Thanks to Twitter, I found three tools that are now a critical part of my computing life.

The first tool is Things.  Things is a task list manager that implements the important parts of the personal task management system created by author David Allen called Getting Things Done.  Tasks can have tags and notes; notes can include URLs that can be clicked to open in your favorite browser.  You can categorize tasks by Area and Project; Projects can be contained in Areas.  I’ve started posting URLs I need to read for work into Things, and after I arrive reading the web content when I get a chance based on the task showing up in the Today view.  There was a post on their wiki support site describing how to share Things tasks between two computers using a tool called DropBox; I now use that to share various files between my work and home laptops.

Googaby is a tool to copy contact information between Google GMail and Mac’s Address Book.  I use Entourage from Microsoft, but synchronize those contacts with Address Book so I can use Address Book tools on contacts.  Googaby moves my contact information from my Mac to GMail.  The reason I especially wanted to mention Googaby is because it didn’t work completely when I downloaded it; it would lock up part way through my Address Book; the author posted a patch that night which fixed the problem.