Archive for the ‘Online serivce’ Category

Software for time tracking

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

I have been using RescueTime for more than a year. By “using” I mean that the application was running on my computer. Time to time I went online to see how my time was spent. Recently, after not visiting the site for a long time, I found out that my data is stored only for three month and some features (a year overview among others) are available only in paid accounts. It seems that $50 a year is not that much. But before committing my cash I decided to see what other options are there. Thanks to alternativeto.net (new website to me, and a good one too) I found a few alternatives.

Before going through the alternatives, I will specify what it is that I am looking for from an application like this. The most important usage for me is to know how much time I spent on a certain project. This simply means that I want to be able to specify what applications (documents in applications) corresponds to what project. Tagging is a way to do that. The next step is to see how much time different activities within a project occupied my time. This is also can be accomplished by tagging. I see benefits of storing the data online, but it is not a priority for me, because I do not plan to use multiple computers. For the next year or so I see myself working exclusively with windows and hence support for other operating systems is not a priority.

wakoopa: First impression was negative. After business like RescueTime, all the colors, pictures, and profiles looked a little alarming. Similarly to RescueTime, the data is stored online. Unlike RescueTime the account is free.

slifelabs: Looks too commercial without enough information to convince me to try them. Hence I did not even sign up there.

ybex: Seems to be oriented on what they need and my benefit is a side effect. This was not very convincing, hence no signing up there either.

manictime: Unlike RescueTime, the data is stored locally and the program is freeware, but for Windows only. The application has much larger memory footprint than other solutions.

Online reading list

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

I am looking for a place to keep the list of the books I’ve read or would like to read. I have looked at the following services:

  1. Amazon lists – too cluttered, could not locate import feature.
  2. Ravish – focused mostly on reviews
  3. LibraryThing – looks too simple, 200 books in free account, so it is not an option
  4. Shelfari – looks very nice, though import did not work out as well as I expect it to.
  5. Googl books – no import (without ISBN)
  6. Goodreads – the least problem with importing

I did like how Shelfari looks, but I will use Goodreads, because it allowed me to import most of my data.

Brilliant idea

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

My professor sent me a link to reCAPTCHA site.