I am currently working on a web application called Workable. It’s a collaborative task management app. You can use it solo to manage all your tasks in the cloud, or you can invite your team to work together, sharing tasks, files, messages and tracking time spent working.

There’s plenty of other task management apps, both on the web and offline, so you could say it’s a pretty competitive market. What I’ve realized though is that I’m not really competing with them. I’m not competing with other todo apps because todo apps aren’t an end, they’re a means to an end. Nobody gets a task management app for the sake of using it, they get it to get things done, and there are plenty of simpler ways to get things done than using a software application…

Do you love your work? And by work I mean the products you create. Maybe it’s a website, maybe a software application, maybe a piece of art—whatever it is, are you really happy with the outcome? Are you truly happy with what you call finished?

If you don’t love that which you produce, then do you hate it? Do you truly hate it? Does it linger on your mind and make you angry every time you think about it? Because if it doesn’t, then what do you feel? Perhaps you feel nothing about it, perhaps you don’t care?

Steve Jobs recently had an interview at the D8 Conference. When asked about better syncing capabilities Jobs responded with:

No, what you’d like to do is share your library of media amongst your various devices. It’s not buying it on that device—you could buy it all on that device. It’s the sharing. You want to share your content that you’ve bought or somehow otherwise acquired amongst your various devices.

Today many people own several consumer electronic devices capable of playing/displaying their media, whether music, movies, photos or books. These devices act as the gateway for that piece of media—the media stays the same, it just materializes through the different devices. The devices themselves are not the owners of that piece of media. Your iPod doesn’t own your music collection—you do. The iPod only acts as an interface to that music…

If you design websites you may have heard of interesting tools called CSS pre-processors. A couple of great ones are LESS and SASS. I helped Alexis, the creator of LESS with the design of the language and built the public site.

It’s a tool I wanted to use myself, and even though SASS already existed I didn’t feel like using a different syntax to CSS—I wanted something to augment CSS and make it more powerful, while still retaining the same look and feel. That’s exactly what LESS does. It extends CSS with things like variables, nested rules, mixins and operations to name a few…

Obsession with tools is an insidious form of procrastination. This form of resistance masquerades itself as the opposite, as a form of improvement and development. Surely, if you’re spending time and money researching and getting the best tools for the job, the stuff you produce will improve? Won’t you have an edge over your competition—those who didn’t take the time to optimize their workflow by getting better, faster or more powerful gear?

Maybe. Probably not.

There is no argument that providing everything else stays constant, better tools will produce better results—after all, that’s that’s what “better” tools do. Whether the tool is a piece of software, a new mobile phone or a screwdriver, the better version would probably do a better job at its task…

Disqus, the very popular outsourced blog comments engine, seems to be going downhill lately. Now…don’t get me wrong, it’s still a solid product—one that’s very easy to install and one that loads very quickly via JavaScript. I use Disqus on all my blogs right now. But…

The problem with Disqus is simply this: bloat. Disqus are trying too hard to be useful and relevant that they’ve ended up spamming their own product with features I don’t need. And I say “I” because I won’t speak for anyone else here. I really don’t know—maybe people enjoy all those “like” buttons and profile popups, but for me, they’re just not useful…

Just something I’ve been thinking about—would love to get your comments and responses to this. Do you have a favorite blog that you read regularly, maybe every day, maybe every week? A blog that consistently delivers new content that you derive a lot of value from? If so, would you pay to read it? Take the poll:

<a href="http://polldaddy.com/poll/3252537/">How much would you pay per month to read your favorite blog?</a><span style="font-size:9px;"><a href="http://polldaddy.com/features-surveys/">online surveys</a></span>

Monetization of online content is of course a big issue right now, with newspapers, magazines and blogs trying out different models. Most blog content today of course is free, with revenue coming from advertising. Web CPM (cost to the advertiser for 1000 impressions, or pageviews) is much lower than that of print media…

If you’re a designer, you probably visit sites known as inspiration galleries. These are the sites showcasing the best designs from around the web—websites, logos, intefaces… When stuck in the creative block, browsing these galleries helps you find new ways of doing things or be inspired by a particularly clever way a designer has implemented something. They’re also just fun to browse, you see what everyone else is doing and enjoy the best executions.

I think though that there is a darker side to inspiration galleries. This darker side is the thing that sucks up your imagination and fills the gaps with other people’s work. You see, when you’re stuck in the creative block and browse such galleries, the first thing that happens is that you notice stuff that you like from other designs—you’re finding ways to solve your problem using other people’s work. Their implementation now takes over your imagination and you begin to think of the solution in terms of that implementation. You’re no longer thinking outside the box, you’re thinking inside a box defined by somebody else…