In comes Vitamin-R. It is not a to-do list, and it’s also much more than a timer. For starters, and this is the only time I’ve ever said this about any piece of software, read the manual. It is a really valuable lesson in how our brain works and what you can do to get it to work more efficiently.

A central concept in Vitamin-R is the concept of a “time slice”, which will be very familiar to users or the Pomodoro Technique. Much like Francesco Cirillo‘s pomodoros, a time slice is a block of time during which you need to be totally focused on the task at hand, avoiding distractions at all costs. Time slices can be configured to have different durations, and the recommendation is that you can go up to 45 minutes, differing from the Pomodoro Technique which says you should stop at 25 minutes. Vitamin-R also recommends that after each time slice you take a timed break, but you can also vary its duration. All the reasoning behind these choices is beautifully explained in the application’s manual.

Vitamin-R's excellent timer

Another interesting concept presented by the tool is that you should have a clear objective for the work you’re performing, so at the start and end of each time slice you are shown what your objective is. There is also a notepad of sorts where you can take notes about anything you need to take off your short-term memory, and also so that you can more easily pick up where you left when you come back for your next time slice.

At the end of each time slice, you are asked to record whether the time slice was a success or not, if your overall objective was completed, and also how you felt during the time slice: if you were distracted, if you experienced “flow”, and a few other perceptions in between. This is one of the nicest touches in the tool, because it generates what to me is the most benefical feature: a rich statistics graph, which shows you not only a log of how you worked that day and how much of your work was focused or distracted, but also during which times of the day you are most focused and during which days of the week you work better. For instance, after a week using the tool daily, I was able to learn that I work better between 8 and 10 a.m. (which I already suspected), that early afternoons suck (which I also suspected), and that mondays are great days and fridays are lousy (which I had no clue). This information allows you to organize your day and week so that your most crucial work is performed during those periods where you work better.

My statistics for time of the day - yes, afternoons suck.

I cannot reinforce enough how much Vitamin-R is helping me work. It teaches you in practice how to be more productive and allows you to develop at your own pace the workflow that fits your method of work. It is expensive for App Store levels (US$19.99), but it is more than worth it for the level of productivity you will gain after only one week using it. I would try to imporve a little bit on the design of the app which, while functional, is not beautiful, and I would add integration with Wunderlist to make me 110% happy with it. But I would definitely recommend the app to anyone interested in getting more done with their time. Plus, it has a killer slogan: “Practice the art of deliberate attention”. Cool eh?

Do you apply any specific time management techniques regularly? Do they fit into your workflow “out of the box” or have you adapted it to your working style?

1. Themeforest

Themeforest is an absolutely huge marketplace, with hundreds of good quality themes in many cateogries (not only WordPress). Themes are sold individually, with a small discount if you use pre-paid credits. Themeforest allows the authors themselves to sell their themes, so each author provides support in a different manner. I’ve never had any problems, but I guess it’s always good practice to read through some of the comments for the theme you’re considering to get a feel of the temperature in there. One of the nice things about using Themeforest is that any credit that you purchase can be also used in any of the marketplaces ran by Envato, its parent company, and there are quite a few of them: Photodune for stock photography, Code Canyon for code snippets and plugins, Active Den for Flash files, and so on.

2. Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes is one of the cheapest solution for premium themes. They offer a subscription model in which for only US$39 per year you get access to all of their themes. Quality is always good, even if some of the designs already look a little dated and their “ePanel” admin interface isn’t always as flexible as I’d like. Since all themes are designed by Elegant Themes themselves, support is through their own forum and is excellent – very fast replies, and I’ve never seen a problem left unsolved.

3. Woothemes

Woothemes is one of the better known names in the WordPress theme market, having been around for a while now. Their theme framework is widely recognized as one of the best around. Recently they’ve released Woo Commerce, an e-commerce platform built around their themes, which has met with some very positive feedback (I’ve not used it yet for production sites, but it looks great). Support is provided by Woothemes themselves. As for pricing, they lean  towards the higher end of the spectrum, with individual themes costing arount US$70 withoud PSD files or US$150 with PSDs. They also have a subscription option which gives access to all the themes, which has a US$125 setup fee with a monthly charge of US$15 for the themes without PSDs, and US$200+US$20/mo for the themes with PSD files.

4. Organic Themes

Organic Themes is another option that sells individual items (around US$69 each, with full PSDs) and gives you the option to buy all of their themes (current and future) for US$249. So far they have a smaller collection, but their themes are good quality. I have experienced slower response times in their support forums, but I do like the general design and quality of their themes.

5. Mojo Themes

Mojo Themes is more like Themeforest in that it is a real marketplace where authors sign up to sell their items. It doesn’t have the advantage Themeforest has of having a bunch of related marketplaces, but it does have some great themes and the purchasing process is very straightforward. Certainly a place to check out when looking for your themes.

The WordPress theme space is growing a lot, now that WordPress has a virtual monopoly in the blogging platform arena – who remembers Typepad these days? Purchasing a premium theme is an easy and fairly cheap way to make a professional looking website, and these marketplaces are definitely good places to start your search for the perfect theme.

• No one really cares about Microsoft anymore. Whatever they seem to do online is irrelevant, and the foundation for their dominance (Windows) is becoming less and less relevant as everything moves online.
• Microsoft’s attempts at becoming relevant in today’s internet have been so far useless. Like Google, they have completely failed to do anything around social networking, even though Windows Live (is that how it’s still called?) is a big player in IM. Bing barely made a scratch in Google’s prevalence, and their biggest wins have been by transparently incorporating themselves in other services, such as Facebook. Not too many people use Bing “directly”, or at least they don’t if they know what they are doing.
• Skype has survived being bought by E-bay and being sold off again, gaining users and cleaning up their legal issues in the meantime. Microsoft will have to really try hard to kill this one.

So basically, as long as Microsoft doesn’t ruin Skype (and I believe this is quite likely to happen), I couldn’t care less… Like Paul Graham said quite a few years ago, Microsoft is by now harmless.

By now it’s old news that Google’s OS is entirely based on the cloud. Even though apparently there is some simple file storage, everything is clearly meant to be taken and used online. That is precisely what concerns me regarding the digital divide in the post’s title. This “always online” philosophy might be fine for countries like the US or other places in Europe and Asia, where network connections are available pretty much everywhere and most, if not all, of the population has financial means to use this infrastructure.  It’s certainly not like that here where I live, in Brazil. Sure, metropolitan areas have plenty of mobile network coverage. But bandwith is scarcer and data plans are very expensive, and the averge citizen is very far away from being able to indulge in these luxuries. Wireless networks are also not quite as frequently found as they are elsewhere.

Of course none of these problems are related to Google’s Chrome OS or in fact to any technological issue. However, the developing world’s infrastructure limitations are bound to become even more limiting as our everyday tech becomes more dependent on exactly this kind of infrastructure.

I’d love to try spending a few days with a Cr-48 as my only machine down here and see how it goes (wink, Google), but I strongly suspect things would not go so smoothly here as they did for the reviewers in the US.

Oh yes, and before I forget, at last someone heard my cries and got rid of the useless Caps Lock key! Google has replaced it with a much more useful “search” key.

• Seesmic

Seesmic Web is the latest product from Loic le Meur and his team.  The brand Seesmic was originally a video sharing app, often described as “Twitter for video”.  Loic, however, was very quick to realize where things were going in this space, and acquired a popular desktop Twitter client called Twhirl.  Twhirl, in its turn, was morphed in Seesmic Desktop, a more robust desktop app, also based on Adobe Air.  So, as it stands today, all three Seesmic products still exist, but the clear focus today is on the desktop and web Twitter clients.

Seesmic's dashboard

The web app itself closely resembles the desktop client, and those familiar with desktop apps like Seesmic or Tweetdeck will quickly feel at home.  The interface is very responsive, and its familiar multi-column layout is immensely flexible.  If you’ve ever used Seesmic for the desktop or Tweetdeck, this one is for you.  Seesmic Web now features live link previews (from bit.ly), and is available in a number of languages, being the only client available in a number of languages.  The major missing feature is lack of support for multiple accounts – this is the one feature that is missing from the web version that stops me from migrating full time.

I am referring to Seesmic as a Twitter client because we are describing here the web version.  The desktop app, however, already boasts a number of  Facebook integration features, and is quickly heading towards being a “Social Media client”, or whatever name someone will come up with for this sort of application.  Even though it is natural to assume the web version will head that way, so far it is not there yet, working only as a regular Twitter client. I should also point out that I am a regular Seesmic user, and have in fact contributed to its translation to Brazilian Portuguese.

• Cotweet

Cotweet is a tool aimed for corporate use, but even so it is a nice way for a single person to manage multiple accounts.  Its focal use case is for many people managing a single Twitter account, and for that Cotweet brings the concept of being “On duty” for a certain account.  Whoever is on duty is notified of any messages the account receives, and messages can be assigned to other people for them to respond to.  You can also assign messages for other people to respond to.

Cotweet's dashboard

Cotweet has a very nice user interface, showing details about users and bit.ly links on the right sidebar.  When attempting to use this as an individual though, it becomes clear that Cotweet is not meant for this.  We use it regularly at work for two accounts we handle and it works great, but for my own accounts, I’d stick with something else.

• Brizzly

Brizzly is still in closed beta, but it does look really promising, with a clean, uncluttered interface that has a lot of carefully considered functionality.  Brizzly is fully geared toward the individual user.  It is very easy to create groups, direct messages are shown in a convenient box to th eright of the main message stream, links are shown expanded (something that we are seeing in a lot of places now) and images are shown inline with your tweets.

Brizzly's main view

Brizzly also has some new friendly features, such as a box displaying current trending topics on Twitter and short texts explaining why those items are currently trending.  Overall, Brizzly is very clean and friendly, and should appeal to a lot of people.

Overall, I’d go with Seesmic for a well rounded offer with a familiar interface – but for that to happen, it needs to catch up to the desktop app in some areas, in particular multiple account management.  Brizzly is an extremely strong contender, with a very nice interface and a fresh take on how to manage multiple accounts, avoiding the “default”multi-column layout.

If you still haven’t tried Sliderocket, now is the time to give it a go, this is definetly one of the new web tools worth trying.

So what’s the big fuss?  Well, XMPP notifications is what a lot of people have been expecting Twitter to deliver more widely for a long time – at the moment, only a select few partners (including Summize, which they bought onyl a few days ago) have access to this feed.  Twhirl has had support for XMPP for a while now, but it’s been pretty useless as their main platform does not openly support it.  I guess it’s a good test for Twhirl, to get some public use of this function so it’s ready when Twitter opens up.

Are you on identi.ca?  Subscribe to me, let’s see how this works!

Polar Rose works by having people tag images through a browser plugin (see picture to the right), and then building a model of that person using some sophisticated technology that came out of EU-backed research projects at the universities of Malmö and Lund in Sweden, where they are based.  After their model gets good enough, Polar Rose is then able to automatically recognise who a face belongs to.  It is even capable of recognizing all the people in a photo – searching for someone on the website tells you who they’ve been seen with lately (Barack Obama was seen with Rev. Jeremiah Wright much more than with Hillary Clinton, for instance).

Polar Rose seems to work great, but to become efficient it needs a lot of people tagging photos, and right now I don’t see much of an incentive to do that.  Yes, I am using the plugin, but then I wil try out just about anything new that I can come across on the ‘net, which is not something you can expect most people to do.  The technology itself is great, but right now they need to work on engaging users to build their index.  And hey, if you want to get the web celebrities happy about you, then you really should recognize Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble (see the screenshot)