Adam C. Hegedus

I haven’t said much about my current job here, but I’m excited about what I’m doing so I thought I would drop some info. At present (and hopefully for the distant future because I enjoy it that much), I’m working for a small software company in State College, PA called Good Steward Software. Our primary function is creating software for medium to large businesses and government entities to track energy usage and expenditures. I know that may not sound like much fun, but when your company is the best at what they do, trust me… it’s fun. Because of our position in the market, we get to push the envelope a bit and run with ideas instead of just maintaining the status quo. That’s where I come in.

I was originally hired here to do implementations of EnergyCAP, our main product. But when I mentioned that I’d like to get involved with future web app development, I got my wish. For the past six months or so, I’ve been managing design and development of a product that will be released in September. I’m excited about it because it’s all I’ve done for six months, and it’s going to be fun to see what people think.

I can’t go into much, but I’ll say this. This product will allow home and small business owners the opportunity to track energy bills. With this information they can answer questions like:

• What is the actual cost of energy is for my home/office?
• How does the weather effect my energy usage?
• Were the new windows I had installed worth the money?
• How does my energy consumption compare to similar properties?
• Just how much Greenhouse Gas am I producing?

And on top of all this, it’s going to look great (I like to think of it as the GQ of Energy management), and free for end users.

Sounds good, huh? More soon…

I just recently decided to look into a new GTD (Getting Things Done) solution for myself. I want a tool that I can use on both my Macbook Pros, and and my iPhone. Ideally, they should be able to sync with each other. Bonus points if the iPhone syncs wirelessly.

Anyway, I’m looking at two great looking products. The first is OmniFocus. This is a really nice looking product. Very complete, with tons of features and a lot of flexibility in how you GTD. Based on OmniOutliner, which is also a very well designed tool.

The second is called Things. The nice thing about this product is that it is really well designed. The folks at Cultured Code definitely put a lot of thought into this great app. It looks great, it has nice features and even though it’s slightly more limited than OmniFocus, it’s still extremely usable.

The one thing that’s not included (yet) in Things is syncing. I’m hoping that this is done soon, but in the mean time, I heard about a great technology that makes syncing Things between Macs a snap. It’s called Dropbox.

This is very similar to .mac, however it syncs on the fly, instantly. So you have a folder called your Dropbox, and every time you copy a file to it, it automatically syncs it to the Dropbox servers. Then you can access your files from any machine (Mac or PC) or even via a web interface. Public files can even be accessed through a web link by anyone.

This is really great technology, but unfortunately it’s not quite ready for prime time yet. It’s still in beta and if you want to get a look at it, you need an invitation. I was lucky enough to get an invite from Eric Belanger, and now I have 10 invitations that I can pass on. So if you want to take a look at Dropbox, post a comment here. I’ll send invites to the first 10 to ask.

I’ll give my take on GTD apps next time.