Jazz and Cloud Apps

Just working it all out again on a Monday AM. Summoning motivation, organizing into work mode and starting another week. Sunny and beautiful outside judging by the slice of light peeking into my basement office. My Bud Powell Pandora station is keeping me sane.

Tried out a couple of new things last week: Evernote (www.evernote.com) and Pivotal Tracker (www.pivotaltracker.com) to keep life and projects in a more manageable space. More manageable in any event than my head.

Evernote is a cool little cloud app for organizing your life and work that uses the concept of notebooks. Each one contains notes, which can be text, photos, audio, webclippings, etc. The webclipping feature is great for project research: you highlight a page (or portion of a page) and hit the Evernote plugin button (in Firefox) and the content is automagically updated to your Evernote account. The photo and audio options are great with your iPhone, you can just snap shots or record musings and they are synched with your account. And its free with some bandwidth (and other) limitations. Runs on Mac/Win/iPhone/etc. Nice.

Pivotal Tracker is project management with a story based concept at its core. Each story is part of the overall project and as you complete stories it builds a map of how you work and how you categorize your work to provide a better understanding of how and when you can meet deadlines. Autopromotion and tracking determine the "velocity" of the current project and the program itself make recommendations about what to do next and why. Interesting. "HAL? HAL? What should we work on today?" Light screenfeel due to Ajax-like interface that allows swift drag and drops of tasks between lists. Initial test drive left me feeling like this could work for my own little company. Simple and easy to use. More to come as I learn more...

I know there are not many of you listening, but I hope this helps out.