we learn some of their secrets.
In search of a GTD solution
An application called Today was released recently by the developers of PocketTweets. It's a $15 application that integrates with iCal to display tasks and events, offering a complete interface for entering new tasks and events without opening iCal. It came at a time when I was furiously trying to make a homebrew task management system come to fruition using iCal and Mail, but ultimately left me in a not-much-better place than I started. I appreciate the simplicity of the app, but it doesn't provide much power beyond just using iCal to begin with. Anxiety, which is free (and features a HUD interface which somehow always earns points in my book), provides similar integration -- at least for tasks -- as do several other great little applications. But none of them allow for the task sorting, flagging, etc. that would make them truly useful to me. So I tried to make my own way...
