Signing up with L8r will allow you to have three pending emails at any time for free, but if you need to send any more than that, it will cost you. You can purchase 10 emails for $1.99, 200 emails for $9.99, and 1,000 emails for $24.99. When you run out, you’ll be switched back to the free plan. Now, you may be wondering, why pay for L8r when you can send emails in the future with a service like FutureMe for free? Paid users of L8r get more features like file attachments, the ability to send HTML email, unlimited pending emails, and SSL security. L8r will also get rid of that annoying “sent later with l8r” message at the bottom of your messages.

What I like about L8r is that you can create email drafts and view pending and sent email in the messages area just like you would a normal email client. The benefit of this is that you can keep record of sent mail and fix any mistakes you have made in a pending email before it gets sent out. L8r will also send you an email when a message cannot be delivered and put it in the “undelivered” tab. This way, if you sent a message to an email address that doesn’t exist or if someone’s mail server is down, you can find out what email didn’t make it and send again. Another feature is the ability to send an email to more than one person. You just separate multiple email addresses with a comma in the “to” field and L8r will send to each recipient.

Even though L8r isn’t anything all that new when compared to email reminders (except that it sends up to five years in the future), I think it’s a pretty neat service. I can see it being helpful for people that use reminders in their daily workflow and need more than basic text messages. You can have three pending emails at any time for free and get extras like HTML mail, attachments, and SSL when you pay for more. Something L8r may also want to consider is allowing users to send recurring messages to themselves for repeating tasks and personal goals. I also ran into a couple minor problems. First, when editing an email, the time did not offset properly from its original set time. Also, when trying to buy more email credits, L8r directed me to a PayPal checkout for Netherlands users and I couldn’t make a purchase. (Maybe not such a minor problem) Otherwise, everything ran well and future emails that I sent out arrived on average 2-3 minutes after my set time.

As a last note, another service similar to L8r and FutureMe is FutureMail which allows you to send email in the future as a note or reminder to yourself. FutureMail also has this neat concept of a “FutureMail Blog” where you get a public stream of your future messages and an RSS feed to share with friends.

When you sign up, OpenTeams assigns you to what they call a “space”, which is simply a group of other OpenTeams users. At default you may be assigned to two spaces: one being a “domain space” and another being an “invitation-only space”. When I signed up, OpenTeams created a space for every user that has solutionwatch.com in their email address. This allows me to collaborate with only users associated with Solution Watch. OpenTeams also assigned me to the space, “OpenTeams User Community,” which is an invitation-only space where every OpenTeams user can collaborate and share (or in its current state, test). I can also go ahead and create my own spaces and provide access to only the people I choose to invite.

Once you are in a space, OpenTeams allows you to collaborate with four main types of content: initiatives, cPages, briefings, and profiles. Strange naming, I know. I even ended up using the help section just to learn what each content type is for. As it turns out, they are just as they sound: initiatives are like folders used to keep groups of content related to a specific project together; a cPage is a basic collaborative page, or wiki page; briefings are groups of content similar to initiatives but organized in an outline form; and profiles are just user profiles that can be included in an initiative or outline.

To better understand how these content types come into play, let’s look over the interface. The interface is split into three panes. The first pane on the left is the OpenTeams navigator. The navigator provides a list of all initiatives and associated briefings, colleagues, and content tags. Each area of the navigator also allows you to associate documents to an initiative, colleague, or tag by simply dropping content on the respective area. The “List Viewer”, or middle pane, lists each relative content item and allows you to filter through all content on the site. The last pane, which is the content viewer, is where users can view a document, participate in threaded discussions, manage attachments, set tags, and even view the history of a document. It’s like a wiki, discussion board, and file manager in one.

OpenTeams allows you to add any of the four content types at any time and so getting started really depends on what you are wanting to accomplish. It’s flexible enough where you can just add content and later group the content into initiatives and outlines or the reverse for just about anything you want to share with your team. OpenTeams suggests you can even create internal blogs using initiatives with cPages, then using the List Viewer to sort the cPages by date. To get started, simply select a content type in the “fish-eye” menu at the top and create a new page. The content viewer will then minimize and a new window will appear that lets you fill in your page content and other metadata. You’ll notice OpenTeams also uses a rich text editor instead of the usual wiki markup making it easier for non-technical users to get in and collaborate.

One of my favorite features of OpenTeams is the briefing outline editor. If you have a group of cPages that you want to organize for your team, you can organize them in outline form with a briefing page making the content easier for everyone to grasp and view. OpenTeams explains that briefing pages can also be good for structuring content like slides in a presentations or listing sections in a table of contents. To use the briefing outline editor, just create a briefing and drag and drop pages into the content view. You can then indent each item you drop into the outline as needed. The editor also allows you to insert a “placeholder” item if you just want to add a simple one-liner. When the page is done, you can also drag it in an initiative folder and it will appear in the “Quick Nav Favorites” on the navigator pane.

Another great thing about OpenTeams is that every page you create gets its own discussion area, file manager, history overview, and tag cloud. What’s nice about this is that it lets you continue collaborating with users in a specific page without having to edit the original content of a page like you would a normal wiki. It also saves you from having to send emails to your team by instead using the discussion area. You can even add images and other files in a pages file manager keeping all information related to a page together.

The last thing I want to talk about is OpenTeams unique billing model. First off, OpenTeams is not free, but they do give you $42 dollars in credit to start out with. The way it works is simple, and at first it may sound pricey, but it really isn’t. OpenTeams charges 99 cents per user-login a day. So, if you were to login ten times in a given month, it would cost less than $10 dollars for that month. This way, you only get charged when you actually use the service. OpenTeams also caps the cost to $16/person a month. Additionally, if you were to stop paying for the service, you are still allowed to access your spaces, but you cannot add or edit the content.

OpenTeams is an impressive service, but is it better than a normal wiki? Yes and no. It really depends on what you need. OpenTeams’ high point is adding structure to a wiki. If you need to organize pages into folders, create outlines, track files, and work with a group of users, OpenTeams is definitely worth checking out. Otherwise, if you all you are looking for is a simple way to work collaboratively on documents, I’d say stick with a free service like Wikispaces or Google Docs.

Cashboard has four main areas: Estimates, Projects, Timesheets, and Accounting. Let’s start things off in the estimates area. This is where you go when you need to send an estimate to a potential client for a project. Cashboard allows you to list each task for a project estimate, set with a hourly rate or flat fee, and send the estimate to your potential client. What’s also nice is the ability to add a best and worst case estimate for each task so the client has an idea of possible overhead. Cashboard then allows you to either have your client login to Cashboard’s client area and accept the agreement or let you print out the estimate and send it to your client.

(Note: figures in the screenshots are just test numbers)

The projects area is the main area of Cashboard and is where you will spend most of your time. Like the Estimates page, you can add and remove tasks and reorder as needed. You and your employees can also log time for a specific task in the task overview. Cashboard also made it very easy for you to keep on top of costs as you add time to tasks. A row will appear stating the billable hours and amount compared to the original estimates or planned hours, which is very helpful for service-oriented businesses. It’s also important to note that when you create your company, you fill in a default hourly rate, but the hourly rate for each employee can be changed on a per project basis in the details area of a project. Cashboard will spot the difference and show your clients the totals based on the company hourly rate while you can view totals based on the company rate and employee rate.

You and your employees can also log their time in the Timesheets area. I’ve tested many time tracking products and I must say Cashboard has done a pretty good job with it. What I like is that it doesn’t force you to track your time a certain way. You can submit time on a daily basis adding the hours you worked for the day manually or using their stopwatch counter. Or you can go into the weekly tab and fill in the amount of hours you worked each day of the week at the end of the week. You can also submit as you go in the “All-time” tab. Whichever way works best for your team, you can do. The only problem I have with the Timesheets page is that the stopwatch counter cuts off when you close the window (maybe adding a simple session when the counter starts would solve this).

The project page also allows you to create invoices from your company’s logged time. Just click, “Create Invoice,” and it will automatically grab the amount of hours each employee has worked and fill in the information for the invoice. You can also add your own items to the invoice manually so anything that wasn’t in the original task list can get invoiced. Cashboard also lets you change the invoice id, sales tax, date range, and add a small note to your invoice. When your invoice is good and ready, send it to your client with Cashboard, which will give your client a login to review it, or print it out to mail to your client. Once you receive the payment from your client, head to the invoice, click “Add Payment” and fill in the amount the client paid up. To close an invoice, just mark the invoice as “paid in full” when adding a payment.

Ok. You’ve created estimates, projects, and invoices. Now you’re ready to view the Accounting area. It’s no QuickBooks, but it covers recent invoices, recent payments, and provides helpful information about client balances and net profits. Perhaps my favorite section of the invoicing page is “Company Cash Stats” which shows totals each employee of your team has made and how much you received from invoices with the end net profit. The cash stats can also be found in an individual project page letting you see how much profit your company actually took in after paying your employees for time on a project. Another helpful section is “Account Balances” which lists each client with collected information on invoices and payments giving you a quick glance at who’s on top of payments and who’s not. My only complaint about the accounting section is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to export the data or print it out.

In all, Cashboard seems to be a helpful product for service-oriented businesses. It’s a well thought out product that was obviously created by people in the design and development industry. You can create estimates, manage projects, manage timesheets from company employees and subcontractors, send off invoices to clients, review company payments and more. I was a bit overwhelmed at first and had some confusion when invoicing clients and splitting employee earnings (figured this out after adding employee hourly rates), but the rest came without problem. It’s also worth mentioning that Cashboard has a Mac Dashboard widget for submitting time and that Basecamp users can sync tasks and use projects from Basecamp.

Cashboard is currently in its alpha stage and offers plans ranging from free to $40 per month. However, and take note, the pricing page states prices are at half price during it’s alpha stage and that pre-launch users will get a promotion code for two free months once the alpha stage has completed.

Looking deeper under the surface you’ll find everything you’re used to. You have your own homepage that you’ll be able to edit at will. It’s split up into sections including, Photos, Tasks, Projects, Friends, the Wall, etc. Each section does essentially what you’d think it would do. Photos allows you to upload pictures from your computer. Your main profile holds all the necessary personal information identifying you, age, relationship status, location, email, even spiritual and political preferences. You have your own inbox on MyQuire that you can send and receive messages from other users. Also on your main page you have the “Wall” which simply allows you to post random comments and ideas that may come to your mind.

You have a projects area where you can create projects and assign members to. In the free plan, I felt it would’ve been nice to allow users to create more than one project to play around with. To add members to a project, simply drag the people you want working on the project from your friends list, onto the desired project. Also, each project is logged into a folder in the “My Hard Drive” section of the website also. This area allows you to manage each of your projects folders. You can open up and revise the files within each of these folders in a WYSIWYG. Easy enough. You can create new files in the hard drive sections and they’ll be stored there and displayed under the “My Files” section on your profile’s front page as well.

The calendar part of MyQuire is probably one of my favorites. It sets you up with a calendar that you are able to add tasks to by day and time. It works very nicely for keeping track of numerous events if your life is a little hectic. You can display them by day, week or month and you can also use the “Subscribe” button to synchronize your MyQuire calendar up with some of the more popular offline calendar applications, including Microsoft Outlook, iCal, and Mozilla Sunbird. The tasks section of the site also has this synchronization feature. Not much to really say about the tasks section though. You create tasks and assign them to a specific due date, if applicable.

While MyQuire doesn’t do anything wrong, it doesn’t do anything really new. We’ve been seeing these networks emerge like dandelions on the internet. One sprouts and soon its ideas fly through the virtual wind and attract others to try and make something similar. I have nothing against MyQuire, it functions, it’s very easy to learn and use, and it covers all the necessary aspects to help people keep themselves organized. Would it be worth upgrading to the Premium plan? I personal wouldn’t, but if it’s your cup of tea, go for it.

HiTask has built an easy to use application that allows users to access every bit of information on one screen. You will find a calendar on the left, tasks in the middle, and your team on the right. Adding a task is as simple as typing in a to-do. From there, you can group the task by user, project, date and color by dropping a task in a grouping. The rest is all very intuitive. HiTask’s interface is so easy to use, you can just about drag a task anywhere and it will do something. Drag a task to a specific date on the calendar and it will assign the date. Drop a task on a team member, or even on a chat window to assign a task to that member. Even set how long a task should take by dropping it on the daily overview and sizing it like you would in iCal.

Getting set with your team involves searching for each team member and inviting them to share tasks with you. I’d like to say this is a painless procedure, but we experienced problems when inviting a team member. Specifically, when a someone wasn’t registered with HiTask already, I would send an invite to them. They would then receive the invitation, signup and try to confirm their registration. But HiTask would for some reason fail to send the confirmation email and not allow them to use the same email address for sending a new one, thus requiring my teammates to direct it to a different email address. We are assuming things would have gone smoother if we were to register first and then connect with each other.

Once you and your team are all setup, you can start assigning tasks and chat with each other. As mentioned previously, this process is as simple as creating a task and dropping it on the appropriate team member. Perhaps my favorite feature is the real-time chat. You may be wondering, why would I need to chat in a task management application? It actually makes more sense than it sounds. Often when discussing a project with one of my teammates, we would start throwing around ideas and eventually end up with an even bigger list of things to-do than before. If we were to discuss in HiTask and a new task should arise, I could simply add the item and drag it on my teammate and further discuss it. The chat also allows users to send messages to one and another even if a user is not online. In this case, an email icon will appear next to the user’s name notifying them of a new unread message that they need to look at. The chat also acts as a log of sorts as it automatically creates a message when you assign a task to a team member. I would imagine this feature being more useful and appealing to teams that work over the web.

HiTask offers a free plan which can then be upgraded to premium at $12 annually featuring unlimited tasks, projects and teammates. HiTask is lacking in content, so I don’t really have limitations numbers on free accounts, but I can say that I reached the limit rather fast. Free users should also expect to see a small advertisement at the top which appears to have been added this morning.

So where does HiTask stand in this crowded space of online task managers? For starters, I found it be one of the more easier to use task managers out there and love how everything is just a drag-and-drop away. The interface has a young vibe to it, possibly to feel more inviting for small teams. Also, the ability to chat with teammates is certainly helpful, although I don’t expect to be using it all that much. I also like that team members don’t have to share their entire task lists with other members – invited members only see tasks that have been assigned to them from your account and other members (unless you provide them with your iCal feed). This way, I see only the tasks that I need to complete. Overall, I like what HiTask offers and my teammates appear to like it as well. We currently use Basecamp which has a nice todo list and milestone system, but we’re going to try using HiTask for a while and see how things go.

In related news: Wallnote, one of my favorite to-do lists for personal use, is now Nutshell. The core features of Nutshell are the same as Wallnote, but now it’s in a simpler interface and has a powerful command-based web search allowing you to search any website by keyword (for example, I have it search Solution Watch by typing “sw” and then the terms).

Project Planning

Basecamp is a communication and project management application which has become a no-brainer for many in the industry for its simplicity. I personally use Basecamp everyday, whether it’s in my own company’s account or on a clients account. It has taken away much of the stress that usually comes with project planning and communication. Users can send messages, share files, manage tasks, track time spent on tasks, set milestones, and more.

Planix is a new product soon to surface from its private beta stage. It’s an interesting application which I think will appeal to many startups. Planix essentially aims to make it as painless as possible for you to estimate resources, scheduling, and the cost of projects in development. Its system allows you to input all your projects features, number of team members, and other details which it then uses to accurately predict development hours and delivery.

PlanHQ, an application which I’m personally excited about, is designed to help you and your team create and maintain your company’s business plan. It provides sections for each area of a business plan as well as financial predictions and growth graphs. How does this help with development? Well, it’s good to fully understand the product you are building and your goals with it. I have recently started using it with my team for our company, but its one of those things you have to really work on for a good while. It’s could be best looked at as a system as flexible as a wiki with focus on business plan development.

Competitious is a unique service that aims to improve your companies competitive edge allowing you to track and gather information about competitors. You can add competitors, track news clippings, and manage a comparison matrix of product features. Using Comptetious, you and your team can easily find what your product is missing and plan accordingly.

Unfuddle is a software development environment and projects management application. It’s focus is primarily on the development and maintenance of your software where you and your team can track bugs, use source control (subversion), track development time, send messages, and set milestones. In ways it feels like Basecamp, though where Unfuddle really shines is with bug tracking and source control.

Gliffy offers a great service that allows its users to draw and share diagrams online. Create flowcharts, wireframes, and even network diagrams. Have an idea for your server architecture or development process? Diagram it online, collaboratively work on it with your co-workers, and print it out when complete. There are other options out there, but I personally keep coming back to this one.

Development

Springloops is a source code management tool focused on web development teams for rapid collaboration. Springloops provides teams with source repositories (Subversion) for each server they add to their Springloops account. Team members can easily commit changes, view logs, back-up to previous versions of code, and easily deploy changes to your servers. Springloops also provides Basecamp integration allowing you to easily import projects and contacts to your account.

FiveRuns is, as they put it, “Web 2.0 system management nirvana.” It’s a hosted applications that watches your servers every move through a small virtual client installed on your system to monitor, analyze, report and predict the behavior of your systems. In other words, FiveRuns allows you to gain insight and understand what is happening when your server or application fails. And being that FiveRuns acts remotely, you can view your systems status from anywhere even if your systems are down. Looks promising, but what it does is beyond my experience to accurately assess.

CodeIDE is an interesting site that actually lets you program on the web. You can manage files, program in numerous languages, run your creations, and use command line. It even has a real-time chat where you can talk to other users who are programming on the site and watch as their errors come and go. As I said, it’s an interesting site, but I can’t see myself developing with it anytime soon. And they need a logo ;-).

OpenCode is a service for all you Java/Processing buffs out there. Developed by students at MIT Media Labs, OpenCode is a web-based programming tool which lets you compile and run Java applets online using Processing libraries. The site allows you to browse through works by other users, create your own applets, manage resources, and meet other programmers. I used to develop applets with Processing a few years back, experimenting with mathematical art, and it’s great to see such a development.

Mashery is a unique service for API developers that provides API security, usage/access management, tracking, metrics, commerce, performance and developer/community tools. Just create an API, plug it into the Mashery service, and build a developer community with documentation for your API, a forum and wiki. You can also track API usage, manage API keys, and even limit API use. For an example of Mashery in action, check out Truilia’s developer site.

Other notable services: Zimki, Versionshelf, Gyre, Workspace.

Code Search and Manuals

Krugle is an innovative code search engine which allows developers to easily search for code within source code files, technical pages, and open source projects. It’s interface allows you to open multiple tabs of results and documents as well as view web articles without navigating away from the site. Another unique feature is the ability to add notes and tags to source code files.

Google Code Search is another code search engine which crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories. It’s very light weight and accurate supporting the usage of regular expressions and advanced operators for quick filtering. I like to use Google Code Search for because it’s fast and simple, but Krugle wins on the feature end of things.

GotAPI is an excellent resource for developers that provides quick access to dozens of reference manuals on one site. I can make a search through all the languages I work with daily and instantly find what I’m looking for or simply browse through a languages API tree. GotAPI also has a neat API search start page that allows you to instantly search through multiple manuals at once.

FiveRuns, the system management product mentioned above, is also developing a troubleshooting site, FiveRuns.net, to help you maintain and monitor your systems. The site has not launched yet, but from what I can gather on the coming soon page, FiveRuns.net will integrate with the FiveRuns.com system management service and provide information around all system types such as MySQL, JBoss, Ruby, Linux and Oracle. The information will be accessible in central information repository to help you resolve problems quickly and move on to other tasks.

Helphee is an interesting service in closed beta which allows you to quickly author and publish help documents online for your products. You can’t find much about the service yet, but what I do know is that it provides a simple means of structuring your documents in an Ajax interface with a WYSIWYG editor. I’ve also learned that you can collaborate with multiple authors and view advanced reports providing information about possible problem areas with your product based on user activity, which I think is particularly neat.

Other notable services: All The Code, O’Reilly’s Book Code Search.

Issue Tracking

Betabug is another soon to launch bug tracking site that titles itself, “Bug management for the 2.0 age.” Even though the service is in closed beta, you can find a live example of the system running to give you a rough idea of what to expect. The service has a big social feel to it allowing users to signup, add tags, comment, submit tickets, and more.

Porchlight is a simple bug tracking solution designed for small teams that allows you to manage projects, bugs, milestones, and team members. It also provides RSS feeds, email notifications, and iCal files to make it even easier for you to track bugs and keep up with milestones. Porchlight also has an API in the works and has recently announced Microformats support.

From the makers of Mephisto, a popular rails based blogging system, is soon to launch Lighthouse. Lighthouse aims to be “beautifully simple” and features email integration, private projects, extension by plugins, and a developer API. It also supports commenting on submitted tickets, messaging, and project milestones. What’s also interesting is the ability to add pages to your account for public viewing.

Other notable services: Bugja, 16bugs, Unfuddle.

Usability Testing and Tracking

CrazyEgg is a useful service that lets you analyze click activity on your site through heat maps, percentage overlays, and raw click summaries. It can help you learn what site design performs best, where ads could be placed on your site, and what areas of your site needs most improvement. Just run CrazyEgg on your site for a week and you may be surprised with what you find.

If tracking clicks isn’t enough for your testing needs, check out ClickTale. ClickTale allows you to track a visitors every move on your site. See what they click, where their mouse moves, and watch how they scroll through your site. Normally, when doing our usability testing for clients, we setup screen recording software and cameras, but using ClickTale would be much simpler. The product is in closed beta, but you can find a video of it in action on the ClickTale blog.

Wufoo, one of my favorite services, is an online form builder that makes it easy for anyone to create great looking forms and generate detailed reports on collected data. I use Wufoo for Solution Watch’s forms and have found the reports and statistics particularly helpful in deciding on a forms structure. Now, developers can harness the powerful reporting features offered by Wufoo through the new submit API allowing them to easily connect any form to its web service, collect data, generate reports, and view statistics.

Widgetbox is an open widget marketplace and syndication platform. It allows developers to publicize their widgets and widget users to customize widgets for use on their sites. In terms of tracking, Widgetbox provides developers with rich metrics covering widget subscription count, daily hits, referrals, and conversions. You can think of it as a Feedburner for widgets.

Other notable services: Formalive, Clickscapes, SiteShots, Clickdensity, Websort.

Widgets and Web Services

Pipes, Yahoo’s latest service, is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Sounds confusing, doesn’t it? Basically, Pipes allows you to grab feeds from services like Youtube, Flickr, and eBay and mash them up with in an interface allowing for the sorting, joining, formatting and querying of the aggregated data. Once you’re done mixing and mashing, you can create a custom feed that accepts user input and re-use on your sites. Really, I recommend just trying it to fully grasp its capabilities.

Dapper is a useful service that allows you to grab and use any web based content from a website. Dapper provides a simple interface that allows you to grab specific parts of a site, add some options to it, and turn it into exportable data for your own projects. You can look at it as building an API for any website. I could, for example, make a custom “Dapp” that grabs headlines from Digg for a specific search term on a certain page that would then notify me of any occurrences of my website. Combine this with Yahoo Pipes and then we’ll really have something special.

Teqlo, the most recent mashup service, allows users to mix and mash widgets from various services into one application. You can, for example, add a LinkedIn widget to your application with a search field by name and connect it with a contact list that interacts with Google Maps. It’s drag and drop style interface makes it relatively easy to use, though I still found it a bit confusing and you can’t yet publish your applications to the web.

What would a development roundup be without Amazon S3? Amazon S3 (simple storage service) is a storage solution for developers that allows them to store and retrieve any amount of data through simple web services. You can look at it as a big file system without a GUI (graphical user interface) that can only be accessed using REST/SOAP. It’s become quite the popular option for developers for its cheap prices and scalability. You could, for example, store images on Amazon S3 while running your service on your production server to cut down on bandwidth costs and scaling issues. Amazon has a good news release that talks about various companies Amazon S3 that’s worth a read.

Other notable services: Openkapow, MuseStorm, SpringWidgets.

Miscellaneous Tools

• WriteMaps is a web-based tool that allows you to create and edit sitemaps online. Add a site to your account, start the first page and simply branch off your sites architecture from there. WriteMaps also allows you to zoom in and out of your sitemaps and view sitemaps in an outline form.
• CSSFly is a very helpful, lightweight tool that lets you temporarily edit any public site in real-time. You can edit the sites HTML as well as select from style sheets used on the website. It’s even better when you’ve got the bookmarklet set to your browser for quick editing. Firefox only.
• Em Calculator is a new JavaScript tool that I came across that lets you calculate font sizes in em’s. If you work a lot with CSS, this may come in handy allowing you to convert font sizes in pixels to em units while keeping everything relative.
• WebWait is a simple tool that lets you benchmark test your website. Simply plug in your address, the amount of test runs, and the interval that each test is run. What makes this site useful to me is that ittakes into account Ajax and JavaScript processing.
• Tingelets are a set of bookmarklets for web developers that highlight specific elements on a page allowing developers to quickly see how their web layouts render in different browsers. At the click of a button, see if a divider element is spanning the correct width, or that a header element is offset.
• FireBug is every web developers dream Firefox extension. You can do everything from debugging to real-time editing of websites. I’ve been using it lately for measuring network activity, spotting JavaScript errors, and editing CSS in real-time. Very useful plugin.
• Ready.mobi provides an analysis of how your web content is likely to function on a mobile device. I’ve been meaning to make my site mobile friendly for a while now and I’m certainly going to be using this to validate it.
• Subtlety lets you create an RSS feed for any remote subversion repository. Handy for those who only use subversion and want to keep track of changes without having to check the repository.

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Simply send a message to IMified to get started (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, and Jabber are all supported). An account will instantly be created for you preset with three IMified applications: Notes, Reminders, and Todos. These applications are not only helpful, but make for a great starting point as you learn how to navigate around IMified. Navigating to a service is as simple as sending the numbers associated with each menu item and sending the letter “m” brings you back to the start message. IMified also has a web-based interface where you can update your settings and add additional services (send “7″ and click the link to get there). There are currently nine services outside of IMified that you can add to your account: Google Calendar, Backpack, Basecamp, 30 Boxes, Remember the Milk, WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type and TypePad.

The beauty of IMified is that all of the applications that you use are combined into one small service accessible through an instant messenger on your computer or mobile phone. However, because of the limited functionality with instant messengers, features are minimal. With Google Calendar, you can add and remove events as well as view upcoming and past events, but you cannot assign meta data or reminders to the events like you can on the web-based solution. The WordPress service allows you to simply add a title and body for a post and publish the post to your blog. Also, the Basecamp integration allows you to add messages, manage todo lists, and add milestones to a project. It may not sound like much, but having the ability to do all of that instantly without opening a browser is very helpful.

IMified also has a very helpful feature that lets you create shortcuts for specific tasks in a service. For example, you can create a one word command that lets you add a task to your todo list, which is much simpler than going through multiple menus and then adding a task. You can also add some text after a shortcut to automatically use it with the task at hand. So I have a shortcut for adding notes where I can type: “note [text i want to add as a note]” and a shortcut for adding tasks with “todo [the task description]“. So far, adding information with shortcuts has worked out great, but I can’t say the same with shortcuts for viewing information. When I write “viewnotes” to view all of my saved notes, IMified returns nothing and seems to only work when used in the service itself. Shortcuts also don’t seem to work when a service requires multiple responses to multiple menus. For example, I can’t add an event description and the date for the event at the same time with a shortcut Google Calendar. These are only minor problems though and I’m more than satisfied with the shortcuts that add information quickly.

Granted that the services IMified connects you with can all be used regularly in a web browser, it’s nice having the ability to quickly send a message to perform a task. If I want to add an update for a projects status in Basecamp, I can simply use IMified rather than opening a browser, logging in to Basecamp, navigating to the project, and submitting the message. There’s still room for improvement though, of course. For one, it doesn’t seem to send error messages if you send something in the wrong format, like a date for an event. Also, I really enjoy Sabifoo and how it creates a public page and RSS feed for all of your notes, which is something I would love to see with IMified. Maybe a way to view your tasks from the Todo service and notes from the Notes service online. In all, I love the simplicity of IMified and how I can easily access services that I use everyday from my instant messenger.

(via GenBeta)