Getting Real Things Done

Starting your own pet software project is exciting when you're sick of your day job. But, unfortunately, you have to actually deal with your own gripes about software process. My partner and I have been experimenting with this since we started working on QuickDeck, a small webapp that's still "super secret" (as in nobody would really want to use it yet).

Our recent revelation was regarding the structure of our tasks lists. After a while, it's easy for our bug / feature lists to degenerate into a pile of the stuff we weren't sure about or needed to make a call about including it in the project.

Taking a page from Getting Things Done we changed the way we structure our task list - instead of a list of features, we have a list of next actions. As per the mantra of Getting Things Done this inspires us to act, and helps us to do more in the time between our weekly discussions.



This helped us to work more independently and embrace our constraint of only being able to meet up once a week. Now when I've got a minute to kill I can just crank on stuff - like drafting a blog post.

Tips and Tricks - Keyboard Shortcuts

QuickDeck is all about creating presentations as quickly as possible right? One mantra I try to live by is Work Smarter, Not Harder. Sure, you could use your mouse to navigate around sites and click here or there, but there are times when keyboard navigation is much more efficient.

(I personally cringe every time I see someone editing a Microsoft Word document that manually clicks on the Save button instead of using Ctrl+S shortcuts.)

Browser support for keyboard shortcuts varies. Each browser uses it's own key combination to trigger the shortcuts. Folks running Apple computers may have a slightly different configuration as well. Here's a quick breakdown of the different browser key modifiers used to trigger keyboard shortcuts:

• Firefox - Alt+Shift


• Opera - Shift+Esc


• Internet Explorer - Alt

In order to accommodate those savvy users out there that prefer keyboard navigation we've been hard at work to ensure that QuickDeck supports keyboard shortcuts. For example, to add a new slide to your presentation using Firefox you can press Alt+Shift+N instead of clicking on the New Slide button.



Make sure to scan around the application for other actions that have keyboard shortcuts. You should be able to identify them by the special underlined character styling.