Input devices

• The Magic Mouse. For the Mac user, the Magic Mouse is a multi-touch mouse that is itself a button that allows you to click anywhere on its surface to scroll, swipe, and click. Simply brush along the surface of the mouse to scroll, or use two fingers to swipe left and right and flip through pages or photos. Cost: $69 from Apple.
• The Phantom Lapboard. This is a combination wireless keyboard, laser mouse and hard surface that you can use from your sofa or arm chair. The keyboard opens to a hard surface for use with your mouse, and with rotating angles which allow you to find a comfortable setting for creating a mobile desktop. Cost: $130 from Phantom Entertainment.

Power devices

• The TruePower U-Socket power outlet. This power outlet provides two USB charging ports, in addition to two standard three-prong power outlet ports, making it perfect for charging any USB-powered device without a computer, including your mobile phone or PDA, iPod or MP3 player, and digital camera. Cost: $23 from FastMac.
• The Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is a universal charger and USB port for electronic devices (currently compatible with 3,767 devices, or so its product page touts). Charge your mobile phone, iPod or MP3 player, Bluetooth headset, and PDA in this single charging station. Cost: $130 from BlueLounge.

Mobile phone accessories

• The Jawbone ERA. This Bluetooth headset eliminates background noise and auto-adjusts inbound call volume to match your environment. With HD-quality sound, you can take calls and listen to your music collection from the one headset. Cost: $130 from Jawbone.

Audio gadgets

• The Pod à Porter. Pod à Porter is a light-weight neckband for the iPod Shuffle that allows you to listen to your iPod, while keeping the controls accessible, but out of your way.  Simply run the headphone wire through the Pod à Porter, attach your iPod, and you’re ready to go. Cost: $30 from Shapeways.

Video gadgets

• Kodak PlaySport Video Camera. If you’re looking for a sturdy digital video camera, look no further than the Kodak PlaySport. It’s waterproof up to 10 feet under water, has built-in image stabilization, and can handle being bumped around a bit. Cost: $150 from Kodak.
• Veho Muvi Pro Micro Camcorder. At less than three inches high, the Muvi Pro comes in as one of the smallest camcorders, yet still manages to capture high quality digital video and sound and can record up to three hours of footage. Cost: $65 through Amazon.

What are some of your favorite media gadgets?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Jorge Quinteros

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Cord Chaos

If you’re like me, you avoid cleaning or rearranging your office due to the dread of having to sort through dozens of cables lurking behind your desk. Fortunately, there are some gadgets on the market to help with this pesky little problem.

• Cordies Cable Organizers Cordies desktop cable management system keeps all your desktop cables straight by snugly holding cables so that they don’t slide off your desk when disconnected. Each loop holds multiple cables at once and can support power cords, USB cords, phone chargers, and audio and video cables. Cost: $12.99 from ThinkGeek.
• BlueLounge CableDrops CableDrops offer another solution for keeping cords and cables in place. They come in packs of six and in a variety of colors. Cost: $9.95
  from BlueLounge.
• Applecores. Keep cables organized and in place with AppleCores. They come in three size, multiple colors, and can hold everything from earbuds to household appliances, and the best part might be that you can simply unplug and they’re ready to go when traveling. Cost: $1.99-4.99 from Applecore International.
• Dreamfarm Jot. Jots work a lot like CableDrops, but might be a little more versatile (the Dreamfarm website shows Jots holding everything from cables to sets of keys) and are only slightly more expensive for packs of two. Cost: $4.95 from DreamFarm.
• Ziotek Color-Coded Surge Protector Keeping cords straight on top of the desk is one thing, but what about under it? How many times have you played musical cables trying to locate one of a half a dozen? The Ziotek color-coded surge protector is just the fix. It includes color-coordinated slots and cable markers to keep all your devices straight. Cost: $10.99 from CyberGuys.

Cell Phone and Charging Stations

What a difference ten years makes! I can’t remember ever needing to charge anything before cell phones and MP3 players came on the market, but charging stations are now a permanent part of our work life.

• Breffo Spiderpodium Stand. The Breffo Spiderpodium stand is a cool little gadget that holds cell phones, iPods, and other devices on an eight-leg “octopod” (instead of tripod). It mounts to car vents or mirrors, stands on desk or counter tops, and wraps around bike handlebars, backpacks, or baby strollers. It won’t leave marks and can easily be moved to another spot. Cost: $17.25 from Amazon.
• G.U.S. Phone/PDA Charging Station. If devices are taking over your counter tops, especially if multiple people in your home or office need to charge them at the same time, you might like a phone/PDA charging station. This one can stand on a desk  or counter top, or be mounted to a wall so that phones are out of the way and in one place. Cost: $39.99 from GreatUsefulStuff.
• Chargepod. For even more devices, you might prefer the Chargepod, which can charge up to six devices on one outlet. It claims to support over 3,000 devices, including phones, PDAs, cameras, and mp3 players, and it’s also available as a car charger. Cost: $49.95-59.95 from Callpod.

Notes and To-Dos

While I love technology and all the conveniences it often brings, I’m still a compulsive note-taker, and although my filing needs are nearly non-existent these days, I still use a few tools to keep paper in order.

• Dreamfarm Gripet. Another Dreamfarm creation, the Gripet holds notes and reminders using friction. It attaches to a wall, filing cabinet, or refrigerator with magnetic or adhesive mounts. Cost: $19.95 from DreamFarm.
• Tear Away Planner Mousepad. In recent years, I’ve  made use of my mousepad by buying a small desktop calendar to fit to it. Although I use Google Calendar for keeping track of dates and events, I like having a month at a glance and right under my computer mouse. If you use a paper to-do list, you might opt for a tear-away planner mousepad instead, which covers a full week of to-dos at a glance. Cost: $9.99 from ThinkGeek.
• NeatReceipts. If you hate tracking paper documents for taxes and record-keeping, NeatReceipts can help. It organizes receipts, business cards and other documents by scanning and then using optical character recognition to extract key information. Cost: $199.95 from NeatCo.

What are your favorite gadgets for staying organized?

Photo courtesy Flickr user yprime

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The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

• An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
• A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
• A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
• A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
• A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

• Productivity: GoldMail
• Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
• Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring “social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes of Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based on OpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets; they can be created with straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part of Xobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available from the company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

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Socialwok builds on the infrastructure of Google Apps to provide document and calendar sharing and storage, as well as real-time notifications via Google Talk instant messaging. Note, however, that your organization doesn’t need to use Google Apps to take advantage of Socialwok.

Socialwok’s web interface lets you create one or more timelines of news, links and comments that look a lot like Facebook or Friendfeed. From these timelines, one can send private messages. Updates can also be imported from Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, blogs and custom URLs. Feeds can be designated any way you like, and each feed can be set to be available only to people within your organization, or clients can be invited to participate in a specific feed.

There’s also a nicely laid-out mobile version of the Socialwok interface.

Socialwok is an early offering of the Google Apps Marketplace: third-party add-ons that integrate with Google Apps. In theory, this should make installation a snap — Google Apps administrators can just visit the Marketplace page for Socialwok, click “Add it now,” and follow the prompts. In practice, setting up the service is not as simple as one might like. Once Socialwok is installed into Google Apps, the administrator must invite her co-workers to join the group, and each member must accept the invitation. After that, everyone must “follow” each other. To get notifications via Google Talk, one needs to accept a friend request from the Socialwok app.

For those who want to display Socialwok within Gmail, there are a couple more steps. Each user has to enable the “Add any gadget by URL” option in Labs, then paste the URL of the Socialwok gadget into Gmail settings. I found the gadget useful, but there is a delay of several seconds every time one moves from Google Apps to Socialwok, so I ended up keeping both screens open in separate tabs.

Socialwok’s help function explains how to set up and use the service pretty well. But at the moment, Socialwok is not seamless enough for me. The steps needed to set up each member of a group may be more than many administrators care to take on. However, if you and your colleagues spend all day in the Google Apps web interface, give Socialwok a whirl. It’s free, and definitely has potential.

Have you used Socialwok?

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1. E-reader

This isn’t a product placement spot, but I currently use a Sony Reader Pocket Edition. I live in Canada, and even though the Kindle (a amzn) just went international, we still got left out in the cold.

Regardless of what type of reader you’re using, whether it’s your iPhone or iPod Touch, your notebook or desktop, or a dedicated device like the Sony or the Kindle, an e-reader is a great tool for someone who works online. Especially if your job involves writing. If you write a lot for your online work, you should also be reading a lot, and not just other online content.

But wait, you say, why bother with an e-reader when I have perfectly good traditional print books? For me, it’s a question of the rate of consumption, convenience, and efficient use of space. With my reader, I can get e-books from the local library, download public domain titles from Feedbooks and other sources, and keep it all close at hand without stuffing my small apartment full of traditional paper tomes. It’s always on hand for when I’m feeling less than inspired or have some downtime.

2. Web Radio

When you have unfettered access to your entire music collection twenty-four hours a day, no matter how large your library is, you’ll eventually crave some additional variety. I need music in the background while I’m working, and when I grow tired of my own stuff, I turn to internet radio for sustenance. Luckily, these days I don’t have to venture far before I find a wealth of different stations playing an infinite variety of music.

My current favorite web radio stations to frequent are the recently relaunched CBC Radio 3 streams. You can listen to live hows and music, or choose from Pop, Rock, Hip Hop and Electronic streams, or build your own playlist by tagging songs that you hear. And it’s all commercial-free because it’s a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation product, which means it’s publicly funded.

iTunes has a lovely selection of various kinds of web radio streams, many of which are also public stations and therefore ad-free.

3. Gym Membership

Or Wii Fit, or a daily walking route, or whatever excuse to stop looking at the computer for a while and get some exercise (Dawn uses iPhone app RunKeeper, for example). For me, that means a membership at the local YMCA, which is conveniently located one short alley away from my apartment building.

Once a day during the week, at about the same time, I put all my work on hold and go out for a 25 minute session on the treadmill. If it’s nice outside, I sometimes run around a local park instead. It replenishes my energy, prevents me from going stir crazy, and has the excellent side benefit of helping to keep me healthy.

Work is work, except when it isn’t. Being successful in a chosen career has as much to do with putting yourself in the right mindset and creating a lifestyle that best complements said career as it does with having the tools and skill sets necessary for the job itself. It can be awfully hard to identify what sort of leisure activities and contextual devices and services have a positive effect on your productivity, but by paying attention to what else is contributing to your good and bad days, you should be able to identify more things like those I’ve mentioned above.

What non-web working tools are essential in your daily life?

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Closet Excavation

It may not be quite as satisfying as unboxing something brand-new, or buying a big ticket item at retail, but digging around in your closet for old, nearly forgotten hardware and gadgets can actually be pretty satisfying. Especially if you haven’t looked at them in many years, since you’ll often be surprised with what recent software updates or new peripherals can help you do with older devices.

For instance, I recently reclaimed an old Palm T|X that was languishing unused in my brother’s bedside drawer. I’d passed the device onto him when I picked up the first iPod Touch, but he’d stopped using it long ago when he got his first iPhone.

Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, it’s still a great solution for quick document writing and editing on the road, and it actually has the added benefit of preventing distraction. I’d almost compare the experience to working with a typewriter, whereas any computer is more like working with a typewriter in a movie theater while a movie’s playing with a jukebox going in the background. Not to mention the fact that the device is still a great universal remote.

Trade for Tech

People who work from home tend to accumulate a lot of stuff. It piles up, falls in and out of service, and eventually just takes up space. You could sell it, but often the depreciation on electronics makes that an unappealing prospect to me. A nice alternative that usually leaves me (and the people I’m dealing with) much more satisfied is to try to work out barter deals to trade things you’re not using for things you’d like to try out.

I’ve done trade deals a few times, and nabbed an eMac and a nice starter film SLR out of the deal. Most recently, I traded an acoustic guitar I had (no, I don’t play guitar, and yes, I did buy it new for some stupid reason) for a 1.33GHz 12-inch PowerBook G4. It’s seen better days, but everything still works well, including the optical drive, which is a rare find for this particular vintage of Mac. A trip to the Apple Store and my local independent computer supply store later, and I’ve maxed out the RAM (to 1.25GB) and have a brand-new battery that will get me four hours and change with smart battery management practices.

Having the Powerbook means that I don’t need my Eee PC anymore. Don’t get me wrong, the battery is great on that thing, and it handles video streaming somewhat better than the PowerBook, but I just cannot get back to using Windows as my primary OS for any length of time. The upshot is that I now have a relatively new Eee PC 1000HE to use for further bartering. I’m hoping to pick up a newer-model Time Capsule, with dual-band networking.

Start a Gadget Exchange Program

Chances are, if you have a lot of gadgets, someone in your circle of friends also has a lot of electronic toys lying around which aren’t strictly useful all of the time. What better way for both (or all, if there’s more than two) of you to get a chance to try out new tools without the high cost than by organizing a gadget exchange?

Of course, there are numerous problems with such an arrangement, which is why you should make sure ahead of time that you trust the people you’re trading with implicitly, and that everyone will treat each other’s gear with respect and compensate one another for any damages that may result. It’ll still work out to be a lot cheaper than all of you impulse buying every new thing that comes out, and is a lot less wasteful, too.

Save Money

The bottom line is, the less you spend on gear, the more money you save. Believe me, if I could, I would just grab everything electronics manufacturers slap a “new” sticker on. Sadly, that’s not a realistic possibility. It’s far better to concentrate on finding “new to me” things to experiment with, and occasionally making a choice investment when one of those things actually does enhance my productivity.

Have you tried a gadget exchange program with your friends? Did is satisfy your urges to acquire shiny, new gadgets?

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But it’s easy to get so caught up in keeping current that we forget to keep the focus on productivity, where it should rightly remain. We can have all the tools and gadgets under the sun, but that won’t necessarily make us effective resources for our clients.

The problem really came home to me recently when I realized I was eagerly awaiting my new Eee PC so that I could get out and explore some co-working with friends. It struck me as painfully similar to the time when I was eagerly awaiting my new Wacom Cintiq 12WX so that I could begin doing freelance illustration in earnest. And that was similar to the time that I was eagerly awaiting the release of Adobe CS4, so that I could finally purchase the Classroom in a Book series and begin supplementing my self-taught proficiency.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was clearly waiting and anticipating much more than I was doing and producing. A quest for the best tools had become an excuse to indulge that most dangerous of professional vices: procrastination. Drastic measures were in order. Hence the following rules:

Rule 1: If you have what you need to do something, regardless of whether or not you might be able to do it better with something new or upcoming, do it.

I call this the Robinson Crusoe rule. The key is to stop thinking of your goals as inextricably tied to software and hardware beyond your reach. Freelancers, and freelance web workers, are valued most for their innovative solutions, not for their ability to rack up huge amounts of additional IT spend. Do what you can with what’s on the island; don’t sit back and wait for rescue.

Rule 2: Every once in a while, take a “Paper Day”

A Paper Day is sort of like a personal day, except you’re still working, you’re just working differently. When I take one of these days, I am not allowed to touch a computer for professional purposes unless absolutely necessary. I often take a Paper Day on the weekend, to avoid spot requests from clients. Writing longhand flexes different muscles, and helps me escape the boxed-in thinking repetitious digital work lends itself to. Plus, there are activities like brainstorming that I still find much more productive and enjoyable on paper.

Rule 3: Set up an IT refresh schedule, like those employed by private companies and corporations.

To prevent a passion for staying ahead of the curve from becoming a daily distraction, I’ve found it helpful to establish a schedule for reviewing, purchasing, and implementing new hardware and software into my workflow. I borrowed the tactic from the small consulting firm I used to work for full-time. They would review and make changes to their IT spend twice yearly, at regularly scheduled intervals. For my own purposes, a quarterly review seems to work best. And, of course, you always have to allow for unexpected purchases (to replace broken hardware, perhaps) and upgrades, as long as they’re actually necessary.

The temptation of shiny new things is a hard one to resist, especially for those of us so steeped in the tech world. Nor should we resist it all of the time, since really, it often represents our bread and butter. Yet we do need to establish boundaries, in order to make sure that the tech we use serves to bolster, not interfere with, our productivity.

How do you ensure the lure of new tech doesn’t impact on your productivity?

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Over the years I’ve learned to wait at least a few days before ordering, to let the initial flush of enthusiasm dissipate. But, judging by the debris of unused gadgets on the shelves in my office, I haven’t learned enough. My biggest regret may be the color laser printer that we almost ever used – but really, it seemed like a good idea at the time!

How about you? What have you spent money on that you wish you hadn’t? Which gadgets are collecting dust in the closet, when the purchase price could be collecting money in your bank account instead? What provoked you to the purchase, and what didn’t work out in reality?

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