Welcome to my internet.
For those of you who are wondering what the heck I do all day at Microsoft, you can read about the upcoming launch of Windows Live Sync (the artist formerly known as FolderShare) over at the Windows Team Blog, ars technica, or over on our official announcement page.
Sync will roll out soon with the rest of the new Windows Live services. Stay tuned… I’m sure I’ll be posting more once everything’s out in the open.
It works like this: I get to the bus stop, I check the time on my cell phone, and I wait nervously. When’s the next bus scheduled? Is it on time? Will I be waiting 2 minutes or 20? Or forever? Most of the time I have no way of knowing.
Ok, sure, I could find this information on my iPhone. But it would involve visiting two separate extremely fugly websites that are even worse on a small screen: Trip Planner and MyBus. On MyBus you can save frequent queries, kind of, by bookmarking search results - but no such luck on Trip Planner. I have to type in my start and end addresses each time, even though 95% of the time they’re both in the top 5 addresses I enter.
In short, it takes several minutes of fiddling. And several minutes of flashing an iPhone around while standing at an unlit bus stop is not generally regarded a great plan.
I was about to post a plea that someone write an acceptably mobile-formatted web app that pulls data from both of these sites, or perhaps an iPhone app that does, but then I thought to check the App Store (crazy, I know).
Sure enough, I found Seattle Bus [iTunes Store link], an iPhone app that does some of the above. It looks like it pulls from MyBus, but doesn’t have trip planning functionality… yet? But it does locate the nearest bus stop based on your location, which is sweet. I’ll just hope that trip planning comes along soon. In the meantime, I’m buying this baby ($9.99) and checking it out.
Another contender is OneBusAway, a free iPhone-optimized web app with MyBus-like functionality, which I’ll also be checking out.
Let me know if there are other solutions, especially ones that integrate trip planning. Efficiency in my daily travels is kind of… a priority for me.
I know that the first rule of getting organized is to find a system that works for you and use it. I know this. But I am also a complete sucker for shiny new organization tools. As a child, one of my favorite places to go was the school supplies section of UW’s University Bookstore. I would examine all the Trapper Keepers and backpacks, imagining the system each might create.
Of course, every time I used one of these items, whatever system I had designed would inevitably break down into appalling messiness: while I really, really liked organization systems, I was really, really bad at sticking to them.
This trend followed me into the digital realm, and online - I make systems and then I cut corners, and then everything goes to shit. Over and over again.
Until I found my soulmate.
Hiveminder has three key features that run my life:
Now, while Hiveminder and I have a solid relationship, I have strayed occasionally. Never for longer than 3 months. But about once a year I’m drawn in by some other, shiny new organizational toy. But Remember The Milk had too many options to fiddle with and I found myself fiddling instead of actually doing tasks. In Nozbe, processing tasks was too time-intensive, plus they hit me with an upsell. I tried a series of text files syncing across my devices, but I was much less effective when I had to manually move things around. And none of them had any safe procrastination support, so they ultimately failed me.
In the end, I always come back. I wonder if I’ll ever learn? Probably not. As long as there’s a new shiny, I can’t help but check it out. But I do so knowing that Hiveminder is waiting for me with open arms, ready to get my life back in order and let me get back to getting stuff done.
Check it out: Hiveminder
email me: rachel at this domain.
