Two Minute Offense

You probably read the article about how Bill Gates works with 3 screens in front of him… And now LifeHacker is talking about increasing productivity with more screens.

Something I discovered, though - which I think Mac users figured out long ago - is that if you decrease the size (width-wise at least) of your windows… you can essentially have 1.5 screens without spending a dime.

Of course, this is a lot easier if you have a higher resolution screen (it works well for my laptop set at: 1400 x 1050). Most websites (which is where we spend most of our time anyway, right?) are configured for 1024 x 768, so if you can set your monitor to a higher resolution, you can reduce the width of your browser to about 800, and have about 300 pixels left over to look at things in the background. It may not seem like much, but trust me it helps. Especially once you get your most used applications in the right places.

Someone said in the LifeHacker comments:

For me, it simply allows me to, if nothing else, have two maximized applications going on at once, whether that be Firefox and some Office app, or doing some development work and having Word open on the other monitor for notes or something.

And sure, that’s nice if you can afford it… but I work from home sometimes, from the office sometimes… you think I want to buy 2 extra monitors so I can have an extra screen at all times? And don’t think that work will want to buy another one for me… maybe in another couple years when I’ve provided some more value.

In the mean time, I just don’t use as many maximized windows, and make more effecient use of my screen’s real estate.

Just check it out. I don’t have time, nor is there really a need, for more of a review than this: Clipmarks is Awesome.

Yahoo has essentially eliminated the biggest competition for their My Web 2.0 by acquiring del.icio.us. I’m glad I switched over from del.icio.us to My Web a couple months ago. Why? Now I don’t have to deal with any weird integration going on between the two like I did with Flickr! The funniest part - at least for me - is that I have a draft post waiting here called “My Web 2.0 vs. del.icio.us” Now I guess I can delete that one…

Another post about the acquisition on TechCrunch.

Despite the fact that Yahoo’s “honchos” kind of came off as assholes in last night’s Apprentice, I have to applaud them for stepping up their game just when it seemed that Google was poised to take over the world. Nothing like rooting for the “underdog.”

With My Web 2.0, the new Yahoo Maps, and the (hopefully) soon to be released Mail 2.0, Yahoo is quickly amassing quite an array of awesome web services. Add to that the new Yahoo Answers, and, well, that’s that.

Most of the answers I’ve seen so far have been pretty good. We’ll see how the quality goes as the “newness” of it wears off…

At least you know it won’t be cluttered with Spam Questions (unlike my comments are - thank god for auto-moderation!) since they only keep the questions around for 14 days.

I could help but reply to this one… (Note, the link won’t work if you’re reading this post more than 14 days after the post date)

Now you can add events to your AirSet calendar without any page reloading! (Okay, it reloads once when you save the event, but only to refresh with the new event) I’m not sure if it’s a hidden div or what, but the Add Event dialog comes up on top of the calendar instead of going to a new page.

The same thing happens when you click on an event that’s already on the calendar… so you can view the event details without ever leaving the calendar page! Thanks AirSet!

Seriously, though… Remember the Milk is awesome. It took me a little while to try it out since I’d been using Airset for my todo lists… But RTM is awesome. When you combine the Ajax interface with the keyboard shortcuts, you get one outstanding web application.

Adding tasks, due dates, and prioritizing is so easy. The layout and keyboard shortcuts are both very intuitive. I haven’t used some of the features like repeating events and email reminders (since Airset has been handling that pretty well), but for someone who needs those things, I’m sure they’re great.

The only downside is you can’t apply multiple labels/tags or contexts to tasks. Of course, I haven’t yet seen a todo list that does that, so I’ll take the next best thing and run with it. If they add some sort of tagging and multi-context support, this will be hands-down the best todo list there is … as if it isn’t already.

I hope these guys get bought out by Yahoo and get totally rich. They definitey deserve it. (I only say Yahoo because they are marginally better at integrating their services than Google has been so far; more on that in my Yahoo My Web 2.0 post)

You can go ahead and see how much you can get for your hipster PDA on eBay now… Someone has developed a lovely little AJAX webpage that let’s you build your own pocket-size planner. It’s 8 pages, fully customizable, and apparently the page even remembers your preferences…

If you’ve got Adobe Acrobat Professional (or other similar products) you can print multiple planners to different files and print out whichever one you need.

It’s cheaper and easier than trying to print out customized notecards - that’s for sure!

If you used computer-based lists like me, then you probably enjoy some amount of automatic sorting by the list program. This is good, of course, but a way to make it even more effective is to choose your words carefully. What do I mean? Well, obviously I’m going to explain or this wouldn’t be much of a post would it?

Say you’re adding something to a list that already has several items, and this thing you’re adding isn’t as important, or isn’t something you want to do right away… The example I’ll use is adding content to a web page (since this is what made me think of it). Adding the particular set of content I will be adding for this project is not as important as doing some other things I’m working on for this project (like getting all the buttons and forms to work correctly). So, instead of calling this item (Next Action, if that’s not trademarked - which it probably should be) “Add content to xyz.html” … I’m going to say “Put content into xyz.html.”

Figured it out yet?

If I use the word “Add” my lists (and probably some of yours too) will put this action near the top (ie: in alphabetical order). But if I say “Put” then there are other actions that will appear before this new one (usually, since P is for “Pretty far down the alphabet.” Things that are more important to “Add” to the site (since I seem to be “adding” a lot of things for this project) will appear before things that are less important to “Put” into the site.

If you don’t have a program yet that lets you make and sort lists, I have to recommend AirSet. It’s still under development, but they’re adding features as fast as I’m adding posts. And they reply to their emails in a much more timely manner.