Freelance developer Matthew Bass has put up a great new blog entry summarizing his experiences with nomadic programming: Recently, I’ve started doing what I’ve termed “nomadic programming.” Namely, spending the day roaming between various wi-fi hotspots instead of working from home. This has worked really well … Read More »
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Mike Gunderloy
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Miro is an interesting bit of software for a web worker: free, open source, and not fitting into the usual categories. Depending on your work habits and interests, though, you may find this desktop video player to be a great … Read More »
We’ve covered plenty of ways to keep track of your billable hours in the past. Most of these fall into one or two categories: desktop solutions and web sites. There are a few services with other ways to get the data into your timesheet, though, and … Read More »
If your idea of web working includes seeing the web your way (instead of the way that advertisers want you to see it), you might want to download Foof. This Firefox extension, a derivative of the popular Adblock Plus, … Read More »
Darren Rowse over at Problogger has a good post up the gets at the heart of many productivity systems: “How Batch Processing Made Me 10 Times More Productive.” The basic idea is to bring some order to the chaos that is the average web worker’s … Read More »
Professional document-sharing site Docstoc (which has quite a number of useful documents publicly available, from leases to contracts to blank corporate forms) has gotten into the email attachment replacement business. After downloading their OneClick application (Windows only) you can … Read More »
Enhancing Drag in Firefox
By Mike Gunderloy
Jun. 11, 2008, 2:00pm PT
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If you’re constantly looking to work even faster on the web, take a look at some of the drag-and-drop extensions to Firefox. The one I like (and have installed) is QuickDrag. With QuickDrag, you can highlight any text and drag … Read More »
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Web working covers a lot of ground: from coffeeshop bedouins to full-time telecommuters to home-office workers. But one thing holds us all together: we use the web to be productive. What does that actually mean, though? Do you just fire up the browser when you have some … Read More »
Looking for a place to save notes, lists, and random bits of information online, with a bit more structure than a wiki? A free account at Helipad might be just the thing for you. Helipad bills itself as “the flexible … Read More »
When I see folks like AT&T Mobility’s CEO say the iPhone “totally and completely mobilizes your data” now that it’s 3G-capable, I know we’re not quite living in the same world. Ralph de la Vega may view 3G as a … Read More »
Apple’s newly-announced MobileMe service looks to offer a variety of useful features for the web worker: Continuous push synchronization for email, contacts, and calendars Online access to your mail, contacts, and calendar Photo-sharing through MobileMe Gallery 20GB of file storage that mounts as a … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
Jun. 10, 2008, 8:00am PT
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If you’re the sort of person who runs their phone battery down to nothing on a regular basis, IOGear’s new GearJuice, could provide just the bit of insurance you need to stay connected. It’s basically a shell that fits around … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
Jun. 9, 2008, 2:00pm PT
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One reason why many web workers love the way they work is that they’re helping to save the planet. We know that not physically commuting and occupying office cubicles cuts down on pollution – but by how much? Some new findings from Sun Microsystems (who, … Read More »
The Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC 2008 ended a few minutes ago, and now it’s time to reflect on what it means to web workers. In truth, what it means is – not much. While WWDC is a developer conference, the usual runaway rumors had many … Read More »
We’ve looked at wide variety of RSS readers in the past. But what if there is RSS information so important that you want it to interrupt your work day? That’s when you turn to new service IM Feeds, which offers … Read More »
There are a lot of solutions out there for tracking your work time on the web. I did some hunting around recently, and typical pricing for multi-user accounts was in the $20 or more per month range. If that’s too rich … Read More »
After our computers, our cell phones are surely the most essential tool for most web workers. With our on-the-go working habits, many of us spend hours every week with the tiny phones pressed to our ears, dealing with clients and coworkers. Recently the potential health risks … Read More »
As we’ve covered several times already, Firefox 3 is on the verge of being released (RC2 came out a couple of days ago). The new version is, at this point, very solid – faster than FF2 and with a lower memory footprint (though of course … Read More »
If you’re like most of us, you don’t even read the manuals that come with your gear. Laptops, digital cameras, wireless routers, phones…we get through just enough to get started, and then promise ourselves that we’ll read later after playing with the new toy. Then, six … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
Jun. 5, 2008, 2:00pm PT
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If you’re like most web workers, you’ve got a stack of obsolete hardware in a closet somewhere. Now TechForward, a relatively new company, wants to take your future junk off your hands – and pay you for it. Their concept … Read More »
Long-time web conferencing and online collaboration suite vendor Central Desktop sent us a link to their latest press release. The actual news of the release is fairly unsurprising: companies using their collaboration platform see higher productivity and lower costs. After all, who would keep … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
Jun. 5, 2008, 8:00am PT
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Wikis are common tools in the web worker’s arsenal; storing and editing stuff on the web comes naturally to us. But many wikis these days are large and complex animals, with a host of editing tools and relatively cluttered user interfaces. … Read More »
Here’s a simple utility for Windows-using web workers who have trouble remembering what they were doing when the last few instant messages and emails arrived: NextAction. The idea of NextAction is simple: it gives you a floating, editable window that … Read More »
As we’ve pointed out before, independent web workers often have patchwork careers. While it would be nice to only have one project needing attention, the reality is that we need to juggle together multiple projects with overlapping deadlines for many clients. Depending on the workload and … Read More »
We know many web workers who depend on Jott – the service that takes your phone calls and transcribes them to emails, to-dos, and other things. But Jott is only available in the US. A new competitor, Dial2Do, offers … Read More »
We looked at people-powered editable search engine Wikia back in January when it was in alpha. At the time they were still in alpha, with poor results but plans to let users refine things by contributing articles to result … Read More »
Twitter remains one of our favorite services here at WWD. Just about all of us use it for casual “water-cooler” conversation, as well as for asking questions of the lazyweb and keeping track of our friends (and even … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
Jun. 3, 2008, 8:06am PT
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We’ve looked before at one of the major problems with web account management: it’s most secure to use different passwords for every service, but it’s easiest to use one password everywhere. A new service from PageOnce wants to let you … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
Jun. 2, 2008, 2:00pm PT
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Mac-using web workers have had to sit on the sidelines while Outlook-based mail organizer Xobni (see our coverage) garnered positive reviews. Now there’s a bit of similar goodness available for users of Apple’s Mail.app client: the RelatedMail plugin. … Read More »
Overnight, Adobe launched Acrobat.com – a newly-branded Software as a Service offering that combines some pieces they’d already released with some new bits. When you visit the Acrobat.com home page, you’ll find a variety of components, including the Adobe Buzzword … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
Jun. 2, 2008, 8:00am PT
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The folks over at Yahoo! Developer Network have released another good resource for the web designer: the Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit. The kit contains 16 different high-resolution image sets (available as OmniGraffle or Visio stencils, PDF, PNG, and SVG). Each … Read More »
We recently looked at a bunch of resources for finding free images on the web. But sometimes, despite the millions of photos on those sites, you just won’t find what you want. That’s when it’s time to turn to the microstock photography sites, which offer more … Read More »
The more time I spend with the web development portion of the web worker community, the more I hear people say bad things about Internet Explorer. But it’s a fact of life that you need to make your sites work in … Read More »
Most web workers couldn’t live without their instant messages. Yahoo! is trying to push the state of the art along a bit with the beta release of version 9.0 of Yahoo! Messenger. Though this is a pretty mature software category, … Read More »
We looked at site-specific browsers last year – desktop applications that capture a single web site so that you can interact with it outside the bounds of your browser. A new entrant in this field, Bubbles, is out with … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
May. 30, 2008, 11:00am PT
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There’s been a little buzz in the blogging world this week about Musion, who call themselves “the world leader in 3D holographic projection.” This was triggered by Guy Kawasaki linking to a video showing Cisco CEO John Chambers chatting on stage with a … Read More »
There’s a new entrant in the online drawing tools market: Flowchart.com. Though they make their pitch as a flowcharting tool, they’re really a general-purpose shapes-and-connectors application, along the lines of Visio or OmniGraffle. Their UI is largely JavaScript-based, but seems reasonably responsive. In addition to … Read More »
Content Delivery Network Akamai is in a good position to keep an eye on the global internet, given that they’ve got a presence pretty much everywhere and huge amounts of traffic flow through their servers. That (along with the chance to advertise their own services) is … Read More »
Most of us are web workers because we enjoy it. Whether it’s the feel of being on the cutting edge of technology, the joy of working anywhere, or the contribution to saving the planet by not commuting physically, … Read More »
If you’re concerned about the sort of behavior tracking being carried out by companies like NebuAd and Phorm, then AnchorFree has a deal for you. Download and run their Hotspot Shield application (for either Windows or OS X), … Read More »
Today Apple released another free minor update for users of OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. Depending on which version you’re coming from, it weighs in at somewhere in the 200 to 400MB range, which is pretty frightening for something that’s mostly fixes … Read More »
I can’t count the number of times I’ve copied something on one computer and needed to paste it in to an application on another. Whether it’s moving emails and links around or composing a document from multiple pieces, this seems to be a common activity for … Read More »
By Mike Gunderloy
May. 28, 2008, 8:00am PT
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Past WWD contributor Leo Babauta has teamed up with LifeDev’s Glen Stansberry to launch Web Warrior Tools, a new ebook publishing house. Their plan is to present “ridiculously useful, powerful tools to change your life” at a reasonable … Read More »
True confession time: I get plenty of things done, but based on the last six months or so of trying to use it, the Getting Things Done system doesn’t work for me. Or rather, the sort of heavyweight task management that … Read More »
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