Time to get organised: I’d been reading a lot about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methods of organising life and work, and it seemed to chime with moves I was making by myself. I got the book from the library and I’d recommend it for people like me who might seem organised on the surface, but at the cost of a bit of stress at remembering everything.

GTD is a methodology that recommends getting stuff out of your head and into a system, so that it doesn’t clutter everything up and get in the way of creative thinking and the kinds of things your mind is good at. ‘Stuff’ comes from your inbox, or colleagues, or mail or phone messages and has to get done; brains are good at remembering, but not at the right time, so you’ll remember you need batteries when you turn on a dead torch, not when you’re passing them in the shop.

It’s a good argument that Allen makes, but it leaves us needing a system to put our ’stuff’ in. I’m using Remember The Milk, which I signed up for a couple of years ago but didn’t take the time to properly investigate; now, with GTD, it makes sense. It’s extremely flexible, and you can add tasks, tags, locations and dates to make your own taxonomy that works for you. I’m working towards a system described in a post by Doug Ireton that implements GTD’s principles; it’s early days for me, but he says his system took a year of tweaking to perfect, so I’m happy to follow the same route. My head is clearing as I write….

Dropbox has just come out of testing and is now a public release. It’s a method of keeping files synchronised across as many different devices as you install it on, PC, Mac or Linux, and even if you’re not at one of your own, there’s a web interface too (with a visual design not dissimilar to Facebook). The attractions of Dropbox for teams or people who work across several sites are obvious, and you can share public links to files in your Dropbox, meaning for instance you could share files with clients. It’s a bit like a Subversion repository, but it doesn’t merge changes or check for conflicts: it just saves a new version of the document with the option to restore a previous one. That said, it’s certainly a good place to keep invoices or project plans where several people might need access but there needs to be a definitive version.

The real usefulness of Dropbox will emerge over time; for now, it’s certainly easy to use and understand, which is half the battle.

I thought it might be interesting to put a moving portfolio image as my ‘featured project’ on the front page of the site. I needed to capture a 950px-wide website, and end up with a 600px-wide SWF. I tried a few different applications:-

RenderSoft’s CamStudio can capture direct to AVI or SWF (SWF was what I ultimately wanted) but neither gave the option to resize the video (I wanted to reduce the image from 950px wide to 600px). TechSmith’s Jing is a much more 2.0 type of affair, but while it seems really useful for quickly getting a point across over something like MSN, again it lacks resizing options. Nice app and well worth checking out; but not right for this.

Debugmode’s Wink is free and really easy to configure, at least for these purposes. It lets you choose the area of the screen you want to capture, then just press shift+pause and away you go. Then you can adjust the size of the resulting frames, delete frames and do whatever you need to do before rendering it as a reasonably lightweight SWF. It takes a few goes to get something reasonable, but if you’re not doing an actual screencast, with audio and timings, it’s a nice quick job.