The app is about keeping track of how you spend your time: Who was it done for, what was the project, what was done, when, and for how long. The first step is to simply take out your phone, start the app (tap 1) and then press the add button (tap 2).
I started this post yesterday. But with Steve Job's resignation, please note that his work exemplifies what this post promotes. Cliff Kuang wrote in Fast Company Design, "Steve Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live..." A Jobsian focus on the user experience is an excellent aspiration for any software engineer.
An important aspect of any product's development is quality assurance. Essential to that is the reviewer's mindset. This is a cliché in macro approaches; of course a "quality mindset" should inform all product creation phases. But even in the micro of quality assurance as discrete phase, mindset matters.
I take it back, I'm switching to OmniFocus. Last year I decided Life Balance was the leader. It had been since I'd used a Treo, excepting a brief flirt with OmniFocus while it was the only iPhone 3 task software around.
 |
Use the Project Manager's Stopwatch to quickly collect time on task and easily export that info: You're 3 taps from the phone being off to using the app for tracking. This utility app is perfect for busy project managers, consultants, and efficiency enthusiasts. Created by a PMP who prefers to not do paperwork. |  |
Recently I received a set of preliminary project plans. On the face it was normal: 18 month duration, relatively standard product set, expected functional groups and staff assignments.
But there was one very disturbing feature: The details increased further along the timeline.
Mobile task management supplies much of my oxygen. By 2006 I had fallen in love with Life Balance on various Palm Treos. But when I got my iPhone 3G in 2008, Life Balance wasn't available and I had to go with
OmniFocus.
Recently I discovered Life Balance is available for the iPhone. So I decided to give it a try. I've also used both OmniFocus and Life Balance in conjunction with their desktop clients.
Yesterday I received the best compliment in a while. I helped a company focus.
Recently I was asking for an XML API, preferably something simple like REST. This company is the electronic equivalent of a printing house and they have the contract for some of the best reference content available.
But the services delivered HTML. It was easily digested as whole content of course, everyone and -thing can do HTML rendering. But it was hard to process. HTML mixes presentation and data, as they say. That complicates processes which are interested in the data only.
I've recently been an observer on two strikingly similar projects, massive programs really, that have had two strikingly different outcomes. In the first week of this year I received memos from the heads of each program, and they couldn't have been more different.
One memo invited me to a demonstration of the project output. The other warned me that project delays would trigger cascading time constraints across several, previously unrelated products.
The year I succeeded at moving firmly into the cloud. I hesitated-- like Star Wars, would a corporate Emperor arrive in my cloud city to tax my data at an arbitrary and unpleasant price? I use online services, but I don't like common trends in terms of service, with Facebook perhaps having the worst.
