It was well over a year ago when I first wrote about SpringPad on this blog. It did pretty much everything I needed it to, but over the course of a couple of years two things in particular started to grate on me. First of all: it was buggy. 3 or 4 times in that period the site was down for a whole day. While the team at SpringPad were always responsive, I keep my work notes on there and can't afford not to have access for hours at a time. The other point was that the site hadn't changed a thing in the time that I was using it. 

So, as I am easily bored and 2 years is a long time for me to stick with any app, I looked around for an alternative. And, of course, the only comparable service I could find was Evernote. So I cleaned up my notebooks and switched everything over to Evernote. You are probably all already familair with Evernote, but in a nutshell: it is easy to use, quick and with seamless syncing across devices. But I never got quite so caught up in it as I did SpringPad. With the latter I would sing its praise to anyone who asked. Evernote always left me a little lukewarm. 

But I needed not worry: have you ever been on hold on a phone call for 20 minutes, but you can't hang up because you're sure as soon as you do the "next available representative" will answer? That. Within 24 hours of me completing my migration and closing down my SpringPad account, the new SpringPad went live. 

Think Pinterest meets Evernote, with the SpringPad note functionality. 

The notebooks look much like Pinterest boards, and you can "Spring" online items in the same you as you "Pin" them. Once in Springpad you categorise your notes as Product, Note, Recipe, Contact, Event, etc. Its's somehow a little smoother than the previous clipping option. 

One of my favourite features on the new SpringPad is the Explore option to see other Notebooks. Again, following the Pinterest example, I can explore based on category - Food & Drink, Design, Tech, etc. - then view public Notebooks and the links therein. Lucky for me they always highlight plenty of Notebooks with the word Geek in the title: productivity tips, new apps and gadgets. Guess where I spend a good share of my time exploring new tools. 

So, in conclusion, SpringPad has quickly and easily won my heart back, and the backward migration has now begun. 

Another app requires my singing of its praises. I have just booked several flights and hotels for 3 weeks of travel in May and June, and am reminiscing about the "old" way of managing all my booking information (and when I say "old", I mean so 2011). 

A confirmation email arrives, I copy the relevant information, go to my Google Calendar, drop in an event and add the details to the location and description areas. To retrieve the details I go to my Google Calendar app, hope there is wifi if required, open up my calendar app, scroll to the relevant day and scroll to the relevant time, open up the event. Substitute Google Calendar with SpringPad or Evernote, and remember when that was the height of efficiency? 

I am probably late to this game but just recently started using TripIt. It's good enough having apps for underground and transport maps for all major cities in a single folder on my iPhone, now add to it all my travel information. The set up is absurdly simple: just forward your email travel confirmations to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or you can have TripIt scan your inbox and automatically import any new travel info to your account. And then, voilá: all your details in one place, in an easy-to-read-no-scrolling-required page. 

Each "trip" is listed in the app, and when I enter a chosen trip, it shows me a summary of flight times and numbers, hotels with check in/out times and maps and any additional information I added. I can add of course car rental details, ground transportation, meetings, restaurant reservations. And, of course, I can share required information with other users. 

This is the free version, but pay for the upgrade (whcih I just might do) and you can check in to your flights straight through your app, as well as receive flight delay alerts. 

With the Orchestra Task app - see what I did there?

This is a pretty useful task management app, available as a free mobile app or also online at Orchestra.com. 

It has all the features you would expect: different task lists or categories, scheduling (specific or broad), instant syncing across platforms. It is a simple userface and extremely easy to use. 

It also offers some of the slightly more advanced features you might want: voice recognition for adding reminders quickly. And also an email to Orchestra option for moving to dos from your inbox, to your task management product (keep that inbox clean, people!). 

What stands out about this app are the collaboration features. You can share your lists for easier coordination across working groups, projects with friends or also home lists. You can then assign tasks to different users and also leave comments on tasks assigned to you or to others. The sync is immediate and you can receive push notifications of changes made to your lists. 

This is not from my own platform, but is a good image showing a few different features available:

You probably thought it was dead and gone, but Plaxo is still around and re-invented. I had registered in its early days, then left it by the wayside, and recently rediscovered the site as an Address Book, a function which it performs rather well. 

Between Outlook, Google Mail, Thunderbird (Mozilla email client), my iPhone and our Linex CRM system (and, of course, my constant need to keep things well categorised), I am after a tool that will keep a variety of information, properly grouped and constantly synced across platforms. 

I am using the free version of Plaxo and it does most of this for me, enough to work anyway. Downloading the app on to my phone automatically syncs with my phone's own address book. Whether I add or update a contact online, on the app or on my phone, it is synced across all three. 

This all works well, but - that I have found at least - there is no calendar or task function, and the categories I have on the website are not syncing to my phone. So my question to you is: what tool would you recommend? I am curious in particular about Gist and Connected (now owned by LinkedIn) but am also curious to hear other tools you are using and would recommend? Send them my way. 

Another quick web app review for you. More functional than exciting, but worth a mention in any case. 

Linex has always worked in multiple times zones, and now of course more than ever. Even internal meetings can require coordinating three different such areas. And in this age of increased speed and efficiency, I was still not satisfied with all the meeting planners I had tried for cross-checking common times. 

Enter World Time Buddy, which I use as a Chrome web app, but is also available online. Set your location as "home", and add those cities you deal with regularly, and there it is. You can drag and drop the cities in the list to change their order, and all times show up on a grid with a highlighter tool making it easy to identify the time across multiple zones. This app has taken a 4-5 click process down to a single view. Clean and simple. 

"The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success.

... if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there."

Just one great quote from the video below: Shawn Achor, explaining everything that is wrong with our formula for happiness, and success. 

I highly recommend this video, it explains so much of what has to be rethrough in work, education and personal life. And so wonderfully told too.

With a slight delay, here is a quick review of the first website mentioned by John DiGilio in his SLA presentation. Namely: Jig.com

I'm going to go ahead and say that it is built like a search engine, but hear me out before you roll your eyes and exclaim "who needs another search engine?". 

You know when you need to find an accountant in York, or whether the Canon EOS Rebel T3i is better than the Canon EOS 5D Mark II for your needs, or not just a list of blogs about puppies, but some commentary on what people like and why? You probably Google it up, with a query like "account reviews in York" or "best puppy blogs", and get a list of links you examine one by one. 

What if instead of search results, you got actual answers? What if instead of search queries you asked actual questions? 

Hold that eye roll again: it's not another Q&A site either. Forget Quora, Mahalo and a plethora of others. Somehow Jig seems to have succeeded in merging these two worlds under an elegant userface and with very straightforward usability. It is not a site to ask about long opinions on the value of semeiotic studies. The query box starts with the words "I need" and you fill in the rest. 

The site was founded by Delicious creator Joshua Schachter, so we know we are in good hands already. Apparently a future development will be "offers" alongside the answers. Whether for products, services, both, I do not know, but I look forward to seeing how that will work. 

To be honest I can't quite put my finger on what it is (premise that I have been staring at my computer screen almost non-stop for 10.5 hours now, so excuse my reduced brain speed), but this is great. It makes the process of searching so much simpler, the replies are qualified and I like that you can turn those into a conversation to get a deeper understanding. 

Check it out, give it a go and let me know your thoughts, I'm curious as to how you will find this site. 

This is a brief post to mention a new Chrome web app I have started using.

Check out Numerics Calculator. Developed using HTML5, the simple interface shows a lrge input box and your recent calculation history. Clock on the keyboard icon and all your advanced math functions will appear. With just as much ease you can switch to converter mode, something that I end up using a lot thanks to the whole continent-via-UK-to-US situation I live in. Given the expertise you can further customise your functions using Javascript. But this is just a small part of what you can do on this app; for more take a look at the Numerics Wiki. 

(of course)

After trying several different to-do list apps, I recently came across Wunderlist. What I wanted here was something very simple, that would allow me multiple lists, a quick simple interface and manual selection and prioritising. The tool also had to, as usual, seamlessly sync across my PC, my MacBook and my iPhone.

You’d be surprised how few of the apps I tried did this effectively.

Wunderlist does it all. I have the App on my MacBook and iPhone, and the Chrome app on my browser. Every time I open any one it will sync immediately (other apps I have can take a while to sync) and interface also remains the same on each device. It makes it all that much easier to add a task on my phone, when I am on the go.

I mention the interface a couple of times above: it is very elegant in its simplicity, keeping tasks and different lists well laid out and quick to access.

To confirm - in case you weren’t sure - I am a fan. Does anybody else use Wunderlist? Or have you used it in the past and since changed apps - I’d love to hear why if this is the case.

I was introduced to Dropbox by a user who wanted to share a large file with me, and after that download I never looked back.

Dropbox is a file syncing product: you download a folder on to your desktop which looks and acts like any other desktop folder. The difference is that any document you upload to the folder is then available on all other machines on which you have installed Dropbox, as well as the on the Dropbox website. In other words: you can access the same version of a document from any computer.

I have two main reasons for loving this service.

The first is the syncing itself: as I have mentioned before I use a PC at the office and a MacBook everywhere else, and I work regularly from both computers. Saving my files to Dropbox means I can always access anything I need, and in its latest version. The fact that these documents are then also available online just gives me one less thing to think about when I am travelling or moving around.

The other is collaboration. Whenever working on a new marketing document, file or report, we can just save the files to a shared Dropbox folder and, once again, always have access to the latest version. We use Google Docs for basic file sharing, but when we are working on something slightly more complex it is easier to use files and Dropbox.

In a nutshell this avoids emailing multiple versions of a file back and forth and having to save all these versions on our desktops. In addition, we know we all have access to same final version of any such file.

This is actually some of the most basic functionality of Dropbox. There are many add-ons allowing such things as emailing files straight to your Dropbox folders, or having online forms sync as files. The syncing is almost immediate and access is then seamless: once installed, you barely even know it’s there.