Online apps

Over the weekend, I've switched a good chunk of my organization to the web. I'm using three 37signals apps including Basecamp for project organization, Highrise for contact management and Backpack for an online calendar and general notes.

I've also moved most of my RSS feeds from Safari's built in reader to Google Reader. I really like how Safari handles my RSS needs, but I work on two different computers and keeping them in sync was a pain. It often involved looking through tons of articles I'd already read.

That really turned out to be my motivation to moving everything I can online. I'm often not in the office and I like to have access to it anywhere. This came up this weekend when we were at my parents house for Colton's birthday and I wanted to check my reading but really didn't want to fire up the laptop for fear of work sucking me in. Now with Google Reader, I can check for new articles anywhere. So far I'm pretty happy with it. It posts new articles a little slow for my tastes. I still have the RSS feeds in Safari for now so I can see when one pops up there. It may be an hour or more before the same article shows up in Google.

The other great side effect of this is that I was able to pair down my RSS subscriptions. I had about 95 different feeds. Some didn't update often and some I found I just didn't have time to keep up with anymore. Now I'm down to just 28 and it's cut down tremendously on the time it takes me to get through it all. If I ever went away for the weekend, I might have 300+ articles waiting on me, most of which went unread. This has helped a lot.

Between 37signals and Google, I'm really enjoying this idea of using apps online. So what great web apps am I missing?

37Signals at it again

37Signals is set to introduce a new product known as Highrise.

As a user of their Basecamp and Backpack software, I can't wait to see what they've been up to.

The Onion on Vista

The Onion reveals the major features of Windows Vista.

Red Snapper

The aptly named Tasty Apps makes a great little program called Red Snapper. It's just about the best utility I've seen for taking screenshots if you use Safari. It adds a simple button to the toolbar. With one click, you can take a snapshot of the entire page and save it in any number of formats. This is incredibly handy if you have to take screenshots very often. Well worth the $8.

Thanks to TUAW for the link.

Quote of the day

"And, meanwhile, we're trying to write our software for an unfinished OS, which is like trying to perform an appendectomy on a patient who is awake and actively slapping your hands away."

by Wil Shipley
The Delicious Library Blog

Delicious Library, by the way, is a phenominal program that's made for cataloging collections of DVDs, books and video games. I'd highly recommend it, assuming you are a Mac user (it's Mac only) and you are as OCD as I am about having your collections organized.