J Patrick Hunt

I’ve got a new venture launching soon called Syncslate. Check it out online or on Twitter. Pay attention around May 10.

If you are an entrepreneur or want to be one, I highly recommend you watch this video. Terrific insight and real data from Aaron Patzer who founded Mint.com 3-4 years ago and recently sold it to Intuit for $170 million. I met Aaron at TechCrunch40 when they launched and won the grand prize, and he is as likable and humble as he comes across in this video. I’ve added this video to my personal collection of inspirational and informative videos that I keep on hand. I recommend you do as well.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

As a geek and Apple fanboy, I ventured to the Apple Store yesterday to pick up a family edition copy of Snow Leopard, version 10.6 of Mac OS X. Unlike previous releases, Snow Leopard was intended to be primarily focused on behind-the-scenes improvements with few features that people would really notice. Its priced accordingly, at $29 for the single user version and $49 for the family pack, compared to $129 and $169 (if I remember correctly) for previous releases. While most of the changes aren’t immediately obvious, I was very impressed that the installation took very little time. In my limited use, I have one major thumbs up for Snow Leopard, and one thumbs down that I hope I can resolve soon.

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This is a really terrific post by Brandon Walkin on Managing UI Complexity. This is what usable is all about.

But Brandon works as a UI designer at Marketcircle. Billings has an amazing simple and intuitive UI. Daylite, not so much. I’ve tried several times to integrate Daylite into my daily life, to no avail because of design issues (its too complex). Hopefully, the work he hints at in this post will result in a much more usable and therefore useful Daylite.

Just a quick note to say that WordPress is perhaps the best software I’ve used in years, including Mac OS X, OS X Mobile (iPhone), and Gmail. Whether you use the hosted version at WordPress.com or the self-hosted version like I’m using here, WordPress is the fastest, easiest, and most flexible way to start publishing online. If you’re using anything else to publish blogs, small business websites, or other sites, you really owe it to yourself to try WordPress.

My wife is a doctor, and she’s been thinking about how to begin using electronic medical records in her solo practice. She uses a Macbook Air as her primary work computer but doesn’t like to type on it while talking patients, so I helped her conduct some research into pen-based input. It looks like LiveScribe’s Pulse Smartpen is our best option. It got great reviews, works with the Mac, and you can now print your own compatible paper. Plus, there is a low-cost add-on for converting handwriting to text. If we get one, I’ll write a detailed review. In the meantime, if you’ve used one, let me know what you think!

For many of you, this will seem like old hat. But I’m constantly amazed at how many websites don’t properly distinguish between form fields that are required and those that aren’t. Even if you have an incredibly simple signup form and ask only for required information, you need to put a note on the form that “All fields are required.” When some are required and others aren’t, clearly mark them appropriately (use asterisks by required fields with a note above that form saying what the asterisk means, include “required” next to required field labels, or include “optional” next to optional field labels, for example). Seriously, you’ll save your users a lot of headache by following these simple guidelines, and you’ll probably increase your site’s performance.

Based in part on a comment to my Task Management Apps post below, I decided to check out Toodledo. I’m still using OmniFocus as my primary personal task management solution, and I love it. But I find that its too complex to meet a key need of mine: capturing a quick list of things that I need to do that are top of mind. I realize the Inbox and other OmniFocus features are intended to support this kind of brain dump, but I just can’t seem to adapt to it for this purpose. So in exploring Toodledo, I found that the iPhone version is both useful and usable, but the web version falls short on the useable side of things. (more…)

I’ve recently moved more and more of my digital life to the cloud, and I find it hard to beat Google for much of what I need. Google has been my default search engine for years, all of my email accounts are hosted by Google (Gmail and Apps accounts), and its hard to beat AdSense and Analytics. Best of all, you can get an amazing amount of features and functionality for free! But its not all wine and rose when using Google. Here are a few observations about what is good, bad and ugly with some Google services. (more…)

So I have licenses to OmniFocus, Things, and The Hit List. On a rainy Sunday, I decided I needed to finally get around to capturing all of my projects and tasks, organize and prioritize them, and otherwise get on top of my life. But which to use?

I absolutely LOVE The Hit List. But its not out for iPhone yet, and its hard to imagine using a task management app without and iPhone version (and some form of syncing).

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