An app I’ve been using on and off for a while is Joe’s Goals, which is a goal tracking application designed to motivate you and help you visualize and accomplish your goals. You can create a list of goals like “Drink at least 0.5L of water instead of Coke”, “Write at least 2 posts a day”, and you can they mark a goal done. You get a point value for each day based on the goals you have completed, all shown in a very simple, but sleek interface.

The beauty of this app is that it is simple on the surface, but once you think about it and see some advanced options (there aren’t a lot) you realize that this is more than an app created in 3 minutes to satisfy the armada of New Years resolution people. There are actually two types of goals available, positive and negative. Fulfilling a negative goal will give you a negative score, while a positive will give you a positive score. You can also fulfill (or tick) a goal more than once a day. For the goal “Write posts” you can award yourself with as many ticks as the posts you write for example.

The picture is further shaded by the fact that you can add a weight to each goal, so publishing 2 posts a day (two ticks) would raise your points, but drinking even one can of Coke could decrease it by much more, it’s all up to you. There are a few more features in there, but in simplicity lies the key here, just set up your goals, visit it once a day and keep ticking. After a while you can see how you’re doing, getting a higher score for me is motivation to drop that Coke can!

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Tags: goals, management, tasks
Categories: Online Services, Tools

Welcome to a new exploratory post here on gHacks! I actually work as a web designer specializing in standalone PHP and MySQL based sites, and I’ve always wanted to write a bit about coding, but it doesn’t really fit my own blog and I just don’t have time to start a whole new blog for it. Since gHacks is a tech blog we thought we’d try it out here with Martin and see how it goes. if you like the idea of similar posts here on gHacks please let us know in the comments (and also if you don’t), we want to post stuff you guys are interested in, so feel free to boo it on out of here! So here goes nothing:

If you’ve been coding for a while you probably have some set ways in which you work. I recommend you also widen this method to naming variables, which when done consistently can be a huge help, especially when you are using some fancy MySQL along with your PHP code. If you are building a site with 15 MySQL tables it is helpful if you know all the column names because you always name them in the same way, but the same thing goes for simple variables, and even ids and classes for HTML elements.

A very common example can be variables which hold a user’s data. In my case I always use the variable ‘$u’ for holding the username, and the variable ‘$p’ for holding the password. If you are grabbing a lot of data, like first name, last name, email and so on you can make up your own standard set, I use ‘$fn’, ‘$ln’ and ‘$e’ respectively for the three.

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Tags: mysql, php
Categories: Web Development

Martin showed you a nifty time tracking app for Adobe Air called Klok in a previous post, and now I’m here to tell you more and to show you the changes and improvements that are making Klok better every day. First of all, head on over to the Klok website and grab a copy of the application, preferably the beta version. As usual it may have some bugs, but I’ve been using it for a while on XP without a problem. Note that not all changes described here happened in the beta, they have been happening since around May.

If you’ve already used a previous version, the most prominent change you’ll notice is the UI differences. I am not a huge fan of changing a UI that already looks and feels good, but they did a great job here, everything is a bit bigger, easier to use, and logically arranged into tabs. My favorite new visual feature can be observed right here in a project’s summary menu, where there is a big “Actual hours vs estimate” representation with a horizontal bar filling up as you go along. Visual stuff like this helps me tremendously, it instills more “panic”, so I will probably get a move on if I see the estimate being overshot soon.

Of course this isn’t a hugely useful feature otherwise, but some great time tracking and usability issues have been addressed as well. You can now reorder your projects using drag and drop, which was something I really missed, now you can push subtasks between main tasks, so if you work in a project oriented workspace (as opposed to a client oriented one), you can easily move subtasks here and there. Another great feature implemented is better exporting capabilities. If you click on a summary you can now simply drag and drop an Excel icon onto the desktop to export to a file (along with comments), but if Excel is open, you can simply drop it in there to open it right away. So simple, yet so elegant, I love it!

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Tags: adobe air, klok, time tracking
Categories: Entertainment, Project, Tools

I’m not a huge fan of free web design stuff, mostly because its either hard to modify, or low quality, or if you can tailor it to your needs, you can probably do whatever you need yourself. I also prefer not to use others’ designs since it takes away my sense of identity, but in some cases I’m willing to be more flexible, like in the case of LogoInstant.com.

They offer 25 designs right now, not a big deal quantity-wise, but the designs are extremely good and nice and web 2.0 in a good way. You also get layered PSD files, which means you can modify these images easily (and freely). Plus, they say new ones will be added periodically, which seems to be true, since earlier today when I checked they only had 23 designs I think (a new page was definitely added).

As a web designer I hate using pre-fabricated termplates, but I have to say this is an exception and I’ll be looking into some logos for my own stuff, it’s rare that you get such high quality in this area of the open source market, enjoy!

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Tags: design, logo
Categories: Online Services, Open Source

I have to confess I am rather into money management apps, although I never actually got into any of them, except for one of the best, Clearcheckbook. Let me state right from the beginning that this is not an automated service, so it won’t pull stuff from your bank account. The reason I found it so good is exactly this, since I don’t have US accounts, I can’t really use Mint well for example. Clearcheckbook handles transactions entered by hand, but does it so elegantly and well that I was hooked straight from the beginning.

As I said, this is manual stuff, so it might take a while to set up and get used to, but from then on its smooth sailing. All you need to do is set up your accounts, set their initial amount and off you go.Whenever you need you can add transactions and transfers, all this in a smooth AJAX style no-reloading interface.

You can take a look at your summary on the front page, which gives some pretty good stats. I use Clearcheckbook mainly for managing my debt situation, which I am sorry to say is quite bad. However, Clearcheckbook helps a great deal because I can much better see the numbers, and feel good when my minuses go a bit higher (closer to zero that is).

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Tags: checkbook, finance, money management
Categories: Online Services, Tools

Martin showed you an application for removing ID3 tags from MP3 files not long ago, so let me quickly add to that by introducing an application that does the opposite, allowing you to add and edit (and remove) the tags for your files.

Mp3tag has always been my favorite, since it not only allows tag editing, but is capable of handling bul operations and pulling album info from the web. If you find an old-old CD, or a compilation CD you did, it might not contain tags. With Mp3tag you can eaisly add the same album name to all the files at once, or (if it’s an original CD track list) you can pull the data from the web, 2 clicks and all tags are added.

There are also loads of power options, like the ability to convert tags to filenames, with the parameters you need, creating file names with rules and so on. You can use the auto numbering tool to add the track numbers quickly, case conversion tool to convert all the names and titles to the format you like. Basically Mp3tag is an ID3 tagging “suite”, with all the tools you need to organize your music collection. Let us know if you have a different personal favorite!

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Tags: id3, mp3, tag
Categories: Music and Video, Tools

I’ve been thinking a bit about the history of the internet, and one important point I deduced was how important Google was to this all. Many-many people love Google, which usually means a lot hate it or dislike it too, but everyone should be thankful for what they have done.

You’re probably thinking that I’m a Gmail maniac, or I use Google Maps too much, but this isn’t the case. The reason Google should be thought of highly is that it made (and makes) everyone question the quality of everything, and taught everyone that even the strongest product can be beaten with the right attitude/tools. It first challenged Altavista and other search engines and won. It then built the best Email app ever, made it completely free and gave people masses of storage.

During this period it “Googleized” all its rivals, meaning Yahoo, Microsoft and smaller companies started to act the same way, thinking more community-oriented thoughts and developing their own stuff to the same standard.

I think most of the Twitter phenomenon is because of Google too. Not that they have anything in common, but the same thing is happening here. First there was Twitter, a great idea. Then others came and created Pownce, Plurk, and loads of other, basically identical services. This is great since it guves us variety, and they push each other to do better and better.

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Tags: gmail, Google, google hate, google love, google maps, search engine
Categories: The Web