Thomas Much's Weblog

Lots of Things To Do

While attending CETiK 2007 last weekend I met two guys from Cultured Code (you might know them for their gorgeous CSS editor/viewer Xyle scope).

They showed a preview of their upcoming To Do management software Things. Despite still in alpha stage (they promised to release a beta version soon) it's already fun to work with this small, yet powerful application.

Things is an easy to use manager of your personal and professional tasks. You can view them as a simple list for today's or upcoming tasks, organized by projects or areas of interest, tagged by whatever categories you like (even hierarchical ones). In fact, while you can use Things perfectly at home for your daily tasks, if you use all of its features it's more like an issue tracking software for small teams with collaboration via e-mail or Bonjour. And this is really cool. If you don't need the overkill of a big issue tracking software (which is the case for many smaller projects), Things might easily be offering exactly what you need.

As far as I can say after their short demo and my two days of testing, Things will become my preferred task management software. The software just works the way you'd expect it to (even if there are lots of tasks in lots of projects). Compared to simple HTML web pages and modern Web 2.0 web applications, I'd say Things is To Do Management 2.0. I wish the folks at Cultured Code good luck for finishing Things in time, and I'm eager to buy a license as soon as possible.

Web Monday; Ruby Tuesday?

Yesterday evening I attended my first (and Hamburg's fourth) Web Monday. There was a lot of talk about Web 2.0, agile software development, communities, mashups... You know all the buzzwords :-). Quite a lot of people with different backgrounds shared their experiences and ideas of how the future web should work. (But how come photos show me eating that often? ;-)

It was nice to see how the Web 2.0 hype has settled down and the technology is now being adopted for common use. Of course, one hot topic was Ruby on Rails, and Jan mentioned his upcoming book on web applications with Rails.

Stefan talked about web standards. And, believe it or not, iCab smiles on his site! He was also interested in a regular meeting to learn Ruby/Rails from and with each other somewhere in Hamburg, something like a Ruby Tuesday. Anyone?