GigaOM » Personal organization

In 2011, Stop Putting Off Your Dreams

Amber Singleton Riviere — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:00:56 +0000

I recently had a conversation with a friend about how much fun it would be for her to open a bakery. We imagined ideas for desserts she might serve, and how she might run her business. But the conversation ended with her saying, “Maybe someday I’ll do something like that.” Immediately, I knew that she probably never would, and I felt very sad — for her, for myself, and for so many other people who sit on the sidelines dreaming, but who never make an effort to pursue their dreams.

Certainly, some of us make half-hearted attempts to accomplish a few of our life and business goals. But how many people do you know who put everything on the line to pursue their deepest, most life-changing dreams? What are the rest of us doing, and what are we waiting for?

Choices and Challenges

Of course, circumstances get in the way. There are challenges, setbacks and detours. But each of us has a choice. Although it won’t be easy to navigate back to the right path, if we say that we can’t find our way around obstacles, we’re making a choice to leave things as they are.

Last night, I was reading about Roald Dahl, author of such hopeful and imaginative books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That might be my absolute favorite story about an underdog who overcomes obstacles while continuing to believe in something, even when all is stacked against him.

It turns out Roald Dahl was a lot like his character Charlie. Dahl’s personal life was filled with hardship and tragedy. In spite of all the challenges he faced, he remained positive and achieved great things. As it says on his website, “The series of misfortunes and tragedies Dahl… suffer[ed did not] made him more bitter. Loss and physical adversity seemed to stimulate his enormous energies to positive action. He fought misfortune as if it was a dragon to be slain.”

Time to Dream Big

I hope that 2011 will be a year of great progress toward achieving our deeply-buried dreams, and a year of doing things that require us to step out of our comfort zones and test our abilities, even if they lead to failure or, even more frightening, success.

I challenge you, as we round out these last few days of 2010: dust off those gutsy dreams and ambitions you’ve kept to yourself until now. Dare to put yourself out there; do something big this coming year. It doesn’t need to look big to anyone else, but you’ll know it is, because it will require you to go out on a limb and do things in an entirely different way.

For 2011, live the way you truly want to live, and achieve what you’ve only ever dreamed you could achieve.

What big, audacious goals do you have for 2011?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Neal

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What Are Your New Year’s Resolutions?

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:00:11 +0000

A recent survey of New Year’s resolutions found that workers want to get organized, stay connected, and respond more quickly to business communications. Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed say that they will resolve to be more prompt when responding to business emails and calls.

The survey was conducted online in December 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia. Respondents were employed U.S. adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution.

We’ve written extensively on how to get more organized, how to tame your inbox, and how to improve collaboration, but we’d like to hear your ideas in the comments.

What are your New Year’s resolutions? How do you plan to manage your work life in 2011?

Image by sxc.hu user ba1969

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Moving to Mac: Window Management Tips

Scott Blitstein — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:06:57 +0000

In my six-month check-in documenting my move to Mac, I mentioned some of the general usability issues that I was still experiencing. While, overall, I was quite thrilled with my new setup, a few nagging issues were really keeping me from feeling really settled in. In addition to some Finder issues and some questions about dual displays, I was having trouble adjusting to how windows are managed in OS X compared to Windows, particularly in restoring items that had been minimized.

My post garnered a lot of comments in response with some great tips and tricks from readers that I thought I would share with you.

The “Black Hole” of Minimized Windows

One of my issues was getting used to the Cmd-Tab functionality of Mac, compared to the Alt-Tab of Windows. While similar, the Mac Cmd-Tab doesn’t restore minimized windows; I’ve been struggling with the “black hole” that minimized windows seem to disappear into. You all came to the rescue though with these handy tips and tricks.

By far the most popular suggestion, and the one that I ultimately ended up using, is to use the “Hide” command or the Cmd-H shortcut to hide windows rather than minimize them. Not only does this remove the window from view but it also shifts the focus to the next application in the stack. This actually helped solve another issue, too, because I was still occasionally bitten by seeing what I believed to be the active window on my screen but having the Application Bar really focused on something else. Hiding the application works to resolve both issues for me.

There is one caveat, though (and I guess this could actually be seen as desirable): if you’re using an application like TweetDeck that is hidden and something happens that prompts a notification, it will bring that application to the forefront. I find this to be pretty distracting so have learned to continue to minimize those windows rather than hiding them.

Another very popular suggestion was to use the add-on utility Witch, which promises to make window switching fun. I tried an evaluation of this utility and found it really useful, but found its plethora of options bit overwhelming, so I’ve settled on the more conventional shortcut hiding method. With Witch it is possible to completely customize how items appear, enable pop up previews and change the appearance of the app switching windows. I have a feeling that as I continue to become more comfortable and my needs increase this is something that I will be revisiting.

Other folks in the comments discussed using a combination of Exposé and Spaces. While I do like Exposé, Spaces just doesn’t seem to click with me. If I could segregate apps, or instances of apps, into different Spaces for different tasks, then I think it would be more useful to me.

Where Am I? How Did I Get Here?

I mentioned that I missed being able to see the full path for the current directory in Finder. Commenter Ted provided the solution: In Finder, open a folder, go to the “View” Menu, then click “Show Path Bar.” This was exactly what I was looking for and really makes the structure of my data make more sense to me.

Where Did I Put that Menu?

With the separation of the Application menu and the program window, I got particularly perplexed when working with a second monitor attached. Having to look to another screen to the see the menu of the application I’m currently using just never seemed right to me. Many of you suggested MenuEverywhere, which adds a staggering number of ways to add menus to just about anything, while another suggestion was Secondbar is more of a single tasker by adding a very useful duplicate of the menubar on the second screen.

Much like with a PC, I am finding that there are a staggering number of utilities designed to fill gaps and provide extra functionality to the OS, and a staggering number of ways to work with and around your process. I am thankful for all of your suggestions and hope you find them useful as well.

Share your Mac window management tips below.

Photo by Flickr user neys, licensed under CC 2.0

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Mobile App Boom Is Lifting Heroku’s Fortunes

Om Malik — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:15:48 +0000

Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian (foreground) speaking at GigaOM's Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco

The rise of smartphones is having an impact across the entire technology food chain. Not only are companies like Motorola moving more phones, app developers are seeing a quick jump in their fortunes. But far from the bright lights and attention are companies that provide vital building blocks, who are also enjoying the good times. These include chip companies like Qualcomm and cloud services provider Heroku, which offers its platform as a service and is based on Amazon’s raw infrastructure.

San Francisco-based Heroku, which has been focused on being a Ruby-on-Rails cloud platform, has seen a sudden demand for its service from mobile app developers, according to Byron Sebastian, chief executive officer of the two-year-old company, which is backed by the likes of Redpoint Venture Partners and Ignition Partners. The biggest boost for Heroku is going to come when RhoMobile, an open mobile framework company, shifts RhoHub, its hosted app development platform, to Heroku. That move alone will add 8,000 mobile developers to Heroku’s cloud service.

According to Heroku, in a survey, nearly 30 percent of its customers said they are building mobile apps, and nearly 60 percent indicated a high interest in developing mobile offerings. Heroku currently has over 83,000 apps (mobile and web) using its platform. Some of the more popular apps are doing 1,000 to 3,000 http requests per minute. Many are offering mobile-friendly HTML, but many are also using RESTful interfaces.

Mobile apps using Heroku’s infrastructure services include Spreadsong’s Freebooksapp and Intridea’s Oil Reporter. Colin Plamondon, co-founder and CEO of Spreadsong, points out that most mobile applications are essentially a pretty interface for web services content and have similar needs to any web application. That’s good news for companies like Heroku.

P.S. If you are a cloud services provider and want to discuss trends with me, drop me an email.

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VMworld Met Expectations, But Is That Enough?

Derrick Harris — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:00:15 +0000

Having just published a report on VMware and endured the barrage of VMworld announcements, I’m probably due to share my post-conference thoughts. As I detail in my weekly column for GigaOM Pro, from a cloud computing perspective, I’m underwhelmed.

For the most part, we saw what we expected from VMware. It delivered vCloud Director and announced a forthcoming PaaS-like solution, called vFabric, as well as expanded on its service-provider business with the vCloud Datacenter Service. The first two weren’t surprising at all, given how closely industry watchers have been watching “Project Redwood” and the ever-growing SpringSource platform.

However, I think VMware’s most-interesting announcements were also the most underreported: the vCloud Datacenter Service and the acquisitions of Integrien and TriCipher. The former is a big deal because it gives service-provider partners a secure, robust offering that will appeal to enterprise customers more than vCloud Express ever will.

Regarding Integrien and TriCipher, the moves are hardly earthshaking, but they do show that VMware has a vision beyond delivering applications and infrastructure. However, any management vendor that wants to be taken seriously in the cloud simply has to have a firm grasp on cross-system monitoring and identity management. VMware already has the former with Hyperic, and Integrien takes it another step with its focus on data correlation and analysis.

At this point, VMware’s big goal should be maintaining its status as a cloud computing thought leader and innovator, which means keeping a safe distance between itself and the competition. That didn’t necessarily happen this week. CA, Citrix, Eucalyptus, Red Hat and Microsoft all took steps to show they’re playing in the same ballpark.

VMware certainly advanced its cloud vision at VMworld, but it didn’t do a lot to demonstrate that it’s still several steps ahead of the competition. Perhaps I’ll change my tune once I’ve had time to digest all the news and connect the dots, or perhaps I expect too much after the past couple of visionary VMworld events, but, for now, I feel like the competition narrowed the gap during VMware’s biggest week of the year.

Read the full post here.

Photo courtesy Flickr user cote.

5 Organizational Tools I Can't Work Without

Amber Singleton Riviere — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:00:22 +0000

I’m on the road this week, and it’s times like these when I really appreciate the tools I use to stay organized. Even while working remotely, I’ve managed to stay on track and not get behind on work because these tools rarely let anything slip through the cracks.

Here are my personal favorites; the tools I’d definitely hate to have to work without:

Gmail. Although there are plenty of times I wish I could avoid email altogether, it’s still a fairly decent tool for keeping me organized, especially by using Gmail. The “Superstars” feature (available in Labs) helps me to highlight and flag emails that require some sort of action or attention on my part. Labels allow me to organize types of communications and information for quick sorting and recognition. The advanced searching functionality helps me find things quickly and easily, and canned responses (also available in Labs) save me from having to reinvent the wheel when sending routine messages. So long as I make sure Gmail is working for me, instead of the other way around, it really keeps me organized and productive.
Google Calendar. I keep all my time-sensitive appointments and recurring to-dos organized in Google Calendar. On a busy day, it’s very easy to forget about phone calls or other items on my schedule, but customizable alerts keep me in check. If I anticipate an overly busy week, I’ll set myself multiple reminders to make sure nothing slips by me. I also love the ability to create multiple, color-coded calendars. I’ve created three primary calendars to organize specific types of activities and tasks: A “personal” calendar (color: pink), a “work to-dos” calendar (color: blue), and a “booked calls” calendar (color: orange). This provides me a quick overview of the week, and if, for instance, I see an orange appointment block, I know I have a call scheduled with someone.
TimeDriver. I used to attempt to manually coordinate my schedule with that of clients, interview guests, and other business contacts, but it became a nightmare, and several times I came close to double-booking myself. Although I’d love to have an assistant handle a lot of these types of tasks for me, tools like TimeDriver are a good substitute. I simply set my availability for the coming weeks, and when it comes time to coordinate appointments with others, I send them a link to my calendar, and they pick slots that work with their schedules. I know Google Calendar could provide this functionality in some ways, but I prefer TimeDriver for this purpose.
Zoho (Writer and Spreadsheet). Lately, I’ve been in the mood to simplify my organization. One thing I’ve been doing is creating a simple weekly to-do list, organized by day, within Zoho Writer. As I work through the list, I strike through tasks, making it really simple to see what’s left to do. I also like being able to see my accomplishments at a glance; I can look back over the entire week and see the tasks I’ve completed, which really helps me maintain focus. I used to create my to-do list on paper or within Backpack, but the paper list tended to get lost under notes and other items on and around my desk, and the Backpack list seemed to be ever-growing (more like a catch-all, master to-do list). The new system is simple and also keeps me from having to rewrite the list as things get moved around.
Pen and Paper. I know there are tons of note-taking tools available online and within different gadgets, but my personal favorite is a simple, 5″ x 8″ notepad and a good pen. I have to be able to catch notes and ideas on the fly, and paper is a good way to physically organize things into the right order or priority. I used to use (and occasionally still use) index cards, along with every size and shape notebook on the market. I eventually settled on the 5″ x 8″ since it seems to be the perfect size to capture and divide thoughts without wasting a lot of paper or running out of room. Although I’ve gotten away from paper-based systems in almost every other area of my work, I think pen and paper will always have its place in my organizational toolbox, even if it is old-fashioned.

With the right mix of applications, it’s much easier to stay on track and prevent things from being overlooked or forgotten, and with all the great tools available online, it’s possible to stay productive no matter where you are.

What tools keep you on track and organized?

Photo by Flickr user brdwatchr1, licensed under CC 2.0

Embrace the Chaos With a Personal Knowledge Manager

Scott Blitstein — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:00:58 +0000

Now that I’ve made my Move to Mac and got myself up and running with my initial software choices, it’s time to get to the fun part of this transition. I finally get to dig into all of the cool applications that I’ve been reading about for years but haven’t ever had the chance to try. My first foray was to look into the area of Personal Knowledge Management or PKM. On the Windows side of things I’ve shuffled around quite a bit. Would I find a tool that suited me on my Mac?

I find there are two different schools of thought when it comes to PKM and organizing all of the bits of information that we compile; it seems that the tools are either page-based or note-based. Page-based tools, like ConnectedText or OneNote on Windows, use a page metaphor to store related bits of information. You can often embed notes, images and files but they are all inherently tied to a “master page” that “owns” that data. I like to think that I work this way — with the ability to have discrete and tidy pages for clients and projects, all defined and ready-to-use. When I picture my information, that is how I see it. I looked at a couple of page-based options like this for my Mac; my favorite being VoodooPad by the wonderfully named Flying Meat Inc. If I had ended up choosing a page-based manager, VoodooPad is the “no-brainer” choice.

However, my reality is somewhat different than my vision when it comes to organization. I’ve got a snippet with notes from a meeting here, a phone message here, a bunch of URLs, a password for an FTP site, and it’s all been entered on whatever page I happen to be on — all with the intent of moving and organizing later. But they don’t get refiled, moved or organized, which means I cant find them at a later date.

So I decided that It’s time to embrace the chaos, find a tool that works like I do, and not like I think I need to. I decided it was time to look at note-based information managers. This type of app is based upon the ubiquitous capture of anything that you need to store. A block of text, a picture, a receipt, a PDF, a URL, all in a simple note document. Notes can be tagged, filed, sorted, based upon any number of criteria. Each note is a distinct piece of information and through efficient organization and search, hopefully you can pull them together as needed.

This is a crowded field, so I looked at a number of options before ultimately choosing Yojimbo. I looked at Yojimbo with high hopes based on Will’s great review from back in September. He was spot-on in highlighting the cool usability features that it offers. Even though I found the functionality, look and feel very similar to some of the others I looked at, one of the big selling features was the presence of a screencast video on the website. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take the time to learn all about the products that I was looking at but I found the head start that I got by watching the video left me feeling more comfortable with it than the others. It was one of the first programs that I trialed and I found myself liking it quite a bit.

There were, and still are a few things I wish it did better or differently, but I found that all of my notes about the other products I was looking at ended up being being stored in Yojimbo, together with meting notes and other snippets of info. I don’t think it was conscious decision that I had made my choice until my trial had expired and I was faced with exporting my data in to another product. Yojimbo isn’t my perfect PKM; it just outlasted all of the others I looked at and sort of just fell in to place.

With that said, it isn’t that I don’t really like Yojimbo. It has a great mix of simplicity and power and I was able to start amassing information quickly and easily and then build my organization around it. The tagging is brilliant and it is just so easy to get data in to the system. I am also slightly addicted to the “print to Yojimbo” option as a means to get receipts and other info captured nicely in PDF format.

Choosing a Personal Knowledge Manager was among my highest-priority projects as I am collecting so much information since my transition, tips and tricks, utilities, software, training, blogs and other resources, all along with my normal day-to-day work, and I didn’t need the headache of information overload on top of everything else. Without my even noticing, Yojimbo stepped in and saved the day.

Yojimbo is a Universal Mac Application requiring Mac OS X 10.5.7 or later. A 30-day free trial is available and if you find it as useful as I did, it will run you $39 to license.

Did I make the right choice? What do you use to keep all of your information organized?

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How I Stay Productive at Conferences

Dawn Foster — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:00:53 +0000

I am writing this post during OSCON, one of the big open-source conferences, which is always a very busy week for me. It is fascinating to watch how people behave during conferences in ways that either help or hinder their productivity. Most of us probably attend conferences at least occasionally, so it is important to find ways to make the most out of our time at the event, while still getting other work done and remaining productive.

Conferences often come with very long days that start with breakfast and move on to sessions, lunches, more sessions and then evening events and after-parties; all of which can leave you feeling exhausted and overworked, if you aren’t careful. Before you start thinking about how to approach the event, you need to think about your goals. Are you there to learn, to network, for press coverage or some other purpose? Most of us probably have overlapping goals for any event, but it really can help to understand what you want to get out of the event.

I’m here at OSCON partly to blog about some of the interesting sessions talking about the community that I manage and to network with other people in the industry. As a result, I needed to attend a few sessions and spend time talking to people, while still finding time to keep up with work and blog about the event. The trade-off is that I spent most of the breaks talking to people while doing my work during times when there weren’t any sessions that I needed to attend.

The key to attending events and getting the most out of them is to stay focused on what is important: Your goals and the purpose for attending in the first place. It can be easy to spend the whole time multitasking — trying to attend sessions and work simultaneously — while not managing to do well at either task. When I attend sessions, I try to ignore or even shut off my email and the social networking streams on my laptop, while leaving a note-taking window open so that I can jot down any key points from the presentation. Admittedly, I’m not perfect, and I find myself checking or responding to email sometimes, but whenever I do that, I become much less engaged in the presentation. On the other hand, I skip some sessions entirely and use that time to catch up on work or blogging. This helps me make sure that I carve out enough time for event activities and my regular work while accomplishing both of them relatively efficiently.

One common mistake I see is when people try to do all of their regular work and attend the conference at the same time. Usually this means neglecting the conference or falling short on sleep. I’ve seen colleagues and friends who fly to a conference in another city and then spend most of their time sitting in on conference calls. If you are going to be spending all of your time attending your regular meetings and doing your regular work you might as well save the company some money and stay home to work. When I attend a conference, I cancel every meeting that I don’t absolutely have to attend and limit the number of non-event meetings. This gives me a break from the regular routine and lets me focus more on the conference. I also try not to work late into the night so that I can get a reasonable amount of sleep to avoid being a zombie during the day. So far this week, I’ve been pretty good, but I’ll admit to pulling a couple of late nights despite my best efforts to get my work done during the day.

What are your favorite tips for staying productive while still getting most out of your conference?

Photo by Flickr user wesleynitsckie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Generic 2.0 license.

3 Productivity Tips for the Corporate Web Worker

Dawn Foster — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:00:58 +0000

While we all love the idea of working at home every day in our pajamas with the freedom to do what we want while still getting our work done, the reality of being a corporate web worker is a little more difficult. In fact, I would argue that corporate web workers have to be even more productive than their cubicle-dwelling colleagues. Whether we are web working one day a week or full-time, if we want to keep the privilege of working from home, we have to be able to prove that we can be just as productive when working remotely as we would be sitting in a cubicle in the corporate office.

Now, I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of finding faster and more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks; I love to find better ways to gather and process information more quickly. I actively look for ways that I can streamline activities to accomplish more in less time, and I wanted to share a few of my tips.

Less Multitasking

I know, I know, you are all expert multitaskers who can accomplish more when you do multiple things at the same time. Maybe, maybe not. There have been some recent studies showing that we are more efficient when we do one thing at a time. I’ve talked before about organizing my work into chunks where I focus on specific tasks; I believe that it’s a more efficient way to work.

This tip becomes critical for corporate web workers because if you are constantly multitasking, then you seem distracted and less productive, especially when you are multitasking on conference calls. After a few times of asking people to repeat the question that you missed because you were doing something else, your boss and coworkers are likely to become suspicious about whether or not you can pay attention when working outside of the office. They don’t know if you were distracted because of email and other work or if you were distracted by the television, your kids or other home activities. We need to stay sharp and pay attention on those conference calls, so reduce the multitasking and focus on the task at hand.

News Feeds

Remote employees can’t always rely on the hallway conversations to stay caught up on industry or company news, so if we want to stay informed, we need to do some of our own legwork. Monitoring information can take a lot of your time if you aren’t efficient, but with a few tricks, you can pare it down to something more manageable. You can start by setting up a little monitoring dashboard that you can use to keep an eye on important information at a glance. Add your company blog and some news feeds that look for keywords mentioning your company or area of expertise to get started and prioritize your feeds to put the most critical ones near the top of your dashboard and searches for less important keywords near the bottom. If you want to get really efficient, you can use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to filter your information down to only the most important items. While a dashboard or feeds of keyword searches can take a little while to set up, this work will pay off over the long term. Ultimately, you want to be able to stay on top of all of the important information about your company and industry while spending very little of your precious time.

Hack Your Email

No, not that kind of hacking. I’m talking about the good hacking where you tweak your tools to better suit your needs. Let’s face it; almost everyone working in a company spends way too much time in email. The key is to be able to process your email quickly and efficiently to make sure that you are responsive without spending too much time. We all have a different way of approaching our email and different needs based on our role and the tools we are using. Here are a few of my favorite email tips that I’ve used:

Use color to quickly pick out important email. I currently have a specific color for the people that are the most important (bosses, employees, etc.) I’ve also used colors to designate client emails when I was doing client work. You can use colors in many different ways to help you catch anything important at a glance.
Filters are your friend. For low priority items, you can process the email immediately by moving it to a folder without spending any extra time on it. I also use tags or smart mailboxes to allow me to efficiently process groups of email while still seeing it appear in my inbox. I use this extensively for mailing lists and other lower priority email that I can scan and process quickly in batches.
Make canned or template responses for those common questions or regular emails that you need to send. Having a template ready to go for status reports or other regular communication can save more time than you might expect over the long term. Celine wrote some handy tips on how to use canned responses in Gmail that could also be applied to other email clients.

Of course, these tips apply to everyone, and there are many more productivity tips that I could have covered (great task lists, organizational tools, etc.), but I thought they would be especially helpful for the corporate web workers.

What are your favorite productivity tips to get more done in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Diacarta: Picture Your Schedule

Charles Hamilton — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:00:48 +0000

Are you bored with regular calendar software? Diacarta, a new S1.99 calendar app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (iTunes link), has come up with a different way of visualizing your schedule.

When you open the app, instead of the usual grid of hours, you’ll see an analog clock face marked with AM or PM. Click the plus sign, and you’ll be presented with over 50 icons that can be used to create different types of events. These images are imaginative, and include a check mark, a golfer, a dog, a party hat, a sailboat, a skier and a blank one that you can add text to. Once you’ve selected the icon, you can drag it to attach it to the clock, or double-tap on it to add details. The result is a visual representation that’s surprisingly easy to understand at a glance. It works well for “dinner at 7″ but is probably not so useful for “train at 5:28.”

Diacarta has some cute touches, like a “ticking” sound that plays for a couple of seconds while it’s loading. It uses some unusual gestures like rotating the clock face — clockwise to move forward in time, or anticlockwise to move backward — so it takes a bit of learning. But I figured it out in only a couple of minutes, even before watching the entertaining and narration-free video.

What makes the app stand out are the graphics, which are elegant, and a real change from Apple’s usual clean, if slightly sterile, design. The app looks good on my iPod touch, and I suspect it’ll look even better on the iPad’s larger screen. The only jarring note is the use of a monospaced font in certain interface elements, which looks out of place to me, but which doesn’t detract from the app’s readability.

This is an initial 1.0 release, and it lacks some features that would make it more useful, like a way to sync information with the iPhone’s own Calendar, or with other services like Google Calendar. It also doesn’t have a way to create recurring events, or a backup and restore function.

But if you’re an analog sort of person who’s not “so amazingly primitive that [you] think digital watches are a pretty neat idea,” (thanks, Douglas Adams) you may find Diacarta a refreshing change from the traditional interface.

How do you manage your schedule on a mobile device?

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