News

Lovely Charts
Chart drawing application
Developer: This Is Lovely!
OS: Web-based
Price: Free, 29 Euros/year for Professional
Site: http://www.lovelycharts.com/

Flowcharts, org charts, site maps, network diagrams — chances are you've seen at least one or more of them in your work life, and even made them on occasion. A chart can be handy for mapping relationships between people or following decision processes, but unless you've got dedicated software like Visio, it's usually a lot easier to draw simple charts by hand than on the computer.

Lovely Charts isn't quite as complicated or as feature-packed as Visio or Omnigraffle, and hardcore chart jockeys will require more power from their chart drawing tools. But for the rest of us, the web application offers a happy medium, able to create relatively complex charts with just a few basic drawing tools for making symbols and connecting them with lines and arrows. Lovely Charts opens with a handy video tutorial to explain how the interface works, but anyone at all familiar with chart drawing apps or more general purpose tools like Photoshop will feel right at home.

The various sets of chart symbols, including flowchart symbols, network diagram icons and generic shapes, allow you to create a wide variety of charts. Lovely Charts even has a set of mock Web interface symbols for wireframes, meaning you can mock up the basic functionality of a website. The major constraint in the free version is the inability to save more than a single chart at a time; serious users will want to shell out the yearly fee to save multiple charts, as well as track revisions and share charts with others. But no matter which version you choose, Lovely Charts is great for cooking up diagrams on the fly.

ManicTime (tested v1.1.1)
Time tracking utility
Developer: ManicTime
OS: Windows
Price: Free
Site: http://manictime.com/

If you're the type to keep meticulous notes about exactly what you've been doing at all hours of the day, chances are you already use a time tracking tool of some sort. From extremely simple task list utilities to comprehensive tracking utilities with hierarchical task structures and Gantt charts reports, there's a program to fit nearly every tracking situation. Relatively new to the scene are programs that not only let the user record their hours manually, but can also keep track of what applications and documents are open at a given time, and for how long.

ManicTime's biggest asset is its interface, which shows three large timelines split into tags, activity and applications. The timelines are much easier to read than other competing applications like Slife, and there are also several other data views that let you see the timeline data as a list of times or a percentage of total time spent. ManicTime's multiple timelines allow you to categorize your time in different ways—by application and open document, as dictated by the window's title bar; by whether ManicTime recorded activity on the computer or not; and by user-defined tags that allow you to assign periods of time to specific tasks or categories like "research."

There are a few features missing from ManicTime, though; it won't create tags automatically based on your open applications like Slife can, nor does it let you start and stop a timer to define a task like Klok does. But ManicLife's easy-to-use interface makes it a winner.

Shutter (tested v2.90)
Automatic shutdown/hibernate utility
Developer: Denis Kozlov
OS: Windows
Price: Free
Site: http://www.den4b.com/projects.php

A couple of weeks ago, Apps We Love covered an application that could automatically turn on a computer that had been placed in standby mode at a set time. Shutter does the opposite: it's a small utility that can automatically shut down a computer. Many programs and utilities offer auto-shutdown options; Windows itself even offers a command-line option for scheduling a shut down task. But few offer the versatility or relative elegance of Shutter.

There are two parts to Shutter: defining a state the computer has to be in before Shutter takes action, and defining the action Shutter takes. The shut down utility can not only schedule a shut down for a particular time, but also if it detects a lack of user or CPU activity, or if it detects a window or program closing. Once Shutter detects a trigger condition, it can fire a number of actions besides shutdown; in addition to the usual hibernate/sleep/monitor off options, it can also log the current Windows user off, lock the system, or even just fire a sound alarm.

Shutter's main deficiency is that it can't interact with individual applications more directly. For example, it can't check your web browser directly to shut down your system when it's finished downloading a large file, or put your computer to sleep after your computer finishes playing a movie in any application other than Winamp. But this is a relatively minor issue, and one that can often be worked around using Shutter's built-in conditions. If you need a way to shut your computer down without your intervention, Shutter's the tool for you.