Small software tightly connected

Posted by Ike Washington
Mar 31, 2007 at 04:44 PM

Just as a slight riposte to the big software enthusiasts, I thought I’d mention two applications which don’t do *everything*, but, IMHO, do what they say they’re going to do particularly well:

Notezilla - http://www.conceptworld.com/NoteZilla/default.asp - was updated a week or so ago so that it now syncs the desktop app with palm pda memopads. What I’ve been waiting for since Conceptworld launched its successor to Quick Notes Plus at the start of the year. Much more than a postit app, Notezilla allows me to place stickies on my desktop or in “memoboards”. A new three-pane browser lists the memoboards, the sticky first lines and shows the stickies themselves. These can be sorted by creation date, modification date, colour etc as well as by tags. It sounds competent/standard, B plus even, but the developer’s taken a lot of care to make it extremely usable. Custom hot keys galore etc. And he’s extremely responsive to suggestions. I use it as my main Getting Things Done container.

Todolist - http://www.abstractspoon.com/ - is what it says: it lists your todos. Completely configurable, great filters and free. Again, perfect for Getting Things Done. I use it to track research/writing projects which have tight deadlines and/or a hierarchy of tasks.

Together with a couple of other apps - mainly firefox addons, dt search, evernote and rationale - these apps form my day-to-day work system.

Two crucial points here: each app is fairly easy to replace, there’s something else available which sort of does the same job; each app is able to export its data out into html. If software comes along which works better or if a developer closes down shop, disappears off the internet, I can switch apps without breaking my stride too much.

Putting my data into several baskets works better for me, lets me sleep better at nights, than the one basket route.

Ike