Not-so-still life with Netbook

My wife bought me a Asus Eee PC 900 for Christmas, after seeing me struggle with an aging Apple Pismo Powerbook that I use for personal use. I will admit that I struggled a bit with integrating it into my workflow at first - I found the response a bit pokey ( and this is in comparison to a 500 MHz G3 processor) and the UI was very clunky.

However, with the advice of a colleague at work (thanks, Andrew!) I installed Eeebuntu, and the machine is now a powerful tool with reasonably snappy response and a usable GUI. Best of all, the machine's small size makes it easy to pick up and use in situations where I'd be reluctant to drag out my work laptop.

The validation came last week for me, when I was able to write a policy document for a major client while on a very crowded flight - and was in a coach seat where I could not have fully opened my 15" MacBook Pro. The netbook's smaller size enabled me to draft most of the document, which later turned out to be a key delivery during the conference. Having the netbook made the difference between immediate and deferred delivery.

So, as always, having the right tool for the right job makes a difference in time and quality of delivery - and the netbook is now part of my arsenal.

I'll be trying a netbook-only day trip sometime soon, so stay tuned for further experiences.

Thoughts on appropriate Email Usage

Recently, I got an email that inquired if I could be at a meeting in five minutes. The good news was that I planned to attend the meeting, had it in my calendar, and made the meeting. I also realize the sender of the email reminder was good-intentioned. Still, the mail made me initially angry and then sad - it was dumb luck that I actually got the message prior to the meeting start, and it showed how people have adopted the medium of email as a crutch, and use the medium without consideration of the purpose of the communication. Since part of my organization's (The Open Group) business is facilitation and email is still the primary communication tool of the consortia we deal with, it is incumbent on us to understand the tools of our trade and use them effectively.

Email is not instant messaging. Reasonable expectations on delivery time are between 10 minutes and one hour. Possibly longer  - mail retry intervals generally default to four hours. If you need to send an instant message use Skype or SMS. (Note Skype can also send SMS so it's a good choice for this.)

Email is not a calendaring system. It is OK to have text on meeting logistics in the text of a message but emails scheduling meetings should contain a calendar event in ICS format with all the meeting logistics embedded in the event. This will ensure meetings actually show up in people's calendars, increasing the chance that people will show up, not be double-booked, have necessary call-in info, etc. Almost all calendar programs or services that schedule events (e.g., iCal, Sunbird, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Kavi, WebEx, TripIt...) can generate these easily. If a group has a shared calendar available, this should be the first recourse for event scheduling.

Email is not a good tool for holding ongoing discussions - conversations fragment easily, and it is nearly impossible to reconstruct the threads of discussion across multiple messages, insertions, etc. after even a short amount of time has passed. A Wiki or blog with comments is the right approach for these kinds of discussions.

Email is not either a file transfer utility or a file management tool. Many email servers impose limits on the size or content of attachments for either security or performance reasons. Many email systems put email with large attachments at the end of the sending queue to ensure fair service, so large attachments will slow your message down (assuming it gets through at all.) Posting to your organization's collaboration site of record (Plato, Kavi, Connection, an intranet exchange site, etc.) and sending a link to the file is a far better approach.

On a related note, keep in mind that not all mail clients can read all attachment formats. Our increasingly mobile members, customers and staff are increasing using Blackberries, iPhones, and other smartphones. These have varying capabilities of displaying attachments - some but all not can display Word and Excel, almost none display Powerpoint. It's best to stick with more open formats such as plain text or HTML. Graphics-intensive documents should be posted as above so they can be accessed by viewing them online.

Email is not a collaborative document creation/editing tool. If you need multiple parties to review, comment on, and edit a document, it is best to use a collaborative document editing tool e.g., Google docs or a Wiki. The one reason not to do this would be if you are working on a customer-originated document and need to keep in a specific format.

Similarly, email is not a version control tool. Relying on an asynchronous and delay-prone mechanism to merge edits and keep multiple people in sync is sure to end in tears - use CVS, Subversion, or a collaboration website for this purpose.

Norm Abrams, the master carpenter from the public TV series "This Old House", once was asked what kind of multipurpose utility tool he used. He replied that "In a good workshop, the right tool for the job is always near at hand." This applies to the art of collaboration and facilitation as well - we need to all be proficient with the variety of tools we have available so we can match the right tool to the communication job at hand.

Mobile to-do lists: Review of Remember the Milk

Review of Remember the Milk

This is the second of a series of reviews of online organizers where we take a look at using them for mobile use, particularly in light of the iPhone's lack of a to-do list. (At least as of 1.0.2; rumors continue about this coming with Leopard.) In our previous review, we looked at Stikkits. In this review we'll be taking a look at Remember the Milk. (Or RtM for short.)

Overview

RtM promises to be the "Best way to manage your tasks." At it's core, it is a simple web interface to lists of to-do items - you just create lists of to-dos, assign due dates, tags, etc to them, and check them off when done. But, there is real power behind the simplicity.

RtM supports multiple lists, and To-dos can be tagged, and you can set a location for to-dos. RtM supports the ability to create a list of customized locations. This would seem to be a good feature for mobile users, as you could identify the actions you could perform in a given location. (GTD fans could use this do create location-dependent contexts.) There's a very pretty mashup with Google Maps which has buttons to show locations of tasks for today, tomorrow or this week.

RtM has a pretty impressive list of mashups with other organization and communication tools. In addition to the Google Maps integration, RtM has a feature that adds a small icon to Google Calendar. Clicking on this icon will pop up a list of tasks due that day. There are also widgets for iGoogle and OS X Dashboard. There are also iCal feeds, so you can subscribe from desktop calendar applications. In addition to the web interfaces, can submit tasks via email and even via Twitter, so you can post your RtM to-dos for yourself or even for your friends from your mobile phone, IM client, or mobile Twitter client. You can also configure RtM to deliver reminders by email, SMS, and several IM services.

A very interesting new feature of RtM is support for Google Gears which "enables web applications to provide offline functionality". Unlike a lot of Google Gears applications, though, RtM supports not only the ability to view your items offline, but also to update them - a real plus when reviewing your to-dos while mobile or disconnected, say while on a plane. Currently, support for Gears is limited to Firefox (though this may be changing ), so it won't be usable on handheld mobile devices such at the iPhone. To be fair, this limitation isn't RtM's fault, and the RtM developers should be applauded for working to provide support for the offline or bandwidth-disadvantaged user.

Remember the Milk has a page optimized for mobile access. This page permits viewing of your to-dos for today, tomorrow and this week - a real help for getting a quick overview when mobile. You can easily add tasks from the mobile page. Tasks can be viewed by location, tags, or by the lists that the item is on.

Finally, RtM allows you to share your lists with other contacts and send them reminders, so it is useful for organizing to-dos for small groups.

Pros and Cons

Evaluation Criteria	Pros	Cons
Ease of accessing and updating list entries	Simple to-do list paradigm is easy to understand and set up	Modal checkboxes for updating tasks sometimes hard to use (but not in the mobile version)
Usability in a mobile environment	-Mobile interface is readable and easy to interact with -Can input new tasks from email, IM, Twitter -Google gears support for offline work	Tasks not in current week or undated tasks difficult to see and access
Support for multiple browsers	Safari and Firefox work well. Mobile Safari good with mobile interface	Offline support limited to Firefox
Integrates well with other organization tools	Good interaction with other services	Location feature hard to use
Good notification support	Very good notification support for several services

Summary and Recommendation

In practice, I found RtM generally easy to use when mobile, and the iPhone version of the service helps this by providing a clean interface with easy-to-click links.

My principal frustration with the mobile site was that it shows you haw many tasks you have due today, tomorrow and for this week - but doesn't show you how many other tasks you have, whether this is because they are beyond this week or because they are undated. If you're a GTD'er, you tend to develop a lot of undated Next Actions, and these won't show up in RtM.

The locations feature seems cool, but the process for creating locations was confusing - you need to look up locations on a map, and then the instructions tell you to click on the map to add a location, which appears to do nothing. It turns out you can only create a location if you haven't looked up an address, and there's no apparent way to use the results of an address search as a location. Setting locations on tasks is relatively easy on the mobile interface, but amazingly complicated on the regular interface, requiring a combination of check boxes and filling in entry fields (and heaven help you if you accidentally set multiple locations - they are very hard to resolve.) Clearly, locations is a feature that needs some more work on the interface.

The bottom line: If your need is for a simple to-do list on your iPhone or mobile device, Remember the Milk is worth a look.

[Note to readers: I'm trying out a new way of posting the blog today - I'm using the ability of Google documents to post directly to Blogger. Keep your fingers crossed... TD]

Mobile to-do lists: Review of Stikkits

Review of Stikkits

Overview:

Stikkit is billed as "little yellow notes that think" Unlike other list managers, Stikkit tries to parse the text you enter and extract meaningful information about the list entry. The smart parser recognizes to-dos, calendar events, contact info, and URL links / bookmarks. It also attempts to link related notes. For example, if you have a note with contact info for John Doe, and later create a note saying "Meet with John Doe for lunch this Friday", Stikkits will create a calendar entry for Friday, and create a link to the note containing John Doe's contact info. (But see below.) A further feature is that notes can be formatted using a subset of John Gruber's Markdown syntax, which allows simple formatting of text and creation of lists. Taken together, these features allow very quick creation of lists, to-dos, and events - the basics for the mobile user.

Stikkit supports email and SMS notification. There are separate views for the different note types, with the to-do list view being particularly useful when mobile. Another very useful feature is the iCalendar event feed, which means you can subscribe to events created from Stikkit notes in Google Calendar or from a desktop calendar application such as iCal.

However, there are two drawbacks to Stikkits:

• Stikkits has a very minimalist interface - Icons for key functions are small, and the interface functions are all spread out toward the edges of the page. While this arrangement does allow maximum area for editing the notes and keeps focus on the content, it makes it difficult to use the interface in a mobile environment. The small icons are hard to tap, and you're constantly forced to scroll the screen to find the necessary functions. Clustering all the icons and buttons together would help, and, like many of these sites, a style sheet optimized for mobile users that made the interface elements easier to hit, even at the sacrifice of some content space, would be a real improvement.
• While the "smart" features of Stikkits is usually a big help, it is frustratingly buggy at times. My biggest problem is with the feature for sharing notes with other users - despite endless tweaking, it refuses to automatically link items shared with my wife, even though I've confirmed the sharing information is entered correctly. I can share a note if I manually share it, but this is extra work the mobile user doesn't need.
  

Pros and Cons:

Evaluation Criteria	Pros	Cons
Ease of accessing and updating list entries	• "Smart" parsing of entries eases entry of to-dos and dates • Support for markdown syntax allows easy formatting	• "Smart" parsing is buggy, requiring manual intervention • Markdown syntax buggy, sometimes corrupts URLs
Usability in a mobile environment	• Easy free form data entry using smart parsing and markdown • Can add multiple list items per edit	• Minimalist interface is hard to use in mobile environment
Support for multiple browsers	• Excellent - works in all tested browsers, including Mobile Safari
Integrates well with other organization tools	• Provides RSS and iCal feeds • Accepts email for new notes and updates of existing notes • API allows integration with other apps, including desktop apps and tools (e.g., Quicksilver)	• Interface limited to text
Good notification support	• Email notification of changes in shared notes • SMS notification of calendar events

Summary and Recommendation:

I've been using Stikkit for a while as my online inbox with good success. If it weren't for the two issues above, I'd give it an unreserved recommendation for use as an iPhone to-do list manager. However, the interface issues may be a real drawback for many, so check it out before committing to use it. There have been a number of requests for a mobile style sheet for Stikkits, along the lines of what Remember the Milk has done - this would be a huge improvement and would make Stikkits a solid choice for mobile users.

Review: Online List Organizers

In a previous post, I noted that online list organizer sites are a good way of overcoming the iPhone's lack of to-do lists. Of course, that means actually finding and using a site that matches your needs and style of handling to-do lists. I've been taking a look at three such lists: Stikkit, Backpack, and Remember the Milk.

My evaluation will be looking for a few things:

• Ease of accessing and updating list entries
• Usability in a mobile environment
• Support for multiple browsers, particularly Safari and Firefox
• Ability to integrate well with other organization tools such as calendars and RSS readers
• Good notification support

Each one of these sites has strengths and weaknesses as an online  to-do list; however each has enough of the basics to get started. Over the coming weeks, I'll be trying each of these out, and I'll report on the results here.  I'd also be interested in getting your comments on experience with these or other sites.

The first evaluation will be for Stikkits, "the little yellow note that thinks", which I've been using for a while. Stay tuned!