If I were to say that there is a dearth of good to-do list services, it won’t be an under-statement. I tried my logic on answering the question as to why there is a dearth of such services. I think the most possible reason should be the fact that a to-do list kind of application has more relevance and presence as a desktop application (desktop gadgets). Two, this kind of service comes integrated with online task-managers and organizers and not as a stand alone service.

Now that I am done with my undeniable logic and quenched my thirst of reasoning, let’s look at the various services and identify the most pronounced and distinguishing feature of each of them.

Please note that we’ll not be covering the desktop based application nor the complete planner/organizer based online services (of which to-do list is a sub-service). The very reason is because each of them require an exhaustive review and hence  deserve a complete post. We’ll be soon doing a post on each of them so keep visiting TNerd.

I won’t make a distinction by sorting them in any fashion. So let me begin with the most technologically sophisticated service.

1. OrchestrateHQ – Manage Yourself

This one has an amazingly web 2.0 interface. OrchestrateHQ is highly Ajax based and one of the most simple interface. It might get a little intimidating initially to get used to the interface, but once you do, it’s has the most simple interface compared to it’s counterparts. Just to capture the effects, I have done a screencast to show you how to use Orchestrate to create to-do list.

Looks pretty nifty! Now let’s see what makes it so web 2.0. Coming to the technology part, OrchestrateHQ. OrchestrateHQ uses script.aculo.us and prototype javascript libraries which is pretty advanced. So technology wise the service is pretty advanced but the folks at OrchestrateHQ haven’t unleashed the power of the technology to pimp up the service with more of features. Overall the service is very basic with great scope of improvement over others.

2. Roughunderbelly

Roughunderbelly is another promising service. As the description goes is currently a free (and unsupported) service of the Topfunky Corporation and is used by permission from the Printable CEO. Very basic but the plus part of this service is it has the feature of tracking progress as it allows you to give yourself points for completing a task. You can create a task with a measure of importance and see how many you can complete in a day. This keeps you motivated to finish tasks so you can brag about collecting and breaking records.

Technology wise this one is again advanced. It runs on Ruby on Rails framework (Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that is optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity). Uses both script.aculo.us and prototype javascript libraries along with lightbox widget.

3. Blablalist

Now that we have seen two decent services which boast of having fantastic technology to back them, do you think they live up to the philosophy of Web 2.0. My answer would be a straight NO. One of the most important philosophy of web 2.0 is collaboration and sharing. the above 2 services do not have this feature. But the services we are going to explore now live by this philosophy. A counter argument would be why do I need to share my to-do list with someone and the answer is you don’t have to. But if you had that option available (whether you use it or not), wouldn’t it be great.

Blabla list (I don’t know who came up with a name like that ), promises a very simple interface to create and manage to-do lists and importantly you can share your list. However, it’s not the greatest service technology wise. It’s still using basic javascript like the good old sites of 1990’s.

4. Tadalist

This service boasts of "4,000,000 to-do’s created!". A very simple yet powerful interface. Two great features, one being sharing of your to-do list and the second being the ability to keep track of your to-do list using RSS. RSS support was missing for the 3 services discussed above.

As far as the usage of technology goes it uses both Uses both script.aculo.us and prototype javascript libraries. Great part about this service is that is supported on iPhone as well. Tadalist is a 37signalsventure which has the popular backpack organizer service for small business and runs over intranet.

5. Remember The Milk

Last and probably my favorite is Remember The Milk. Getting back to my good old logical reasoning, I think the philosophy behind having that name is because traditionally forgetting to buy milk has been a ritual. So in order not to forget buying milk you need a to-do list and what better than the name Remember The Milk.

Remember The Milk has a beautiful user interface. Probably the most advanced user interface. Let’s see screenshot of each section and features it has.

In the above image the two important features (marked by a red arrow) are offline mode and locations. Using the offline mode requires you to have Google Gears installed. The locations feature means that you can associate a particular task to a particular location (city). The location feature is being backed by Google Maps.

All the features in the above screenshot are pretty self explanatory. The orange arrow indicate marking tasks with different color codes suggesting the priority associated with each of them. Sharing and collaboration is the most easiest compared to other services. A little more advanced that the other similar services with a lot of features makes RTM (Remember The Milk) the best to do list and organizer service available online. You can also integrate RTM with outlook calendar or Thunderbird. You can also sync your RTM account with your blackberry and windows mobile. Also, there is a Firefox extension available for RTM.

I am hope this list helps you chose a service that you like. However, there are other services out there which are more than to-do lists like Google Calendar which can be used as a complete organizer. Also, there are more online to-do list services. You can find a good article on the same at solutionwatch by Brian Benzinger.

Wordpress is a blog publishing system written in PHP. All data is stored in a MySQL database.The latest release of Word Press is version 2.6, released on 15 July 2008. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The purpose of this post is to bring to your notice the key new features in the new release of Wordpress Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. Let’s look at the feature one-by-one. I have tried to put them in the order of importance. However, there is no hard a fast rule to sort them in that fashion.

1. Post Revision This feature is a life saver and is the most important feature at least for someone like me who usually ends up messing with an on-going post and hence looses out on good lines (both in numbers and content). Re-doing  is so much more painful. What this feature basically does is it auto-saves multiple version of your on-going post and allows you to go back to an older version of the post. The most sexy part is the fact that it shows you in color highlights the changes you have made prior to a revision. Something like the one in the screenshot below.

The left hand side (in pink color) is pre-post revision version and the right hand side (green color) is the revised post. Obviously the one in pink is an earlier copy of the same post. Let me now tell you how to achieve this. When you are writing/editing  a post, right at the bottom you can see something that reads Post Revisions (see the screenshot below)

When you click on any of the saved versions, you’ll get various options. The important ones are marked with a red arrow in the image below.

You can now conveniently compare for changes between any two versions of saved post. You can also restore an older version.

2. Press This

Press This is a simple feature that enables you to quickly post a blog post of the web page you are viewing. On the right hand side (When you are in the Write Post area), you can see something that reads Press This. It’s self explanatory, which reads

Drag-and-drop the following link to your bookmarks bar or right click it and add it to your favorites for a posting shortcut. Press This.

Ones you have bookmarked it (I use the the bookmarklet feature of Firefox/Flock) and you click the link (button in case of bookmarklet), you’ll have the option to quickly post a blog post. It looks something like this. Again the important features are marked with red arrow.

As you can only the basic wordpress features are available. That means if you have some plugin (All-in-one SEO) enabled for wordpress dashboard which enhances the capabilities of your post, it will not be available to you in this mode. As a result I am not a great fan of this feature.

2. Image Caption

I haven’t been able to replicate this (because my image upload is more or less screwed up post upgrade) but to give you some understanding of this, whenever you upload an image and insert it into your post, make sure that you start adding caption to it. Following image from CNN has a caption in it and this is the exact feature that has been replicated in wordpress 2.6.

4. Theme Preview

This is another cool feature. No need of upsetting your readers any more by showing them the theme changes you are planning. If you want to change a theme you can see the preview instantaneously. I am not going to get into the details of this. It’s more or less fun to just try to change your theme and see what happens.

5. Google gears

This (Wordpress 2.6) beautiful piece of open source web application is not complimented by another beautiful open source application called as Gears (earlier Google Gears). Following is what wiki talks about Gears.

Gears, formerly Google Gears, is beta software offered by Google to enable offline access to services that normally only are available online. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established. Thus Gears enables web applications to work even though access to the network service is not present.

In order to install Google Gears, hit the turbo link on the top right corner of your dashboard once you have logged into the admin area. Google Gear is compatible with Firefox 3, IE 6 and 7 and is all set to be compatible with up coming release of Safari.

6. Word Count

If you search for something like "length of a blog post" on Google, you’ll be hit by a number of people talking about what should be the ideal length of a post. I don’t follow any hard and fast rule on this but if you want to and sound like a pro blogger (who write close to 1000 words in a post) wordpress now shows you the length of the blog post you are writing. It looks something like this:

There are other small little improvements and features which have been added to Wordpress 2.6. I’d suggest you to upgrade to 2.6 just because every new release fixes old bugs and importantly seals any security flaws. Please take a backup of you database before upgrading. I hope this post was useful. Please drop in your comments and have a say on what’s your favorite new feature in Wordpress 2.6.

Well, I can recollect one offline service I used to use which is Microsoft Outlook that would download all the mails so that I can read it later when I am offline.

A lot of such attempts have gained momentum this year.

Few of which include:

• Google Gears Beta
• Adobe Air and
• Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Google launched Gears Beta Web Application ,which is an open source browser extension. It lets web applications provide offline services.

Advantages:

Database installation on client system
Uses data from local cache
Synchronizes data in the cache with online services.
During unavailability of network, synchronization is deferred.

To Install, Visit Google Gears Beta.

Adobe launched Air:

According to Adobe , Adobe Air is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web application developers to use their existing web development skills (HTML, Javascript, Adobe Flash®, Adobe Flex™, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.
In other words, Adobe Air helps users to update their information to the url once they connect to the internet.

Advantages:

Installation files can be much smaller
Allows integration of the technologies together (Flash, HTML, PDF) on a much lower level than may otherwise be feasible.
Standardized and consistent security model for Adobe AIR applications and users.

To download Adobe Air, click here.

Microsoft launched Silverlight.:

Silverlight is termed as a rich plugin for browsers. Its focus is on animation, graphics and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation.

Advantages:

Supports the display of high definition videos.
Microsoft to host silverlight media files and applications to stream large media files.

Read the overview and compatibility topics here:

Download from here :Microsoft Silverlight site