I posted one half baked idea a while back (find people by interest).
Here's another.
A personal, multi-accessible, cross-platform, "cloud", simultaneous-accessible scheduler.
I want to be able to access my schedule through my phone or my home computer or my work computer.
I want the option of scheduling a reminder independently of the event - so I could say I want a reminder on this date at this time, and the title of the event is XYZ. Currently, with outlook, I have to specify 2 date / time periods - first when the event is, then when I want the reminder - I'd rather do it in one.
I want the reminder to pop up on all my synced devices simultaneously, so whichever I happen to have with me / am looking at, I get the reminder - at the moment I can't schedule everything in outlook at work because sometimes I'm not in the office. I can't schedule everything on my phone because sometimes my phone is on silent (e.g. when I'm in the office). When I get my reminder, I want to be able to snooze the reminder on one device, and it will pop up again after the snooze duration on all my synced devices, and any of the devices could snooze it again.
Saturday 17 September 2011
Thursday 3 March 2011
The taskbar is my mental stack
If I've got one objective that I'm trying to achieve, I might need to meet several sub-objectives along the way.
So if I've got visual studio open and I'm working on my main feature, then I notice I need to get something out of a folder, I'll open an explorer window and navigate to that folder. While I'm there, I realise I need to do something later, so I'll make a note of it in notepad. A colleague then asks me to fix something in another program, so I'll open another instance of visual studio, and maybe firefox to look up the issue in the bug database, and another explorer window to find the data.
Pre-windows 7, my taskbar would now have 6 items on it, in the order: visual studio 1, 1 explorer window, notepad, visual studio 2, firefox, and another explorer window.
The items on the taskbar were arranged in a similar way to how they were ordered in my mind. As I complete sub tasks, I can close the programs one by one, from latest, to earliest, until I've finished my main task. That was good.
Now, windows 7 groups similar items together. Which means the mental associations between the second visual studio and the explorer window (for example) are no longer matched by what's on screen, which means I have to spend mental effort connecting the various items whenever I try to work out what I was doing. And since lots of my work involves putting my mind through a mangler (figuratively), any extra mental effort that I have to put in that I didn't used to have to do, isn't appreciated :-(
Luckily, there's (at least) one app which "fixes" this for me. Windows 7 Taskbar Tweaker lets me change the behaviour so that buttons are no longer grouped. Back to full productivity again! :-)
So if I've got visual studio open and I'm working on my main feature, then I notice I need to get something out of a folder, I'll open an explorer window and navigate to that folder. While I'm there, I realise I need to do something later, so I'll make a note of it in notepad. A colleague then asks me to fix something in another program, so I'll open another instance of visual studio, and maybe firefox to look up the issue in the bug database, and another explorer window to find the data.
Pre-windows 7, my taskbar would now have 6 items on it, in the order: visual studio 1, 1 explorer window, notepad, visual studio 2, firefox, and another explorer window.
The items on the taskbar were arranged in a similar way to how they were ordered in my mind. As I complete sub tasks, I can close the programs one by one, from latest, to earliest, until I've finished my main task. That was good.
Now, windows 7 groups similar items together. Which means the mental associations between the second visual studio and the explorer window (for example) are no longer matched by what's on screen, which means I have to spend mental effort connecting the various items whenever I try to work out what I was doing. And since lots of my work involves putting my mind through a mangler (figuratively), any extra mental effort that I have to put in that I didn't used to have to do, isn't appreciated :-(
Luckily, there's (at least) one app which "fixes" this for me. Windows 7 Taskbar Tweaker lets me change the behaviour so that buttons are no longer grouped. Back to full productivity again! :-)
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