Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

As you might know, I am mildly obsessed about statistics, visualization and productivity. And this is exactly the mix that makes RescueTime so fascinating for me, RescueTime, marketed as "Time Management for Geeks" will analyze how much time you spend on your computer with what desktop or web applications and what websites. You can get a graph of the ten most used applications based on daily, weekly or monthly view. Additionally you are able to tag all applications and web sites in order to organize them into categories like work, personal, procrastination or according to activities like reading, writing, planning, etc. All in all a very helpful tool that tells me how I spend my time - and a website that has changed the way I work, even if I spend less then 7 minutes on most days on this website.

A list of cool things I found in the last days, but for which I had not enough time to blog:

• Basel to Zurich in Google Maps shows public transportation (via Gregor)
• The World of ECMAScript by John Resig (via dzone.com)
• A recent applications and a recent documents virtual stack for Leopard - cool, cool, cool (via fscklog)
• VCard Explorer - supports hCards in Safari, but no real plugin yet
• Open Terminal here for Leopard - another tool that makes leopard even nicer.
• Shindig - Opensocial for Apache - an Opensocial implementation could be part of the Apache Incubator soon (and then part of Roller or JSPWiki) - thanks to Betrand for keeping me updated.

There is a first snapshot of the Mindquarry Desktop client available for Mac OS X. It is written natively for Mac OS X, as the standard SWT Java client crashes due to problems in the SWT library, especially when it comes to more advanced features like system tray integrations.

The feature set so far:

• Shows a task list
• Allows updating a task's status, title, summary and priority
• Supports multiple servers

Enough said, here is the screenshot:

You can download a development snapshot (as all our development snapshots) from snapshots.mindquarry.com. The client was created by Jonas Witt who is also developer of Aurora.

Check out this post from BlogBridge:

If you write or contribute to a blog or publish your work and commentary somewhere then we you will be interested to hear about the BlogBridge Pub Service. Ed: Yes, we did change the name from Pro to Pub after some feedback]

We’ve found that many of our users like BlogBridge for the same reason that we like it: you read (or follow) lots and lots of blogs and want to be as efficient as possible doing this. And why do you read so many blogs?

(from: Coming soon: BlogBridge Pub Service for micro publishers)

 This post was written using the new publishing feature in BlogBridge 4.4 (you need to use the weekly release, available for Java WebStart). And thanks to the stellar work of Aleksey Gureev and the BlogBridge team the latest 4.5 Snapshot of BlogBridge supports Roller, which allows you to publish to Goshaky Weblogs, JRoller.com, blogs.sun.com and many more.

• Topic-oriented authoring
  Not DocBook vs. DITA, but topic-oriented authoring vs. narrative authoring. Norman Walsh says, tpoic-oriented authoring can lead to worse documentation quality due to measuring only coverage, not readability and usefulness.
  (tags: docbook techdoc)
• Inkscape 0.45 - A Pretty Blurry Release | FootNotes
  Inkscape is a remarkable open source vector graphics program, I use it for creating icons for the Mindquarry Collaboration Server.

  (tags: inkscape software macosx gnome cool)

Just a quick note: Sandvox 1.0 is out. Sandvox is what iWeb could have been - an easy-to-use, WYSIWYG-Website editor for Mac OS X. The idea behind Sandvox is similar to the CSS Zen Garden: Sandvox creates HTML output and links, depending on the user's preferences, different designs with the website. These designs are 100%-CSS and range from playful to beautiful.

Sandvox allows inexperienced users to build simple websites, but also weblogs (integrates with Haloscan to allow comments), photo galleries (it integrates with iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie to upload media files) and allows a range of ready-to use "Pagelets" that can be added to the website. These pagelet include the essentials for every Web-2.0 citizen: del.ico.us, digg.com, flickr and stickam.

The websites can be uploaded to .Mac and any other provider that supports either FTP, WebDAV or SFTP. Especially the last two alternatives are interesting for me, because it does not require setting up a FTP server on my host, which is required by most other tools.

I've bought this application immediately after the release for my wife and if you are looking for an Website builder for OS X, you should do the same. (I've bought the Pro-version as it allows inclusion of arbitrary HTML snippets, which is not necessary in most cases, but you never know...)

That Instant
Originally uploaded by ocellnuri.

I've come accross a very cool new Web 2.0 application that allows management of micro-debt and micro-credit. cyclr.com allows you to track for example payments made for your colleagues when eating outside and only one colleage decided to pay.

Cyclr will analyze the credit-debt-relationships between all users and identify debt-cycles that can be resolved without any payment. For example if Peter owes Paul 5 $ and Paul owes Mary 5$ and Mary owes Peter 5$ no payment is neccessary.