Just a Memo

Action Method - Splash 20080916, originally uploaded by stechico.

In a recent announcement, Behance unveils its new product called Action Method (AMO). They have spent the past year designing and developing the new platform for productivity and project management.

The system is based on the “Action Method” and the design of our paper product line, but the technology itself is revolutionary. Now being beta-tested by a select group of people and teams, AMO is a web-based application that offers a radically different approach to managing projects and collaborating with others.

You may signup to be notified when it launches by click here.

Meanwhile, on a side note, I’m digging the Methodology page’s copy and visuals:

The success of any idea ultimately comes down to action. Our method is a discipline for everyday productivity.

Designed for those with many ideas and lots of creative energy, the Action Method seeks to simplify project management and life.

This Chronotebook from Muji is a fresh concept. It was designed by Wong Kok Keong (Orcadesign, in Singapore) and won a Judges’ Prize in Muji’s International Design Awards #2 (May 15 to July 31, 2007).

Diary schedules are arranged in lines and grids, which are difficult to see and has little flexibility. This notebook makes it clear, intuitive and easy to plan and see your daily schedules.

Cool Hunting’s brief write-up on it gives us a qualitative insight on how useful it can be, and how different it can be to what we have been used to:

Beige, minimal, with rounded corners and just small enough to fit in your pocket, the Chronotebook has trademark Muji aesthetic appeal. The clock, located in the center of an open page, is divided in halves by the midline of the book—the left hand white graphic represents AM, while the dark graphic on the right is PM. Not only does the layout illustrate our circadian nature but it forces you to organize tasks according to the time of day they need to be done. Overall, it’s easy to look at, simply comprehended and accomplishes a design feat by adding a small feature (a more logical way to break up your day) that has big rewards in functionality.

Anyways, thought I’d share with those of you looking for a new way to organize or log your day, etc.

I have been tinkering around trying to get GCALDaemon working again after the update to Leopard, but it just hasn’t been the same from its former self of 1-to-1 sync. Thought you can find different applications that may allow you to do this, it’s one thing to get it for free and do through the power of the crowd. But things have been looking grim lately as getting GCALDaemon to work with Leopard is still up in the air. Enter NuevaSync.

NuevaSync allows direct, over-the-air, native synchronization of certain smart phones and PDA devices with public PIM, and calendaring services including Google Calendar. NuevaSync does not need any software installed on your device because it uses synchronization protocols that are already built in.

I had given it a chance. It requires you signup w/ nuevasync.com. Yah, I know its another account to keep track of from the many services out there, but hey… if it works–it works. The setup is pretty simple. You pretty much just have to follow the instructions which were written in terms of a 7th-grader–easy enough.

A couple of facts that I found out along with NuevaSync’s FAQ:

• It currently supports the following mobile devices:
  • Apple iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2.0
  • Windows Mobile based PDAs and smartphones
• You’ll be doing push/fetch to NuevaSync’s “Exchange Server”
• Adding an alarm notification on an event will default to a “Pop-up” reminder in the event’s Google Calendar (gCal) version. Vice-versa; you’ll need to select “Pop-up” as the type of remind when creating the event in gCal in order to have it also available in your iPhone.
• Having your iPhone’s setting of “Push to OFF” and “Fetch to Manually” will still enable to NuevaSync to perform its job while allowing you to save your iPhone’s mojo.
• It can sync to multiple calendars under your gCal account of those Calendars you have a permission to write to. You may find out which ones via going to the NuevaSync status page.
• Even though you can sync with multiple calendars, creating an event in your iPhone would default to your main calendar. This you can say would be a step back if your trying to keep things very organized and categorize your events (i.e. Personal, Work, Project A, Project B, etc.).

Sounds good right? So, if you aren’t really using more than one calendar or don’t care if the events from your write-permitted calendars are merged together into one in your iPhone, I’d definitely recommend you to give NuevaSync a try. But don’t worry, they have that item in their TODO:

So when will you support multiple calendars on the Apple devices?
Soon, it’s one of our top new feature priorities.

Anyways, I hope this helps. Please do let me know if you happen to find new, interesting things about it. Have a good sync!

It seems that I am finding Google Calendar (currently being referred to as gCal by technopiles) an alternative to Outlook lately. Even though I wish that Google would finish up implementing some kind of syncing between gCal and Outlook already. But luckily, there’s a “hack” that helps out in that side of things. I guess its enough to hold me down for a bit till something from Google comes about.

Anyways, one of the other things that I was hoping gCal to have was a simple to-do list(s), aka. Tasks for those Outlook-oriented people. As I was Blingo-ing for an integration of some kind of to-do list with gCal, this article was on top of the list by Matias Pelenur. It does the job using JS, GM and FireFox. Although at the moment, it only saves your to-do list per GM install; locally that is, per computer. But there are a couple of workarounds that can be done to make it store to services such as Amazon S3, gCal itself, etc. as noted by Matias.

Supposedly, Google mentioned the availability of an “Account Authentication Proxy for Web Applications” feature that will be intergrated with their gCal API in late April… this past April in fact. I guess we’ll just have to wait for an update on Matias about that, or from Google regarding their own home-blended to-do list integration with gCal.

Protopage just seems to keep getting better and better. Lately, they updated to version 2.0. That’s “2.0″ as in “Web 2.0″–HA! *snicker* OK. I admit, it’s still too early on the week for such foolish wordings but all is fair in the land of web technology and blogging.

Meanwhile, Protopage jam-packed their release with a slew of new features. Some new features that stood out for me were:

• ability to add new pages
• rounded corners on panels
• new color schemes for panels
• and rich-text editing

There are plenty more that I still have to try out. So, if you missed my write-up on Protopage last September and still haven’t tried it out–it’s not too late to do so. By the way, did I mention that it’s FREE?!

Do you need another reason to jump in and have a look at it? If so, then lets just say that the BBC covered Protopage. Anyways, what’s a better reason than to just help you get organized in life.

Keep it simple–and FREE!