I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has been available to the technology community.  I’ve used it on Macs and PCs and even a Linux box or two and for the most part it has been pretty good to me.  The fact that it is so extensively customizable, that it had tabs before any other browser that I’m aware of and the fact that it was a product made by someone other than the “Evil Empire” all contributed to my choice to use it instead of Explorer.

Certainly it wasn’t perfect with the primary problem from my perspective being a rather persistent issue with memory leaks that ultimately forced you to restart your computer at times that perhaps you would have preferred not to or else locked you up completely if you were a little bit unlucky.  However, aside from that issue I would have to say that up until this most recent release it has been one of the best pieces of software I’ve used.

FF Three on the other hand has been making me pretty miserable ever since I made the mistake of installing it.  I don’t know if it’s just me or if other people are having a similar bad time but after the success I had with the prior two major releases, I’ve been very surprised at how many bugs seem to still exist within this program.  In fact, there are enough problems with it that I find myself uncomfortable using any kind of web-based application as a trusted system and will probably continue to feel that way at least until an update appears to have solved the majority of the problems that I’m having.

So what are these issues you ask?

Well, I had hoped that the memory leak issue would be the major improvement with this release.  In fact, that is the principal reason why I upgraded (?) to Three in the first place.  Sadly, the leak seems to be a regular fixture that has not been “fixed”.  Perhaps I get a bit more runtime before needing to restart but when I look at my activity monitor on my Mac or check out what tasks are demanding the most memory on my PC I invariably see that Firefox is by far the one requiring the most resources.

Beyond these bug, however, are a number of other issues that  vary from annoying to critical.  On the annoying side is an issue I am having with the vertical height of the tabs.  Since a picture is worth at least a couple dozen words check this out:

(You’ll probably have to click the image to see the full sized version to really see what I’m talking about here) This is Firefox the way it is supposed to look.  Check the hight of the individual tabs.

Now the above version is what is happening to my installed version of Firefox Three on both my PC and my Mac after I open up enough tabs that they would occupy more than a single row.  As you can see the tab height has increased.  The more tabs you open the thicker the tabs become taking up more and more screen real estate as they do - which, since I use a laptop is particularly annoying.

What’s especially frustrating about this is that even when you close enough tabs that they would no longer occupy more than one row you don’t get the real estate back, the tabs stay fat.  This problem doesn’t seem to be theme specific either.  I have tried the default theme and four or five other themes besides but the problem seems to persist regardless of which theme I am using.

A variation of this problem also occurs with certain images.  When you click an image to see a larger version of it, sometimes the height of the tabs increases to fill more than half the screen.  They are so large in fact that you can’t even view the image you were looking at because the tab obscures it.  Frustrating and weird.  At least when this happens closing the offending image does restore the tabs to their normal size, at least so far.

Now the last bug that I’m going to mention is the one that is the most problematic.  Here, again, a picture will help explain what’s going on:

This error seems to occur any time that Firefox spawns a new window - when you click “help” while using GoDaddy for example, or any other website for that matter.  You can eventually get rid of the message and continue working by clicking okay about a dozen or more times but if you keep the small window open the error will continue to pop up and interrupt your work until you finally close the window to put a stop to the irritation.

This last problem is more than just inconvenient however because about one in three times the problem seems to completely crash the browser which means that if you are using any kind of browser based application whatever it is you were working on is probably hosed unless you were smart enough to save often or lucky enough that your application saved it for you automatically.

I am wondering if I am the only one having these issues or if other people using Firefox Three are being similarly inconvenienced and paying the price by getting less done as a result.  Please share your experience in the comments.

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My friend and mentor Andy Abramson who authors the excellent blog, Working Anywhere.  He has just posted an article called Tools of the Global Nomad that is a must-read for anyone that does any serious amount of work while on the road as well as folks that work from home but have the needs (or wants) of services comparable to those that any reasonably sized and appropriately equipped enterprise would have.

Andy’s list of service providers is very comprehensive however there’s one company missing and I think it is a vital one to have on your list if you travel in Europe at all and especially if you rely on mobile data in any way, shape, or form.  That company is Yoigo.  They’re a telecommunications service provider that sells 3G sim cards that work just about everywhere in Europe.  The deal with them is that for about the equivalent of $1.25 per day you get unlimited voice and data with your own new international number.

These SIM cards are sold all over the place - you can get them at grocery stores, tobacco shops, etc.  These cards, in and of themselves are enough reason to unlock your iPhone if you are planning on going to Europe.  They mean the difference between being connected or not being connected (or being connected and not coming home to a $17,000 data bill - no I am not joking - I really did get one of those!)

Among the providers Andy lists are:

PhoneFusion,  GrandCentral , Jazinga,  Boingo , Skype, MaxRoam, GizmoProject, Truphone, Mobivox and many others. This is one of those “print it out and save it” sort of posts as it references a ton of best of class providers that can make it a lot easier and more economical to get things done and look good doing it.

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TUAW is reporting that “Outpost“, an application still under development, will make Basecamp even more useful by supporting management of the application via your iPhone. Details are still fairly sparse at this time and it looks like we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to really see what the folks building Outpost are doing with their UI as even the images on their website state that they are under development and subject to change.

A lot of people are pretty excited about this developing software.  Basecamp, by 37 signals is a very popular application, and many folks that follow the GTD productivity strategy have found that Basecamp is one of the most efficient and effective tools for helping to keep track of commitments, projects and the next actions that they entail.

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One of our most prolific contributors, Eric Mack, has been hard at work developing a tool that has been called the ultimate GTD application for Lotus Notes.  Now, after months of beta testing with select companies, Eric is about ready to release the application to the public.  However, before he did this he wanted to do one last set of tests and get some additional real-world feedback.

As a result, you’ve got a chance to get a 24 hour preview of eProductivity for Lotus Notes and for those folks that put in the time and energy to give Eric the sort of detailed feeback he seeks, it seems you’ll get a preview license and also be entered into a drawing for a full version.

For more information you should head on over to Eric’s blog and check out the announcement for yourself.  Also, if you do check out eProductivity and find that it is as useful as people have been saying, could you please comment here so that others will have the benefit of your experience?  Thanks.

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If you happen to be a road weary traveler who works in or even with any significant amount of technology, I am certain you would agree that accessing your data on the road is one of the banes of your existence.  Between lugging your “desktop replacement” aka your carry-on boat anchor (so that you have all your critical data with you - just don’t forget your Chiropractor’s phone number) and attempting to remember which files you’re going to need and then synchronizing them to your small and light “travel computer” aka your anemic, expensive, carpal tunnel causing DVD player.

On the one hand you end up dragging around this behemoth computer that does everything you need (so long as you are within cord’s reach of a power outlet) while on the other, you have ample run time however your productivity is limited by how well you planned ahead as to which data you needed to synchronize as well as how quickly you succumb to the hand numbing discomfort courtesy of attempting to work on a cramped keyboard.

Personally, I have found a third solution that allows me to use any computer while on the road and so long as the computer I’m at has a reasonable Internet connection it is pretty much just like I’m sitting at my own desk, working on my own computer.  LogMeIn isn’t really one program - rather it’s a company that provides an entire array of services that for the most part revolve around providing remote access and administration for one or more computers.

Their basic program, LogMeIn Free is free just like the name says.  Unlike most free products, however, this is not a frustratingly crippled version of some functional program that is purely intended to force you to upgrade if you really want the promised utility.  This is not the “walled garden demo-version”.  In fact, LogMeIn Free is not only the version that I, myself, am currently using, it is so robust and provides so many sophisticated capabilities that there are literally certain things that this program allows you to do to a machine remotely that are all but impossible to do while physically sitting in front of the machine that you are accessing via the LogMeIn Free interface.

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Editors Note:  Erratum.  This article had a number of errors that have been corrected from the original version.

Applebriefs‘ Jeff Kabbe has done a spectacular job authoring a very detailed review of the GTD task management application Omnifocus. Mac owners have probably seen other applications developed by Omni Group, particuarly OmniOutliner  which comes preinstalled on many machines from Apple.  The company has also developed  OmniGraffle,  OmniPlan and roughly half a dozen other useful applications.    His review is so comprehensive that it makes no sense for me to do anything except refer you to his blog where you can read it for yourself.

Meanwhile, the guys folks at Omni Group  have made a splash of their own by giving folks a preview of their soon to be released iPhone application. In addition to supporting live sync - supposedly even capable of background syncing tasks to Apple’s new MobileMe service and being FREE to registered users of the desktop version of Omnifocus, the iPhone version is also location aware and thus can automatically identify various contexts and provide you with task details that are contextually appropriate.

As you might imagine there’s quite a lot of excitement about this forthcoming application.  Omni Group says that it will be released about the same time as the new 3G iPhone goes on sale.  You can learn about more about the soon-to-be-released application in the comments on the Omni Group blog

Lastly, there’s a small bit of news for GTDtimes..   Evan Carmichael maintains a list of the 50 top Productivity Blogs.  When the updated list was released recently I was dismayed to see that GTDtimes was not listed.  I suspected that this might be due to the fact that we only launched in March of this year and that with so many good productivity resources Evan might not have even come across GTDtimes yet.

I figured that I had nothing to lose by writing him a note to introduce ourselves and Evan surprised me by adding GTDtimes to his list as a special mention just below the top eight sites listed in the GTD Category.  I thought it was incredibly cool of Evan to take the time to do this - most folks running popular sites probably wouldn’t have been so readily accommodating.

Incidentally, Evan’s Top 50 list is a rich productivity resource and his site is packed with useful content for entrepreneurs, GTD’ers, and really anyone that wants to be more productive, more successful and more balanced in their approach to work and life.  I highly reccomend you check it out  (and mention that GTDtimes sent you).

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Thanks to the DidIGetThingsDone Blog I just discovered FreeLine Reports and their most recent video which does an amazing job of describing several helpful and free GTD applications.  You may have heard of some of these, you may have even used them, but the refresher is quick and I can almost guarantee that at least one of the applications they mention is new to almost everyone.  Check it out.  Hat-tip to DigIGetThingsDone for the discovery…

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Most of the time having anxiety is a bad thing or so we’re told.    From what the doctors say (and research seems to support them on this) anxiety can lead to a whole host of problems from high blood pressure and heart disease to troubled sleep, sexual performance issues, and even accelerated aging.

Luckily for me, the Anxiety I’m referring to actually starts with a capital “A” and is designed to reduce rather than increase the stresses of trying to remember too many things which need to be out of my head and into a trusted system - so long as you use a Mac.  Sadly, only Mac users can get this particular form of Anxiety.  PC owners will have to settle for the original version.

Anxiety is a cool little application that does one thing but seems to do it very well.  It sits unobtrusively in your menu bar or your on your dock (or both), waiting patiently for you to enter something that you need to remember.

When you invoke it you are presented with an interface that is so simple that I don’t think it could be any simpler and still be functional.  It lets you select the calendar where you want to save the task, provides room to enter the task and shows you how many tasks are open in that particular calendar.

The only other things that you can click from the interface is an icon that opens the preferences interface and a corner that allows you to horizontally resize the GUI. That’s it.

Entering a task is fast and simple and for basic “get it out of your head and somewhere fast” sort of work this is ideal.  Invoking it using ActiveWords or Quicksilver would be even slicker.

My only complaint is that in order to provide further detail about something you’ve entered into Anxiety you have to open the item in iCal which adds an extra step and a second application to the chore of entering certain tasks.

The good news is that Anxiety is donationware so you can try it and use the full featured version absolutely free for as long as you like to figure out if it’s an application that wll work for you.  With zero risk it’s probably worth a few minutes to see if adding a little Anxiety to your work day might be just what the doctor ordered after all…

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Editor’s Note: Author Steven Borsch has played both contributor and senior executive roles in technology companies (e.g., Pioneer New Media, Panasonic Communications & Systems Company, Apple and Vignette) but left that all behind several years ago as the Internet and Web accelerated and a participation culture emerged. He now concentrates on management consulting in social media and the biggest shift in human communications, connectedness and collaboration any of us will ever experience in our lifetimes.

Blogging at Connecting the Dots and Minnov8 , following 171 bloggers and numerous media sources, keeps him in the game and connected with other thought leaders. Without GTD, he’d have no hope of staying on top of all the projects and tasks he’s involved in daily!

By Steven Borsch
You have a keen interest in personal or group productivity which is why you’re involved with David Allen’s GTD system. As more of us seek ways to coordinate and orchestrate our projects, tasks and activities with an ever widening number of other always-on, always-connected and willingly participative people (many of whom have already embraced GTD), a new company and their product has significant opportunity to become a preferred and social way to get things done.

Due to the success of Allen’s GTD methodology and the sheer volume of software developers among the ranks of the faithful, you know that tools abound for using the GTD method. From David Allen Co’s own Microsoft Outlook add-in to dozens of offerings for PC’s and Mac’s (as well as other types of tools), most work well but suffer from an increasingly evident fatal flaw: using GTD is a problem if all of your data is sitting on a single computer. More and more of us are on multiple devices and mobile…using a laptop, smartphone, desktop at home and the office (and even casually using computers in coffee shops, airports or at a friend’s house) and need to use GTD but be able to access it anywhere we have an internet connection.

In 2007 Eric Hedberg, an economics major from Carleton College, worked at Secure Computing and Stockwalk.com, the latter in financial sector software. Hedberg became aware of the direction applications were taking by being delivered “in the cloud” (i.e., as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hosted and available to anyone with an internet connection) and started looking at ways to implement a SaaS data warehousing/workflow management application for the financial services industry.

After some prototyping and user feedback, he and his college friends who’d joined him (Doreen Hartzell, CEO, and Steve Bentley, in charge of interface design) realized that the best part of what they’d built was the project management piece, which delivered collaborative online workspaces using a GTD model. That revelation spawned the current company focus, Enleiten, which is a collaborative GTD application delivered in the cloud and available for single consumer users, small groups or businesses.

I interviewed CEO Doreen Hartzell about Enleiten and their approach on taking the to-do list and project management paradigm to a new level.

“To-do lists can be very good for supporting individuals working through and organizing their tasks. They tend to be weaker about the collaborative nature of work - how to delegate and track things without creating a lot of duplicate entries or extra steps to capture things you’re waiting for. In many cases, those are also applications that can support GTD work-flows, but are not necessarily designed for it.”

She continues,

“Project management applications, in our experience, are great at presenting things to managers, but not as well designed to handle the actual specific actions that need to be done to move the project forward. The separation of tasks by project can make it difficult for users to extract their tasks and integrate those with the rest of their work. They can also be problematic if it’s difficult to reorganize projects in an iterative work-flow. We believe the efficiency of those applications can also break down a bit if members of a project team have different personal systems and then need to do double entry to their own system and the team’s project management application.”

When I asked about multiple device types and access from anywhere there is an internet connection, Ms. Hartzell touched on several of their roadmap directions and this is clearly directional for them. The Pro edition for groups includes all of the current features with these additions appearing in about a month:

• File upload
• Creating workgroups to share full projects (vs individual task delegation in the basic version)
• Ability to create custom checklist templates to streamline business workflow or commonly used lists

They have a long list of planned features, and prioritization of those will be driven substantially on user feedback. Their goal is to deliver simple software, but they’d like to accomplish that through good user interface, and careful choice on adding features.

Finally, their short list of features to add include:

• Increased input/output options including Jott integration, iCal import/export, custom RSS feeds, SMS, and within a week daily email task notifications
• Greater customization of information display by the user (what you want on your Next Actions page, maybe color coding of projects, tasks or contexts, etc.)
• Mobile and offline versions
• Establishing a community library of templates to allow users to share them.

My brief exposure to Enleiten has caused me to consider their approach carefully. While admittedly not a left-brain dominant analytical, I do understand enough about myself that I realize I need the analytical as well as both visual and experiential elements in an application to truly and intuitively “get it” and continue using it. While I found the Ajax-y goodness of dragging-n-dropping tasks into other projects compelling, I did find the application to be too transactional and thus mostly left brain (and I’d buy the upcoming “Pro” account to get rid of the advertisements in the free version as they’re visually distracting as they are with most “freemium” versions of other, cloud-based applications).

That said, Enleiten has nailed the workflow and functionality (Projects/People/Contexts) in much the same way that Google nailed search vs. cluttering up the page with lots of ads, upsells and cross selling. They’ve hit the sweet spot of GTD and lightweight project management and coupled it with a group approach — one I’d term a “social GTD” application.

It’s worth a few minutes of your time to check out Enleiten, a likely candidate to become a preferred and social way to get things done.

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Earlier today I got the chance to get a personal tour of a new application called Presdo that makes it fast and easy to schedule meetings with one or more people. My tour guide was Presdo founder Eric Ly who also happens to be one of the co-founders of another little application called Linkedin. Eric and his very small team - which he calls one and a half people - has been laboring over Presdo for the better part of the last two years and it shows.

Presdo, unlike one of its principal competitors, Tungle, (previously profiled on GTDtimes here) is a completely web-based application which means there’s no client to download, no limit to the type of operating system it will work on and no need to integrate the software into any other product such as Outlook or Exchange.

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