1FPS|by David Chartier

ReadWriteWeb quotes Karim, one of its own commenters, who was responding to a pro-Google Docs piece on the site a few days ago. Setting aside the fact that the public barely knows about online office suites in general, there are just too damn many great quotes in here about the significant functionality problems that plague Web 2.0 apps, such as:

Open a Google doc. Paste an image. Oh, that’s right, you can’t Ctrl-C copy, Ctrl-V PASTE an image into a document. Ok, so INSERT an image. Now proportionally resize the image so it retains its aspect ratio. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. Now crop the image. Oh that’s right, you can’t.

and

Now type some text and select it. Choose one of the fonts on your computer instead of the six fonts Google licensed from Microsoft. Oh wait, you can’t. Create a new paragraph style. Oh wait, you can’t. Change the font color and background on some text. Now copy that formatting to another paragraph. Oh wait, you can’t.

and

People just love to use software where some incredibly basic feature like “search & replace” is marked with “WARNING! EXPERIMENTAL! Use eye protection! This could blow up in your face!”

and

Finally you tell us that “Google will win this battle” is because “they have the economic engine,” meaning, they have advertising in all their stuff. Yay capitalism. I know the last six times I used a word processor, I kept thinking it needed more advertising.

I know I quoted about half the entire comment, but head over and read the rest; it’s all good stuff. Karim’s right: Google Docs and similar offerings can certainly do the trick for people who need some of the absolute basic office features. But they consistently fall short when you get to the rest of the basic features, never mind anything even marginally more powerful that most of the real world uses.

Considering all this, and being the fan of desktop software’s power and integration, I see a lot more potential in services like Microsoft’s new private beta Office Live Workspace which I wrote about for Ars back in December. It’s more of an online conduit for sharing files and offline collaboration; there’s no web-based editing right now, though limited features are on their way. Never mind the fact that Office is one of Microsoft’s largest revenue generating products‚ÄîOffice Live Workspace provides an easy way for home and small business users to share and collaborate on documents, yet still harness the vast power of the desktop Office suite.

Sure, some day we’ll all have flying cars, ubiquitous, terabyte Internet connections, and web apps with all sorts of super powers. Until then, and web apps for making lists of things to get done notwithstanding, desktop software is where the real power for getting things done lies.

A simple Menu Bar app that displays events from Google Calendar. I like that it offers a full month view with highlighted days that contain any events. The events list at the bottom of the calendar is also a nice touch, and the UI is very customizable to add things like a second month.

I think this is a great utility for Google Calendar users, but note that I split my event and task duties between iCal and Remember the Milk. I then use Spanning Sync to keep iCal and Google Calendar synchronized as a sort of backup solution should I ever lose my iPhone or otherwise lose access to an iCal-friendly device.

TinyCal is $10 and requires Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or greater.

Remember The Milk (RTM), my favorite task management app with a ton of integration, now ties incredibly well into Gmail. Via a Firefox extension, a new customizable Tasks panel can be displayed next to messages. Every aspect of tasks can be edited (time estimates, due dates, tags, location, etc.), and RTM tasks can be tied not only to Gmail messages but Calendar events and even contacts as well. This is really, really impressive. You have to check out the post for yourself to see how good of a job the team did here with a half-supported Gmail API.

Now I’m primarily a Safari man myself, but I typically have to have Firefox running for a variety of reasons such as working in the Ars CMS. I’ve resisted temptation from other extensions to use Firefox a lot more, perhaps even as my primary browser, but this is the first one that’s getting me to seriously think about it. Remember The Milk and its plethora of useful task features and integration has literally changed the way I work and get things done in the rest of my life. Bringing Gmail and RTM together like this is really exciting. I can’t wait to give this a thorough run-through later today.

read more | digg story

If you’ve been following my Twitter account for the last few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that I have a new love in my life. I haven’t figured out how to tell my wife yet, but I’m sure she won’t mind. In fact, she’ll probably be pretty happy to hear about my new affair: the web-based task management app Remember The Milk (RtM). With a slick UI and a healthy dose of flexible tools that can fit into just about any workflow, RtM is one of those apps that finally *clicked* with me, allowing my work and life to get a whole lot more productive.

With all the goodies available for RtM though, I figured I’d highlight a few of my favorites that I’ve settled on so far; the ones that really go with my flow. You can of course check out the full roster of RtM’s Services yourself, but here’s my spin on the most useful ones based on the way I live and work.

1) Twitter integration

I know this is going to sound weird, but I have to say that RtM’s Twitter integration is by far one of the most useful tools in RtM’s lineup. Debates aside about whether Twitter can be a time saver or a time sink, I always have some kind of a Twitter client nearby, whether it’s Twitterrific on my Mac, a Twitter web client on my iPhone or at least a Twitter SMS in my iPhone’s conversation list. With RtM’s ability to use plain language for creating tasks (such as: “Dinner with Jessi Friday 6 pm”), sending a direct message to RtM’s Twitter account is about the fastest way for me to fire off a task idea. It sure beats the hell out of tabbing and mousing through iCal’s clunky editor, and it makes me feel better about using Twitter so much since I’m actually getting something done by creating tasks this way.

2) Remember The Milk’s iPhone app

Introduced mere days after I began digging into everything Remember The Milk can do, I use the iPhone app more as a birds-eye view of what I need to get done for the day or week (and yes, by “iPhone app”, it necessarily works just as well with the iPod touch). iPhone web apps are pretty impressive and all, but tapping through a number of screens and waiting for refreshes just to create a task or two feels more clunky than productive at most times to me. To its credit though, the RtM iPhone app is one of the fastest I’ve seen over EDGE yet and really is pretty usable, for what it’s worth (and it flies over Wi-Fi). I do find myself using it to add tasks from time to time; it simply isn’t the main way I jot tasks down.

Still, the RtM iPhone app is a great way to look at a list of things that need to be done while on the go, like groceries or a few errands. Note, however, that the iPhone app is only accessible to Remember The Milk Pro accounts, which costs a mere $25/year. I dropped for one of these accounts roughly 5 minutes after taking the iPhone app for a spin. Other Pro-only features right now are priority e-mail support and a Windows Mobile client (c’mooon iPhone SDK!), though the company is slowly rolling out more Pro features in the coming months.

3) Firefox add-on: Delegate to Remember The Milk for Gmail

This one isn’t officially listed in RtM’s Services directory, but that doesn’t make it rock any less. The Delegate to Remember The Milk Firefox add-on adds a new button to the bottom of Gmail (the old version; this doesn’t work with the new Gmail, yet) which allows you to quickly create a new task from the current message. The beauty here is that this add-on utilizes Remember The Milk’s email-to-task feature and its extensive support for adding task metadata.

On each line of the task that you e-mail RtM, you can include things like L: Personal to immediately add the task to your Personal list (instead of just dumping into the Inbox), Priority, Location, tags, and it even includes a link back to the original Gmail message you can click from within RtM. The add-on allows you to set up a series of defaults for much of this information, but it still generates a new Gmail message which you can tweak before sending off.

If you’re like me and you store things to do in a task list instead of events placed on a calendar, this is a great way to combine Gmail with a task management system instead of trying to work something out with Gmail’s built-in Google Calendar support (which isn’t very reliable because it only kicks in when Gmail sniffs out event-worthy info in an e-mail).

4) Netvibes module

While customizable “startpages” like iGoogle seem to be a dime a dozen these days, Netvibes has always struck me as one of the leaders. I think it debuted right around the time “startpage” gained new meaning with the rise of web 2.0, and it certainly seems to have a flourishing community, as well as strong support and integration from other third parties. Netvibes also has a very iPhone-friendly version of its site, so I’ve been using it for quite some time now on both my desktop and iPhone as an easy way to get a quick glance at RSS feeds from a few key websites and other information that matters to me the most. While the RtM module for Netvibes sadly doesn’t work on the iPhone version, it’s still a great addition to my desktop browser’s start page to help me get an even better overview of everything I need to read and do for the day.

And that about does it for my suite of Remember The Milk tools so far. It’s a great service that still makes me feel as though I’ve barely scratched its surface, so I’ll definitely be tinkering around with the site and more tools like the ones I’ve listed here. Part of RtM’s appeal in this respect is that despite its many features‚Äîsome of which I haven’t even touched on like collaborating on tasks between multiple users‚ÄîRtM still looks and feels very simple and intuitive, typically offering more power and features only when the user wants them.

If I’ve piqued your interest in Remember The Milk, my best advise if you want to learn more is to simply sign up for a free account and start poking around. Free accounts work with nearly everything I mentioned in this post (except the iPhone app), as the company seems pretty focused on providing almost the entirety of its product for free. Of course, I’m happy to answer any questions you have about RtM here as well.

“Open in TextMate” from Leopard Finder ‚Äì The Pug Automatic

Henrik Nyh created an AppleScript you can place in Leopard’s Finder toolbar to open the the files of the currently selected folder in TextMate as a project. Handy:

Clicking the toolbar icon now opens the selected file or files if there is a selection; otherwise it opens the current directory. You can also drag-and-drop files to the icon to open those.