The world of Time Tracking and Project Management is a vast one. For small businesses like ours, there are seemingly endless time tracking solutions and a good number of project management answers. I spent nearly two weeks evaluating options in my spare time, so hopefully this data will help save you some time.
Mindomo is a great, free product for mind mapping. You can utilize it online for free to create some great looking and functional maps.
There is also a pro version at the great price of $6/month, which provides a desktop version, allowing you to store the files locally and organize with folders and sharing capabilities.
With the upcoming addition of collaboraiton, and there continual efforts to improve the product, it’s quickly becoming a great brainstorming and outlining tool.
For programmers and writers, being able to keep a history of copy/paste and access it with a hotkey is a serious boon. Here are some of the ways I use a clipboard tool daily (sometimes fifty times a day):
I’ve tried a few different tools, like Comfort Clipboard and XNeat Clipboard. But nothing beats Spartan for simple, direct, fast, and capable.
It allows you to store most any sort of formatted text, has 36 quick copy/paste slots, and multiple columns where you can drop text for different topics to store permanently and access them with a click.
If that wasn’t enough, it offers 10 different views, each with full hotkeys and columns. I’ve set mine up with CTRL+\ as a hotkey, so I have quick access to anything on the clipboard at the speed of typing.
It has a trial period, and is well worth the 20 bills for the full version.
For those with a little less robust needs, they also have a free version, 101clips, that is quite capable. Though I couldn’t live without the advanced capabilities of the full version.
I installed a new DVD/CD drive on a box today and found that the WinXP version it was installed with had no CD burning software–yarr.
A quick Google turned up about 20 paid products and 5 unpaid products that looked at least promising and moderately maintained. After reducing my list to the top three free–or nearly free–choices, I decided to give CDBurnerXP a go.
It didn’t find my DVD/CD combo drive, so I checked from explorer and found that it wasn’t being detected. A quick jumper fix and the drive was now on Cable Select and working for windows.
However, it still didn’t appear in CDBurnerXP. On a hunch, I un/re-installed CDBurnerXP. Low and behold, there it was. Hmmm. That means that should I change drives or add a new drive, I’d probably have to do the un/re-install again to get it to detect them.
However, the functionality/usability of the app is great, so I dropped a donation in their paypal acct and and decided to stick with it. I’ll post an update if I change my mind later.
