According to the team who is behind Doris development, they built the tool with the following requirements in mind:

• Simplicity: we have often been overwhelmed by the amount of projects, tasks, deadlines and priorities that needed to be tracked - we needed an app that didn't get in our way, made it simple to manage work, and that allowed for hiding complexity.
• Great usability: the UI had to be fantastic, frictionless, fast, minimum clicks, keyboard optimised and of course very responsive.
• Speed: there almost seems to be a requirement in GTD circles to make Todo apps as complicated and painful as possible. Reminds me of submitting bugs in Bugzilla where you need to fill in 50 fields per ticket as opposed to Trac where you need 2. Typical task options we've seen are priority, category, mood, colour, status, due date, flagged, starred, notes, tags, contexts ... no kidding, just unbelievable! So with Doris we wanted single field, keyboard-friendly task entry. Lightning entry! We do actually make other aspects of classification available to users, but these must be enabled in your settings first.

I've been trying Doris for 1 day now (switching back and fourth from my computer and iPod Touch) and I'm loving it so far. It is so simple to drag and organize tasks around, and the design is totally well thought. It doesn't have stars, deadlines, priorities, etc.. However, since its goal is to be simple, you can easily create different groups (there is a default Today group) and organize you actions in order of priority. I, for example, created groups for Next Actions, Waiting on and other GTD typical organizational method.

The web application is free and I paid USD $1.99 for the iPhone app. There is one free version available, but apparently it won't sync with the web version, which to me would not be enough for my needs. The app is also very well-built and the commands are a pleasure to learn and use.

There are different functionalities that are still under development (team collaboration, integration with e-mail services, gadgets, etc..), but the app is ready to use for those who just want a simple but flexible to-do list.

Check out Doris here.

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Upload 24 images
One at a time or select multiple images simultaneously. It's super easy!

Personalize
Choose theme color, image position and add album description. 

Preview online
Like what you see? Save it, share it & order it!

The interface is very sleek and easy to use. Besides uploading the pictures from your computer, you can also import them from Flicker or Picasa. There are also comunity features where public albums can be browsed, rated and purchased.

Each album costs €14.99 and the shipping is free to anywhere in the world. Very reasonable price for a creative and memorable gift.

Check memolio here.

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Think about is as a Google Docs for writers, where you get the collaboration and editing tools, but customized to the book writing experience. For example, if you decide to write a novel, the tool offers the templates for the book structure (prologue, chapters, etc..) and the interface is also adapted to it's purpose, with only the basic editing capabilities and the ability to see the actual format of the final book.

If you don't want to start your book from scratch, FastPencil offers the hability to import any blog (with full content, including comments), and use it as your initial draft.

The greatest thing about FastPencil, though, is it's ability to distribute the books, creating a marketplace for amateur writers. According to their website:

FastPencil gives you distribution flexibility that is unmatched in the publishing industry. Your books can be distributed in printed or electronic formats via Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and shortly, through the FastPencil Marketplace. You can even sell or give them away as eBook, Kindle, or PDF files. The choice is yours.

FastPencil is offered as a free product including unlimited space for text and images. However, if you want additional features (like personal consultant, editorial services, custom book design and ISBN), you can buy the Silver or Gold packages, starting from USD $399.

If you decide to create a print version of the book, FastPencil negotiates volume discounts on printing costs, that can go up to 30% (+500 books).

Create your free account here.

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For magazines, I find Zinio a very good attempt to solve this problem. It is not perfect, since it also replicates some of the "old school" magazine model, with weekly or monthly paid subscriptions. However, you really feel like you are turning pages and browsing the whole page.

For Newspaper, the NYT amd WSJ readers for the iPhone were a great first step. However, the need to browse many news on a larger pages were missing. Until now.

Skimmer is an online application offered by the NYT that provide a "paper-like" experience from your web browser. The image above shows it running on Jolicloud (the OS I run in my eee PC), but it can be run on any desktop or laptop.

According to their editors:

... our focus was on the fundamentals of the experience. It is empowering to spread so much information out on a table, so we spread as many stories as we can fit into the space of your screen. It is easier and more relaxing to scan a surface of information than flip through a stack, so information is laid out in a rigid two-dimensional grid. The sections do not flip into place; instead, they slide up and down. If you want to imagine the whole of the content as a giant uncut scroll of paper, don’t let us stop you.

They also comment on the commands built into the web app:

We’re also geeks, so there are plenty of keyboard commands for the efficiency lovers. The space bar takes you down a section, and shift-space brings you back up. Arrow keys do the same. You can navigate sections by holding down the “s” key (s for section), typing the number that appears, and releasing the “s” key. Same goes for articles, but with the “a” key (a for article). If you need a reminder, just click the “?” in the upper right corner.

The application does a great job in solving the browsing experience. They included nice transitions and the pages load very fast. However, when you click on an article, you get the  "web-like" long text strips that makes the in-screen reading somewhat boring. I'd like to see, as a next version, a way to provide the unstructured reading paths that mix texts, images and some callouts, another aspect that makes the off-line experience a pleasant one.

Skimmer is free and the only popular browser it won't run is IE6. Well, if your are reading this blog, you probably don't use IE6, so you'll likely be able to try it now.

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EtherPad is an online application that removes all the clutter and focus on just one thing: Realtime collaboration. You might be thinking: doesn't Google Docs offer that already? The EtherPad team has an answer to that:

No. Google Docs is a suite of products that do many things, from word processing to spreadsheets to document management. One thing that Google Docs does not do is real-time collaborative text editing. We think this is an important use case, so we built EtherPad with real-time collaboration as the focus.

For example, with Google Docs it takes about 5 to 15 seconds for a change to make its way from your keyboard to other people's screens. Imagine if whiteboards or telephones had this kind of delay! In contrast, the EtherPad infrastructure is built to carry your every keystroke at the speed of light, limited only by the time it takes electrons to travel over a wire (such as an "ethernet" cable).

EtherPad has a simple but effective interface, using colors to differentiate each user on the text body. Some of the use cases they provide include: meeting notes, meetings, teleconferencing, drafting and editing prose, program as a team and engineering phone interviews.

The Free Edition lets you create public pads on etherpad.com with no user accounts and minimal security. If you want to use it seriously, the SaaS Professional Edition is free for up to 3 users, and costs USD $8/user/month. There is also the Private Network Edition for USD $99/user, in case you want the software to run in your own servers.

Try EtherPad here.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgjbVRpvBsU&hl=en&fs=1&]

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A Sweedish company called Nordic River is offering a different approach to online collaboration on texts. With TextFlow, all your colleagues work separately "offline" on their usual word processor (MS Word or Open Office), and after you get all files through e-mail you drag-and-drop them to TextFlow to compare versions and make decisions on the editing.

The interface is very sleek and I see value in being able to compare different docs this way. However, it sounds to me that it is much easier to go with the approach taken by the companies I mentioned at the top. Perhaps I'm missing something here.

TextFlow can be used through any browser or the installable Adobe Air version. It is free, unless you want to pay US$ 99,00 per year to use the Professional edition and get rid of the "not for commercial use" watermark automatically added to all documents.

Try TextFlow here.

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Donationware Rollip is a very simple web application that lets you transform any picture into a downloadable "Polaroid" photo.

All you have to do is select one of the 12 available effects (soft-focus - or not - and different color saturation), upload your photo and download the converted version. That's it.

I've tried one of my pictures and it looks very real. If you are looking for some cool effect to add to your next presentation or are just feeling nostalgic, you should try Rollip here.

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The process is very simple: you select a picture, upload it, hit a button and that's it. What you can see above is the suggested color pallet for the Van Gogh's painting I've chosen as inspiration.

In addition to the main suggested pallet, the site offers some related pallets from color websites Adobe Kuler and Colourlovers (the one I used to come up with the colors for FLYABYTE).

There is also a very nice iPhone functionality available (see how it works below), allowing you to get inspiration from anything in the "real world" that can be captured with your camera.

Pitaculous is free and can be accessed here.

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With Aviary Falcon, all you need to do is type "aviary.com/" before any URL. After a few seconds, you will have in front of you the full web page (even long ones) ready to be edited by the aviary online image editing program.

By default, the application opens a simple interface with tools to accomplish the most common operations. However, you can choose to launch the advanced editor if you need more options. After you're done with your editing, just save the new image to your desktop or log in to host it online.

The company also offers a Firefox add-on that also gives you the option to define just a selection to be captured.

Falcon is part of the excellent creative web suite offered by Aviary, that also includes color, effects and vector full editors. All products are free.

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