Tag: applications

Super short Nozbe review

Nozbe is a web app that allows you to organise your to-do’s Getting Things Done style. This morning I spent a little while giving it a spin. I decided to sit down and enter a bunch of actions I have in my Hipster PDA (a Moleskine Memo Pockets and a bunch of blanc index cards) into Nozbe. First impressions:

  1. Nozbe is a cool concept. I have really been waiting for a multidimensional productivity web app. They got this part right! (Projects and contexts are included.)
  2. I like the book excerpts that explain the different GTD concepts such as projects, contexts and actions.
  3. I’d really only consider using Nozbe if it’d include a mobile variant (otherwise my actions are only accessible when I’m online behind a computer).
  4. Nozbe forces you to enter each action in a project up front. This is, I think, a misreading of Allen’s ‘gospel’ and increases the cognitive load when quickly entering an action. I’d have actions be forcibly linked to a context but give the user the option to add it to a project. (I worked around this by creating a ‘No Project’ project and adding actions to it before reorganising.
  5. Contexts are fixed, which is a shame. Please, please, please let me create my own contexts, tagging-style. So I can have actions linked to multiple contexts (which again reduces cognitive load).
  6. Don’t show the duration menu by default when entering an action, keep it clean. I’ll add durations when I want to, but don’t force me to.

Productivity apps are hard to get right because everyone has such a personal workflow. A good app takes that into account and offers many ways to do the same things. So again, Nozbe guys: the app is a good start, congratulations on the good effort! However it could benefit from some more user-centred thinking and design. Try to get a feel for the context of your users and tweak the interface accordingly!

Update: For those who hadn’t noticed, I found this tool via the excellent Lifehacker blog. Nozbe have their own spartan blog too.

Another update: The excellent GTD blog Black Belt Productivity does an in depth review and comes up with some of the same points as I did plus a whole bunch more.

Google Reader improvements

The new Google Reader trends page

I hadn’t touched Google Reader since taking a brief look at its initial launch in October 2005. I’m now using it as my primary reader, having grown tired of Rojo‘s poor performance and frequent interface overhauls. There’s a few things that have really improved since that first release. I’ll sum them up briefly here:

  • Uncluttered, simple interface. They’ve gone back to basics and mimic a plain desktop application UI. Hardly any superfluous web 2.0 features demand your attention.
  • Trends page (I’ve bookmarked a few articles on this); which allows you to look at the feeds you’ve been reading the most but, more importantly, allow you to weed out the ones you never look at or have died. Essential for someone who has over 200 feeds to track.
  • Multi-folder organising, not quite free tagging (which is a shame) but still nice for the folksonomically inclined.
  • When scrolling through a list of expanded new feed items, Reader automatically marks items you’ve scrolled past as read. Which greatly reduces the excise other web-based readers force on their users when wanting to mark a feed as read.
  • Performance is acceptable to good. It’s not as fast as Gmail, but vastly superior to Rojo for instance, despite the considerable use of AJAX.
  • There is an unofficial Mac OS X notifier that uses Growl.

Most of these features are not included in one or both of the previous two web-based readers I used for a length of time (Bloglines and Rojo). Google have really come up with something nice here. I wonder when it’ll move out of the lab.

Why am I not using a desktop based reader? I’d like to (NetNewsWire‘s great for instance), just as I’d love to use a proper desktop email client, but my multi-platform, multi-machine personal and professional use doesn’t allow me too. I work on at least two separate PCs at work (a desktop and a laptop) and have a cute little iBook that I use at home. This all means I am a real web OS user. Firefox as browser (with Google Browser Sync to keep it the same across all installs), Google Reader for RSS, Gmail for email and (until recently) Google Calendar for, well, my calendar. Is it coincidence I seem to prefer Google products for these things? Probably not, Google seems to be doing a very good job at these kind of productivity applications (just as Yahoo! seem to be leading the way in social applications).