the Chaos Communication Congress is for hackers what the Game Developers Conference is for us. Three days of lectures about how to creatively use hard- and software, lectures about security-related topics and about miscellaneous stuff such as – this time – Getting Things Done.

It’s organized by the Chaos Computer Club which in turn is a hacker organization. Every year in late December people meet in Berlin here in Germany like game developers meet in San Francisco.

(In this context hackers are computer enthusiasts – not necessarily people involved in computer security. Or insecurity.)

Oh, that’s awesome! I’m really happy to hear you benefit from the neat little apps I yak about on here. :) ToDoList and Plaxo are a couple of my favorites, in fact, especially since the new Plaxo rolled out. I hope it’s true that Facebook is buying them out… that’d be amazing. Synergy!

What’s the Chaos Communication Congress? It sounds alluringly alliterative!

ThinkingRock… sounds like TDL is superior, but I’ll still check it out.

WebDrive… that totally kicks ass, especially the way you use it. I’m sure I can find even more crazy uses for that myself. I already recommended it to someone I know that could use it. Thanks for the recommendations!! :)

Weigel, dork! :)

Matt, I generally use Windows Explorer as well, but sometimes I’m navigating in an Open File dialog box inside another app, discover a file I need a path for, and can’t copy from the address bar.

However, I did not know that using F6 would immediately jump to the address bar. Thanks!! :)

Stan, I’ve heard rumbles about ToDoIst on LifeHacker but I’ve never checked it out. I will now and see what all the hubbub’s about, thank you! :)

Also, glad you like RocketDock!

Thanks for the comments, guys! :)

I also use RocketDock and many of the little things that Jon has suggested and has made my life easier.

For any keyboard-centric users who would still rather not spend most of their time at the command-line, I recommend ditching Windows Explorer.

ThinkingRock looks really interesting– I’m going to check it out.

Over time I gave ToDoList a try and I’m still using it today. I also gave Plaxo a try and I’m still using that, too. Now it’s Path Copy and during the next weeks I’ll check whether I like it or not.

And while you’ve also highlighted services such as Netvibes for which I don’t have the slightest use – the tools I _do_ use make up for them. ToDoList is a special one among them. I’ve been using it for like half a year and don’t wanna tackle my day-to-day work without it anymore. I’ve tried other task-tracking alternatives, too. For example during last month’s 24th Chaos Communication Congress Stephan Schmieder gave a lecture about David Allen’s Getting Things Done techniques and specifically presented his own experiences with a software called ThinkingRock.

ThinkingRock is all about Getting Things Done – it makes use of pretty much everything David Allen suggests. However, it’s written in Java and that sucks on ice as The Scout likes to put it. Its interface is slower than similiar application s in C# or C++. And due to its wealth of features it feels bloated. I mean sometimes with ToDoList the term “feature creep” crosses my mind but with ThinkingRock it just didn’t feel right to me. Eventually I figured I’m be better off with ToDoList.

I’ve thought about tools I could savely recommend and the one thing I came up with is WebDrive. I use Windows XP; one day I wanted to map a web server as a network drive so that I could then up- and download files to the FTP server as if it were a regular drive in my machine. I learned that an Apache web server could be upgraded with a so-called WebDAV module which would allow me to do just what I wanted.

Installig the WebDAV module on my server wasn’t an option at that time so I looked around for other solutions and found WebDrive. It connects to FTP servers and maps them as network drives.

Now I use the identical TDL file for ToDoList on more than one machine. No more manual copying – just launch the tool and start working. Pretty convenient.

Greetings,

Sven