Then Producteev came along providing free web and iPhone apps, automatic task syncing, multiple workspaces, due dates, labels, and a lot more. The one thing that it has always lacked is a native Mac app. That problem was remedied earlier this week. Let’s take a look.

A Team that Listens

Before I jump into the review I want to say that Producteev won me over not simply because of the software, but because of the people behind the software.

They have the strangest habits that I’ve ever seen in an app team. In the early days of Producteev, I would send them a tweet to tell them about a bug… and they would actually respond. Further, within 24 hours, they usually let me know that they had fixed the problem.

The same goes for feature requests, when Producteev first launched there was no support for recurring tasks, users said it was important and the Producteev team made it a top priority to get it implemented.

It’s incredibly refreshing to see a developer take an active interest in the concerns of an app’s user base. You would be surprised at how truly rare this is.

Producteev for Mac

Producteev for Mac brings all your favorite web features to a slick desktop environment. Everything you do here will automatically sync to both the web and iPhone versions. Perfectly synced task management is a beautiful thing.

One thing that I really like about the Producteev Mac app is that it doesn’t seek to emulate every other task management app out there. The interface does use a familiar column layout, but it manages to look and feel completely unique.

Producteev for Mac

As you can see, it’s a nice mix between light and dark areas, the contrast makes for a really sharp interface that fits perfectly into your Mac environment. It’s all quite intuitive and can be picked up in an instant, but let’s take a closer look to see how it works.

Sidebar and Task Column

As you would expect, the sidebar holds your various lists and sections, but the system is a bit different from what you may be used to in other apps.

By default, you’ll see a list of filters and labels. The filters include all your tasks, your inbox and special groups of tasks like starred and hot. You star items manually but “hot” items are those with a due date coming up.

Producteev Sidebar and Main Area

As you can see, next to the sidebar is a column holding all of your tasks within the current filter and workspace. There are large buttons for checking off a task, starring it or assigning it to someone.

The little “+” icon under the task name allows you to quicky add labels and the little clock icon on the right lets you add in a due date.

Assigning Labels

Setting a due date

Workspaces

Where some apps have separate task lists, Producteev has “Workspaces,” the idea is basically the same and just gives you an easy way to keep your projects separated.

To change Workspaces, you simply click on the the name of your Workspace near your avatar at the top left of the screen. This turns the sidebar into a list of your Workspaces, just click on one to activate it.

Changing Workspaces

The “Overview” Workspace will allow you to view all of tour tasks from every Workspace in one unified list, sortable by due date, last updated, etc. You can add new Workspaces (and labels) via the “+” icon at the very bottom left of the app window.

New Tasks and Notifications

Clicking the little pencil icon at the top of the screen will bring up the new task window (there’s a menu bar shortcut for this as well). This little guy is wonderfully designed. Right off the bat you see only what you need to create the task but you can quickly access the controls for adding any additional information that you want: due dates, labels, etc.

Adding a new task

The little globe icon brings up the notifications panel. This is mainly used for collaboration: the free plan allows for two users, the premium ($220/year) and platinum ($330/year) plans allow for unlimited users.

Notifications

Task Info

When you select a task, all the related details show up in the task info column on the far right, which is collapsible and can be hidden at any time.

Task Info

Producteev is a remarkably powerful task management solution and keeps a ton of info for each and every task in your Workspaces. Here you can not only track basic info like labels and due dates, but historical information such as comments and notifications as well.

How Is It?

Producteev is one of those products that I continually think is too good to be free, and the Mac App falls right in line with this theory. It’s attractive, highly usable and gives you complete freedom to run your entire Producteev account instead of forcing you to open the web app for more advanced actions.

For users who have tried simpler apps like Wunderlist but need a little more power behind their task management solution, Producteev is the way to go. It really has tons of muscle and certainly can’t be accused of lacking in the features department.

The one thing that I miss in the desktop app that I enjoy in the web app is the calendar view. For whatever reason, it’s quite hard to find a task manager with a calendar view and that’s one thing that helps Producteev stand out. I’d love to see it implemented on the Mac app as well.

Conclusion

To sum up, Producteev is a fantastic task and project management solution and the Mac app is a worthy addition to the family. Whether you just want a simple and free task list or you’re looking for a high quality, professional solution to manage projects across large teams of people, Producteev has you covered.

Check out the free Producteev web app, iPhone app and Mac app today and let us know what you think!

The Philip K. Dick Award, for science fiction books originally published in paperback instead of hardcover, put out its shortlist for the year, and chances are a few books on the list haven’t been on your radar. (The list does include Project Itoh’s Harmony, which was one of our favorite books of 2010.) Since these books are all out in paperback, they’re pretty inexpensive, and they all sound pretty intriguing. Here’s the list: More »

From the map on the iPhone’s Maps icon being 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino (Apple’s home base) to the iPod artist silhouette being of one-time Apple partner Bono to actual Java code written on the napkin in their Java icon, Apple has a long history of embedding secret meanings and Easter eggs in their icons.

While some Apple fans may own a limited-edition print of the original Mac OS icons or even felt keychains in the form of iPhone icons, not too many of us know all the secrets inside our icons — until now. The majority of the secrets exposed in the article are true, but readers should note that a few stand out as potentially incorrect or just a creative guess. For instance, “Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet Etiam” found on the Apple Dictionary icon doesn’t mean “Hello world! Etcetera” as mentioned, but rather is just a deliberately corrupted version of a Cicero passage commonly used as filler text when writing copy. And as for creative stretch, well, we highly doubt that the Find my iPhone icon has a map of New York City on it because Steve Jobs once had an apartment there. But it’s certainly an interesting idea!

Do you know any other hidden secrets in either OS X or iOS icons that were missed? If so, please be sure to let us know about them!

The hidden secrets inside Apple icons originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments

If you you aren’t already paranoid enough to remove your address and cell phone number from Facebook, today might be the day. Facebook has decided to give its third-party app developers API access to users’ address and phone numbers as they collectively get more involved in the mobile space, but privacy experts are already warning that such a move could put Facebook users at risk.

In its Developer Blog post, Facebook noted that developers will only be able to access an individual user's address and phone number—not the info of his or her friends. Additionally, those who want to be able to use that data will have to be individually approved by the users themselves, and those developers must take special care to adhere to Facebook's Platform Policies, which forbid them from misleading or spamming users.

Read the comments on this post

From imprisoned Pirate Party member to government leader, it’s been an eventful week for Tunisian blogger and software developer Slim Amamou. Arrested by security forces a week ago, Amamou emerged from jail a few days later only to watch as president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled the country and the new “unity” government asked Amamou to join.

Amamou is a well-known digital activist in Tunisia; his Twitter account outlines in brief his positions: “Against censorship, against IPR, for net neutrality.” He’s a member of the Pirate Party of Tunisia and head of a small software company called Alixsys that develops Web apps for pharmaceutical companies and online startups.

He was arrested a week ago, as Tunisian demonstrations against the Ben Ali regime reached a peak; security forces apparently wanted to know about any involvement Amamou had with a series of denial of service attacks on Tunisian government websites.

Amamou’s self-portrait after being freed

On January 13, Amamou was released. He commemorated the moment with the briefest of tweets: “Je suis libre.” In response to a question, he said that he “was not physically tortured (or very little). Only psychologically.”

Ben Ali and his family fled the country last week as his minor political concessions failed to appease demonstrators. A new unity government, one that includes many key ministers from the old regime, was formed on Monday and meant to include a broad range of political parties (which could now exist legally). Amamou was asked to serve as state secretary for youth and sports, a newly created position that he has accepted.

Will the current unity government hold? Several junior ministers have already walked out after it became clear that key jobs, including interior and defense, won’t be changing hands. For its part, the new government has pledged to hold a full slate of elections within the next few months, saying that current ministers were still needed to maintain stability during the transition period.

Read the comments on this post

Now, users will be able to share articles, leave comments and play fantasy sports on Yahoo by signing in to accounts they’ve created on Facebook and Google. They won’t have to create a Yahoo profile or associate their Facebook or Google ID with an existing Yahoo one (though a Yahoo account is being created in the background that’s associated with the other site’s credentials).

Other properties included in the new login regime (or lack of a regime) are Yahoo! Finance, as well as pages for users to rate movies, music and restaurants. (Obviously for some properties, like Yahoo! Mail, users will still need to plug in Yahoo-specific credentials to create a full-fledged Yahoo ID.)

The beleaguered company is playing this as a move toward openness. And there is some precedent for the move. Yahoo had previously allowed users to log in to Flickr using OpenID logins from Google, and had partnered with Facebook to give users an option, through Facebook Connect, to integrate their accounts on the two sites and send information back and forth between them.

But this latest announcement is different from Facebook Connect; what Yahoo is now offering is a wholesale substitution of another site’s account system. Yahoo for a long time had the coveted advantage as a Web portal of having a large percentage of its visitors logged in at all times to a consistent account across all its properties; that doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the company anymore.

Now, when a user clicks the “X” button to remove a story from their News Feed, there’s an option to unlike the page, which joins other options including “mark as spam, “hide this post,” or “hide all” posts from the offending page.

Sponsor

The change, notes marketing news site Clickz, reporting on the impact of this news for businesses, makes “Facebook wall posts behave a little bit more like email, while raising the stakes on high-level message relevancy so audience members don’t opt out.”

Unliking Gets Easier

We saw the news about this change reported on Monday as well, on unofficial Facebook news site, Inside Facebook. They noted that this was only one of many changes surrounding the “like” feature as of late. Facebook has also been prompting users with few likes to add more pages, has been showing what likes users have in common, has re-launched its “Page Browser” to encourage liking and more.

The “unlike button” change is so new, in fact, that we couldn’t find any mention of it in Facebook’s own help documentation. Currently, the only mention of how “unliking” pages works is this FAQ post directing users to “unlike” a page by visiting the page directly, then clicking the “unlike” link in the lower left-hand corner. That process is similar to how you would “un-friend” someone on Facebook - you have to visit their profile and then select “Remove from Friends” at the bottom left. Obviously, having to navigate directly to a page to unlike it is much more cumbersome for users than just clicking a button.

Spammy Marketers, Take Note

For marketers, this easy-access “unlike” button in the News Feed means it’s even more important to dial down the frequency of updates so as not to become overly “spammy.” The content of those messages should be carefully considered too. Offend a user with an off-the-cuff post and they may be gone for good. Says Clickz, users can now “simply see one brand post that turns them off and leave the company’s audience…without leaving their personal wall.” The only good news for marketers here is that the change doesn’t seem to propagate over to the end user’s Wall for their friends to see, too.

While the new “unliking” methodology is certainly easier than before, it’s not a one-step process. Instead, “unliking” actually takes two steps - the first to click “unlike page” and then a pop-up box appears asking if you really want to remove your connection to the page entirely. A user has to click “Remove Post and Unlike” in order to opt out from seeing any more messages from that page going forward.

The change may help to increase the number of “likes” a user doles out in the future. Once users know that it’s (almost) as easy to “unlike” something as it is to “like” it, they may be more willing to click the like button.

Discuss

Now, when a user clicks the “X” button to remove a story from their News Feed, there’s an option to unlike the page, which joins other options including “mark as spam, “hide this post,” or “hide all” posts from the offending page.

Sponsor

The change, notes marketing news site Clickz, reporting on the impact of this news for businesses, makes “Facebook wall posts behave a little bit more like email, while raising the stakes on high-level message relevancy so audience members don’t opt out.”

Unliking Gets Easier

We saw the news about this change reported on Monday as well, on unofficial Facebook news site, Inside Facebook. They noted that this was only one of many changes surrounding the “like” feature as of late. Facebook has also been prompting users with few likes to add more pages, has been showing what likes users have in common, has re-launched its “Page Browser” to encourage liking and more.

The “unlike button” change is so new, in fact, that we couldn’t find any mention of it in Facebook’s own help documentation. Currently, the only mention of how “unliking” pages works is this FAQ post directing users to “unlike” a page by visiting the page directly, then clicking the “unlike” link in the lower left-hand corner. That process is similar to how you would “un-friend” someone on Facebook - you have to visit their profile and then select “Remove from Friends” at the bottom left. Obviously, having to navigate directly to a page to unlike it is much more cumbersome for users than just clicking a button.

Spammy Marketers, Take Note

For marketers, this easy-access “unlike” button in the News Feed means it’s even more important to dial down the frequency of updates so as not to become overly “spammy.” The content of those messages should be carefully considered too. Offend a user with an off-the-cuff post and they may be gone for good. Says Clickz, users can now “simply see one brand post that turns them off and leave the company’s audience…without leaving their personal wall.” The only good news for marketers here is that the change doesn’t seem to propagate over to the end user’s Wall for their friends to see, too.

While the new “unliking” methodology is certainly easier than before, it’s not a one-step process. Instead, “unliking” actually takes two steps - the first to click “unlike page” and then a pop-up box appears asking if you really want to remove your connection to the page entirely. A user has to click “Remove Post and Unlike” in order to opt out from seeing any more messages from that page going forward.

The change may help to increase the number of “likes” a user doles out in the future. Once users know that it’s (almost) as easy to “unlike” something as it is to “like” it, they may be more willing to click the like button.

Discuss

Now, when a user clicks the “X” button to remove a story from their News Feed, there’s an option to unlike the page, which joins other options including “mark as spam, “hide this post,” or “hide all” posts from the offending page.

Sponsor

The change, notes marketing news site Clickz, reporting on the impact of this news for businesses, makes “Facebook wall posts behave a little bit more like email, while raising the stakes on high-level message relevancy so audience members don’t opt out.”

Unliking Gets Easier

We saw the news about this change reported on Monday as well, on unofficial Facebook news site, Inside Facebook. They noted that this was only one of many changes surrounding the “like” feature as of late. Facebook has also been prompting users with few likes to add more pages, has been showing what likes users have in common, has re-launched its “Page Browser” to encourage liking and more.

The “unlike button” change is so new, in fact, that we couldn’t find any mention of it in Facebook’s own help documentation. Currently, the only mention of how “unliking” pages works is this FAQ post directing users to “unlike” a page by visiting the page directly, then clicking the “unlike” link in the lower left-hand corner. That process is similar to how you would “un-friend” someone on Facebook - you have to visit their profile and then select “Remove from Friends” at the bottom left. Obviously, having to navigate directly to a page to unlike it is much more cumbersome for users than just clicking a button.

Spammy Marketers, Take Note

For marketers, this easy-access “unlike” button in the News Feed means it’s even more important to dial down the frequency of updates so as not to become overly “spammy.” The content of those messages should be carefully considered too. Offend a user with an off-the-cuff post and they may be gone for good. Says Clickz, users can now “simply see one brand post that turns them off and leave the company’s audience…without leaving their personal wall.” The only good news for marketers here is that the change doesn’t seem to propagate over to the end user’s Wall for their friends to see, too.

While the new “unliking” methodology is certainly easier than before, it’s not a one-step process. Instead, “unliking” actually takes two steps - the first to click “unlike page” and then a pop-up box appears asking if you really want to remove your connection to the page entirely. A user has to click “Remove Post and Unlike” in order to opt out from seeing any more messages from that page going forward.

The change may help to increase the number of “likes” a user doles out in the future. Once users know that it’s (almost) as easy to “unlike” something as it is to “like” it, they may be more willing to click the like button.

Discuss