Productivity Safari, or the hunt for the perfect app combo

So I’ll just come out and say it: ‚ÄúI’m a app-oholic.‚Äù

I constantly am trying out new applications, which has if anything gotten worse in this web 2.0 world of web apps. Usually, I have a goal in mind of finding a better way of doing what I already do in some other application, but other times I’m just doing it for the geeky thrill.

Lately, my app hunt has been mostly centered around improving my web development environment, streamlining my blogging experience, and enhancing my productivity. The latter being the most ironic as I waste tons of time in the process.

Recently, I posted about the great little web app Todoist which I was using for this purpose. I have since abandoned that app for several reasons. Don’t get me wrong it’s a clean and fabulous tool, but it required yet another browser tab open, and most of all it just got intimidating to look at the more I added to do items.

Did Done List

To fix all this I’m taking a tip from a post off of lifehacker, Improve your productivity with a ‚Äúdid-do‚Äùlist except I’m calling mine a ‚Äúdid done‚Äù list cause I think it sounds better and frankly just to be different. Of course, I still need to keep a running to do list or else I’d forget all the stuff I need to do, but now I only need to visit that occasionally. This way the thing I normally see is the stuff I’ve happily accomplished rather than the dreaded pile of stuff still yet on the horizon.

All of this is now just living off of my wiki that I set up for our household which makes it extensible, easy to use, and best of all mine‚Äînothing like a sense of ownership to increase task stickiness. By the way, setting up the wiki was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s sooooo amazingly useful.

Successful hunting in app-land

I’m posting this from Ecto which so far is an excellent blog posting app. I had to make a couple tweaks to get it to work properly: 1) It doesn’t play nice with wordpress 2.1 but luckily someone figured out a fix for that. 2) I use Ultimate Tag Warrior and I needed an additional plugin to get ecto to play nicely with tags.

Speaking of cool apps, Coda. the all-in-one webdev app from Panic, looks incredible! I haven’t had a chance to play with the demo yet but wow‚Äîwish it came for the PC. I use Topstyle on my windows laptop at work, which is decent, but it’s a bit clunky as most windows apps are, and it has no internal FTP. Arg!