All of us could use a personal assistant every now and then, especially when it comes to planning your itinerary for a trip where you have to put together reservations for restaurants, entertainment, and rental cars into something you can follow once you reach your destination.
TripIt is a site designed to take confusion out of trying to organize all your reservations by doing it for you. The service takes all the plans you've made for your trip such as plane reservations, rental cars, and restaurant reservations and organizes them, adding important things like directions to get to where you're going and a projected weather forecast for your trip. Your TripIt itinerary can then be printed out and taken with you as well as forwarded to friends in email, synced with your personal calender, or viewed on your mobile device.
TripIt allows you to add information to your trips manually or if you schedule events with one of TripIts supported websites you can just forward your reservations to the site via email and have them added to your itinerary for you. Currently TripIt supports a slew of airline websites, restaurant reservations through OpenTable.com, and they just added support for a variety of event sites such as Ticketmaster.
Is it just us, or has there been an explosion of online scheduling services over the past few weeks? First there were Jiffle, Tungle, and When is Good. And now there's Presdo. Like the other services, Presdo makes it easy to schedule meeting with one or more people. You send out a request, and other users can reply with the times that work best for them. But there are a few things that set Presdo apart.
First, it uses natural language recognition to help schedule your meetings. The home page isn't filled with a bunch of boxes to fill out. Instead, you have one search box, into which you can type "lunch with Bob," or "dinner with Joan." On the next page, Presdo will make an educated guess as to the best time for your event. If you enter something vague like "take over the world with Pinky," it'll probably just use the default "tomorrow at 10am." But it does a pretty good time of picking the proper times for meals.
You can also use Presdo to help find a place for your meeting. If you entered "Coffee with Mike," Presdo will let you pull up a window to search for coffee shops with Google Maps. When you send out your invitation, recipients can either accept or offer their own suggested times.
There seems to be an explosion of applications designed to help you schedule group meetings. In the last few days we've covered When Is Good, a simple, free web-based solution, and Jiffle, a desktop based application that synchronizes with Outlook and Google Calendar. Today Tungle launched a public beta of a desktop application that looks a lot like Jiffle.
When you install Tungle it will automatically find your contacts and schedule from Microsoft Outlook. When you want to schedule a new meeting you can select times that work for you, choose from your contacts list, and send out an invitation. If the recipients are also Tungle users they will see your availability in their own calendars. If they're not, you can create and share a "Tungle Space," which is a web-based meeting planner. People can then view your suggested times, and choose one and/or leave comments.
Tungle is free while in beta. It's not clear what the pricing will be when the application emerges from beta. In related news, Jiffle was not available for download when we took our first look at it the other day, but you can now download the application from the Jiffle web site.
Tired of sending emails back and forth trying to decide when to hold your next team meeting, video game night, or birthday party? Well, while we generally recommend having your birthday celebrations as close to the actual date of your birth as possible, Jiffle can help with the rest.
Jiffle is an online scheduling service that lets users pick the times they're free and then share their calendar with other users. In other words, it's a lot like When is Good, but with a desktop client that works with Outlook to let you share your existing calendar online. A new version will add Google Calendar compatibility.
You can sign up for Jiffle for free, but we found that when we tried to download the client today we were instead greeted with a message letting us know that a new version would be available next week and we'd be notified when it was available. Jiffle is a commercial application, but there's a free version that will let users schedule up to 10 meetings per month. For $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, you can schedule unlimited meetings. A few bucks more gets you a version with your company branding, and for $99.99 per month you can get the corporate edition with licenses for five users and no advertising.
While Google's Blogger service offers just a fraction of the features you'll find from a more robust blog client like WordPress, it looks like Google is playing catch up. Just the other day we reminded you that you can check out draft.blogger.com for a variety of beta features and widgets that aren't available via the regular Blogger site. And now it looks like Google has added a feature do Blogger in Draft that it should have had years ago: the ability to schedule posts.
Previously, once you hit the publish button in Blogger, your post would go live. Even if you set the date for tomorrow or next year, a post would still go live as soon as you hit publish. This comes in handy if you want an easy way to pin a post to the top or bottom of the page (just set the date for the year 3017 or 1999). But if you plan on taking a vacation and you want to schedule a new post every day while you're out, you've had to resort to third party services, like writing blog posts via email and using an email scheduler like LetterMeLater.
But now if you use the Blogger in Draft page, you can schedule posts just by setting the time for a future date and then clicking Publish. A message should pop up telling you that your post is now scheduled. Keep in mind, this only works if you write your posts using draft.blogger.com. If you use the main Blogger page, posts will go live as soon as you hit publish.
We can think of plenty of reasons you might want to send a time-delayed email message. Perhaps you're sending an email to someone who usually has such a full inbox that you want to make sure they get it when they're sitting in front of their desk, not at 2am when you're writing the message. Or maybe you want to write a few happy birthday messages while you're looking at your calendar and schedule them to actually go out on the actual dates of your friends' and family members' birthdays.
But most web-based email services don't offer the option to schedule your email delivery. You click send, and it's gone. LetterMeLater is a handy email service that lets you schedule your emails any way you like. Best of all, it lets you use your usual email address. Your messages won't wind up in your Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail sent messages folder, but your recipient will see your email address and be able to reply.
LetterMeLater also features a fairly powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor. That means in addition to sending emails with fancy formatting and embedded images, you can use LetterMeLater to write up blog posts if you use a blogging client that supports posting by email. Why does this matter? Say you use a service like Google's Blogger that doesn't let you schedule posts, but you're taking a week-long vacation and want to make sure there's still fresh content on your site every day. Just write up a few posts in LetterMeLater and mail them to yourself one at a time over the course of the week and nobody will know you're actually scuba diving.
Cozi was created by a group of ex-Microsofties to help address the complex dynamic needs of a family lifestyle nowadays. They created a complete scheduling environment to help families stay productive and on schedule. Cozi is a downloadable PC application that serves as a central location where families can plan, schedule and manage all the things they do in life. There is also a web-based version that supports Mac users.
Through Cozi users can access their family calendar, schedules, and notes information that are stored in the family's personal system, even when they are on the go. Reminders can be sent out and accessed by any PC or mobile phone you choose. This sounds like the ultimate family planner, 2.0 style. Did I mention it's free?
Here's a neat little utility with questionable usefulness and a less-than-intuitive UI - but, yes, it's neat. AmbientClock pulls appointments from your Google Calendar and maps them along a circular analog clock. You can also add a secondary calendar (such as that of a co-worker or spouse) for a visual representation of schedule conflicts.
So far, I can't really see what AmbientClock accomplishes that plain ol' Google Calendar doesn't, aside from the "oh crap look how little free time I have today, when am I going to eat?" factor. You can add it to your Google homepage, which I suppose is useful in the at-a-glance sense. However, browsing to future dates didn't work for me in Firefox 2.0. But since it's in beta, I'll cut it some slack.
Apparently, if all goes well, AmbientClock will soon be more than just a Google gadget - it'll be a standalone device. As in, an actual, three-dimensional product you can place on your desk!
Sometimes scheduling meetings and get-togethers sucks. The difficulty of finding a date and time that works best for everyone increases exponentially with the number of people involved. Doodle aims to simplify things. It's a simple web-based polling app that lets you list possible dates and times for an event and then survey all of the interested parties. When you create a poll, you're given a link to send to everyone--no sign-up required!--and another link to keep track of the results. Those you invite just enter their name, click on the dates that work for them, and submit. Doodle then tells you which date and time works best and how many people can attend then. Fast, free and easy!
Chronically forgetful? Always making lists - and then forgetting to look at them? FutureMe might be just what the doctor ordered.
FutureMe.org is a simple, no-frills web site with one purpose: helping you stay on top of your various obligations. Its usage is self-explanatory, but I'll break it down for you anyway: use the form to write a reminder to yourself, enter your email address, and select a date to have the reminder emailed to you. This is way better than simply sending yourself an email, because in that case you get the email immediately - which doesn't do you much good if the event you need to be reminded of is two weeks away. You can set reminders to be delivered up to 30 years from now (assuming the zombies haven't taken over by then and obliterated all technology).
Also, you can set your reminders to be private (sent just to you) or public (viewable on the FutureMe web site). Browsing through the public messages makes for some good laughs.
All of us could use a personal assistant every now and then, especially when it comes to planning your itinerary for a trip where you have to put together reservations for restaurants, entertainment, and rental cars into something you can follow once you reach your destination.
