According to a posted online petition for a ToDo or Task list feature - the Gods at google finally responded…Tasks are officially on their way. When? Who knows..but they’re coming.

The official response was:

“Hey everyone - thanks for the loud and very clear feedback on your desire for a to-do/task list feature. We’re pretty passionate about to- do lists here as well, and we’ve got something in the works. Of course, we’re working to add our special Google secret sauce to the to- do lists space (which can take some time to get right,) so we don’t have something to announce just yet, but the entire team is listening to these threads closely.

Please be patient - we’ll have more to talk about soon.”

I’m not sure why this gets me so excited, but I have the strangest urge to start dancing because frankly i’ve been waiting for a google task feature for the last two years. I practically base my entire working life & personal life around lists & tasks and I have no doubt that google will strive to impress with this one. There’s been enough talk about it.

Here’s to it arriving before the end of the year.

Just a quick post to mention a Mac app I have personally been using & recommending over the last couple of weeks. It’s called photobook and essentially it allows you to easily browse & import your friends photo albums from facebook into your iphoto.
The app is called PhotoBook, made by Caffeinated Cocoa , and although they promote key features such as slideshows and as-you-type search…the best feature is the ability to import entire albums into iphoto with just the click of a button, ok two buttons - select all & ‘add to iphoto’.

To give you an example of the ideal time you could use the app…Say you & a bunch of your friends attended a wedding. Actually, let’s take it a step further - its’ YOUR wedding and you want every single photo from the beautiful day. A week or so after the big day, your friends upload their photos - you login to photobook & in a matter of minutes you’ve got all their photos sitting in your iphoto. The only downside…they’re not high-res but that’s hardly PhotoBook’s problem.

Oh, and one final point before I show you a couple of screenshots - it costs nothing, nada, zilch (at the moment) and you can download it here.

AOL, yes A O L, have recently launched what I would confidently call a wonderfully simple yet extremely elegant web app called CircaVie. The idea behind the app is to be able to create timelines whether for personal, business or just for a bit of fun.

Created in flash, the UI is very well executed & the ability to add events had been implemented superbly. You simply add an event title, date (& time if you wish), an image (if you wish) and also a link to any external site (which could be a set of flickr photos relevant to that particular event…). You can then embed the timeline anywhere which accepts html.

People have been comparing the app to flickr, yet I really don’t see the similarities. I see them working side by side allowing you easily create a time line of events & link the events to your flickr photos.

So if you have a few minutes to spare…it’s fantastic little app. And for you lovebirds out there, would really recommend making one for your other half - a personal timeline can really show them you know them insideout! ; )

Below is an example of timeline created with CircaVie.

Suprisingly few days ago Joyent has released it’s office collaboration tool as open source. This is really exciting as I always felt that their tool is one of the best looking ones!

Try it out here. Of course you can browse the source immediately here or download it with your Subversion client from here.

Additionally Joyent has released their desktop deployment tool for Ruby on Rails applications - Slingshot. Basically it allows you to convert your Ruby on Rails application to run as a desktop application. Similar to Adobe AIR but you don’t actually need to change your code at all (in most cases). Give it a shot!