The Web 2.0 era saw the consolidation of 3 different kinds of website: social websites (which include communication tools like Twitter and bigger networks like Facebook), collaborational websites (Google Docs, Wave) and online backup solutions. Not exactly a “websites”, when people started browsing more and basically doing more stuff with their computers, the need of a virtual, remote yet secure backup solution seemed pretty much obvious. I mentioned many times what I think it’s the best app to effortlessly store up to 2GB of data for free, Dropbox, and I’ve also written a post about 40 creative uses of Dropbox. That post basically talked about many different ways of using Dropbox not only to store simple backups of files and folders, but how you can use it to synchronize applications libraries and, for example, browser bookmarks across multiple Macs. But wouldn’t it be great to have a built-in, Apple -like solution to do that instead of setting up a lot of little tricks and hacks?

As a second post for the “It could be a Mac app” series today I’ll talk about MobileMe: I’ll take a look at the pros and cons of Apple’s web interface for its sync & backup tool, the actual usability of the webapp and why you should even consider of making a Fluid app out of it.

Read more

The Mac platform is blessed with tons of excellent productivity tools, outliners, and task managers. Despite this, the majority of these apps have been founded on the GTD philosophy, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’ve always wanted a separate application for managing tasks that specifically relate to school. You could certainly do this in an application like Things or The Hit List, but it can get quite messy since you’d have to create tags for classes, then you have to manage assignments alongside your business stuffs, and you just get bogged down in everything rather than the schoolwork you want to focus on.

Enter Schoolhouse, an application dedicated to providing you with the management tools needed to stay on task and get those assignments turned in on time. It also features an incredibly smart grading tool that can calculate weighted and unweighted grades, which is an amazing time saver compared to doing it by hand on the Ti-83.

Keep on reading to find out what makes this app one of my favorites.

Read more

There’s an interesting paradox floating around the Mac OS X scene: there are a lot of interesting apps to manage tasks and make your to-do workflow easier, but most of these apps are difficult to manage. What a nice situation: getting things done with an application that requires 2 minutes just to set up a new task. And trust me: it’s full of apps like these out there. Now, the situation isn’t that tragic fortunately: it’s also true that there are many excellent apps, both for Mac and yes, the iPhone.

Today I’d like to talk about what’s in my opinion the best to-do management and task organizer app currently available for Mac and iPhone: Things. I’ll explain how I’ve set it up in order to manage MacStories’ activities and scheduled tasks and how I made it work as a team project management app as well.

Read more