With some students already in school, and some preparing to enter yet another journey into a new semester, let DLS make your studies that much more organized with a few free desktop and web applications that will make your school life that much more enjoyable.

From free document creation applications, online to-do's and organization applications, users are faced with a decision, go for the costly desktop versions and upgrade every few years, or stay ahead of the curve with free web based applications that are constantly updating with new growing feature sets. The choice has never been easier.

This DLS special feature lists out current tools that are floating around the web as highly competitive alternatives for both students and professionals.

Like many others who are trapped in their cubicles all day I've developed an unhealthy fascination with task managers, todo lists, and project trackers. I want that extra edge - that little boost that will help me get more done in less time. Todoist is one little tool created to make managing your pending todos easier.

Todoist is a free web based todo list app (in an already very very crowded market) that has some very special charm all its own. Built by Amir Salihefendic in "about a month", Todoist lets you create and sort projects in a very slick Ajax interface. Once you have a project you can create todo items within that project. Where the app really shines is in the customizations area. You can make text bold, underlined, and highlighted. You can also add links and due dates for items. By holding CRTL and using the arrow keys you can even indent a todo item or move it around in the list. One of the easy things you can do is create a item such as "Story Ideas" and quickly add your ideas under it using the * symbol to remove the checkboxes.

Another nice feature of Todoist is that it supports natural date keywords for setting due dates. This way you can type "tomorrow" or "next Friday" and it will understand and assign the correct date. You can then create a schedule for the week using the handy date search box. Unfortunately there is no way to share your projects at this point, but it wouldn't surprise me if that is in the works.

Todoist strives to be a very simple, fun, and easy to use tool that offers a lot of power to the average user. It doesn't offer you all the features you might expect from some of the more established alternatives, but that is by choice and what is there works wonderfully. Give it a look.