GITweekly

With my life careering out of control like a chicken riding a skateboard, I’ve tried to wrangle back control without harming said chicken. Enter the iPhone and its menagerie of apps for organising your life.

First I tried the super comprehensive Awesome Note. I envisioned myself creating an epic tome of organisation with maps and pictures, syncing to Google Docs, and shielding all of this highly classified data with pass codes. It didn’t happen. The thought of adding images to a task called “get some milk” just seemed a little absurd and tinged with a little over kill.

Keeping it truly simple. Seriously.

Enter GoTasks.

This free – yes free – app does exactly what it advertises and it does it well. Instead of aiming to be the be all and end all of task management and life organisation, GoTasks simply organises your tasks.

GoTasks lets you do all of the usual:

• Set due dates
• Categorise tasks
• See how many tasks are due just by looking at the iPhone badge
• Sync with Google Tasks – accessing multiple accounts
• Uses HTTPS to sync securely

But overall the killer feature is its elegant simplicity. This app has simply organised my daily work-flow. Its integration with Google has meant that any tasks added by iPhone appear on the iPad and online. Just beautiful.

I say forget the milk. Say no to making awesome notes for yourself and grab the app that dares to keep it simple stupid.

Google has pulled the pin on its Wave product – at least as a standalone technology.
Its impressive possibilities may crop up elsewhere – but at this stage you’d better get your fix now because it closes at the end of the year.
Sadness. Especially as it came out of Google Australia’s skunkworks.

The Twitter Tsunami Vs The Google Wave

Anecdotally speaking, some days I’m finding that I get more traffic to GITweekly from the mighty Twitter than I do from the big search engine that could, Google.

Look, I’m not complaining – any traffic’s good traffic. Great even.

My only problem is that we may be missing our target audience. You see, at GITweekly we’re trying to chat to the people who aren’t the hardcore tech heads. We’re trying to get some interesting news and ideas onto the desktops of the masses rather than the Android mobiles of the technorati.

Sure the average Twitter user may be in our demographic but people who use Twitter to search out topical news, and subsequently find our Twittered links, may just be a little too hardcore. It’s hard to say and time will tell.

All in all Twitter is proving to be a very powerful tool for marketing, topical news searching and discussion. It’s not just about inane chatter about how soft your stools were this morning. Sorry.

But if you are one of those folks that prides themselves on being “tech-forward” please hang around. Make comment. Suggest story ideas. Heck – write for us. We’d love to see you stay and give “average Joe and Josephine”* something great to sink their teeth into.

Cheers.

*Davey apologises if your name is Joe or Josephine – please substitute either Sandra or Sandro in your names place.

So, there’s this obsession kind of thing going round these days. What with the prevalence of iPhones and their ilk.

It’s called Chronic-Random-App-Downloaditis (err…CRAD for short).

However, in Australia at least, this obsession soon leads to a sister condition. Normal-App-Disappointment Syndrome (NADS for short).

So why is it that most Australian app down-loaders suffer from NADS?

Because there’s too few of us.

Consider the very clever social mapping application Waze. This could be a cracker of an app – and I’m sure it is over in well populated areas of the world – but in the expansive and underpopulated locales of Australia’s suburbia it can’t help but under perform.

So what is this Waze of which you speak?

According to the Waze folk, Waze is apparently the “way to go”.

To do this the Waze boffins are trying to create the world’s first live map. At the same time they’re layering, over the top of the map, content generated by your good selves.

So in simple terms, that us GITs can understand – as you drive, your smartphone maps the roads and sends the data back to Waze servers. Info, like your speed, will give other Waze users an idea of how fast traffic’s moving and events, like accidents, can be marked with a couple of button presses so that other Waze users can avoid the area (although some road law changes in Australia will make this button mashing a big no-no even when stopped). The killer feature is the apps ability to do turn-by-turn navigation that bears in mind the live traffic data. Bumper to bumper on one road? Route around it! Sweet.

Other features are planted firmly in the social networking scene:

• Pinging other Waze users to have a chat.
• Seeing where other “Wazers” are on the live map. Click on them and you’ll see how fast they’re travelling.
• Earning points by finding prizes on the roads as you drive.
• Checking your score on the scoreboard (earned by marking new roads, driving over certain roads, marking incidents).

So here’s the thing. If everyone downloads this app and uses it we’ll see how truly amazing this kind of technology can be. As more people get on board, more roads will be mapped, and then we’ll get to use the Waze app in its full glory – as an intelligent turn-by-turn navigator with a community spirit.

Until that time (and I fear that time will never come) we’re just stuck with a map that’s in pieces (see the image below for an Australian example) and aching for a Google cash and maps injection.

Grabbitnow.