Here are the criteria I used to narrow down the possible project management and time tracking solutions:

• Web based application
  Our devs use various platforms and it needs to run everywhere without install and upgrade headaches, I also considered Air and Flash apps
• Support for 5 users
  Because, yanno, we need five people to record time
• Time tracking must include timer with start/stop capabilities
  We are multi taskers and like accuracy; we considered products with timer widgets as well
• Feature list and pricing prominent
  Excluded all sites with vague details, no screenshots,  or “contact us for details and pricing” models, due to sheer volume and time needed to research
• Must have a free trial evaluation
  Yanno, so I could evaluate them
• Professional and sharp web site
  Attention to detail is critical to good software design and project management, how they run their site should reflect this

After nearly ten hours of research, I narrowed the field to fifteen products. Then I evaluated each product by importing several of our current projects into it and using the time tracking tools for one day. After which I ran reports and recorded my findings in a spreadsheet. The final ratings were on a 1-5 scale, based on usability, project management capabilities, time tracking capabilities, invoicing features, reporting capabilities, and API and integration tools. Here’s what I came up with:

Once I had some numbers to work with, I weighted each product to meet our needs, based on the following criteria:

• Usability: Ease and speed of use is very important to us, as we have little time for project management (x2)
• Time tracking capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Project management capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Low price:  we want to keep the price under $50 a month, so our value calculation was tweaked accordingly:  rating *3 – (price per month/10)
• Invoicing, reports, and so on are nice, of course, but we can make due with our external, existing solutions

So, using this data, here were my findings:

It should be apparent that ProWorkflow is, hands down, the best overall product on the market. It’s quality, well thought out, bug free, fast, and powerful. Skylight was by far the best for our needs, according to price versus quality. The rest of the data is interesting, but several of the products listed had a time tracking or project management rating less than three, which is insufficient for our needs. So the final choices for us were as follows:

• Skylight – use this and put up with the slow, laborious interface; our preference for now
• Basecamp + MyHours/Harvest/Tick – together, these products are a complete package, but pricey
• ProWorkflow – very pricey, but we could bite the bullet on this and get the best quality product on the market.

If you’d like to view or download the complete data, including links to all of the product sites, you can find all the gory details in the Google spreadsheet. You can also view the same data sorted by total quality instead.

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.

• Take notes quickly–store a url, email address, or command for reference later
• Reorganize a document–clip here, copy there, then paste it all together
• Store commonly used commands and html strings for quick access
• Passwords that I type more than ten times an hour
• Storing things I use daily: IP addresses, dates, sql queries, urls

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.

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.