Kurlo & ToDoList

Two valuable tools that I’ve started using are Kurlo, a free, portable contact manager designed for personal and small business use and ToDoList, a time-management program that uses XML and XSLT.

For my contact management I looked at many software solutions including SugarCRM and Daffodil. However, these were much too complicated and were not intuitive. Then, I came across Kurlo. This program was written in Java and allows you to maintain information on people and organizations. Each entry can be cross-referenced to many different categories. I’m using this to keep track of all my business connections along with notes of meetings, birthdays, children’s names, etc. I can also add unlimited custom fields. Best of all, I can run Kurlo from my USB drive.

I can address and write emails inside of Kurlo, using my existing email software to do the actual emailing. This program is very fast and exceptionally easy and flexible to use. I’ve imported all the names from my school Outlook account . Importing the names from my Macintosh Address Book took a little more work, until I found the vCard to CSV conversion tool which converts the VCF files that Apple’s Address book exports into CSV files for Thunderbird, GMX, or Gmail.

The only downside is not being able to handle duplicate entries. Also, a Linux version that will not be ready until the middle of 2007. It will be nice to be able to use the same program on my PC as well as my Mac.

The ToDoList by .dan.g. is very valuable. It gives me a single spot to keep all my reminders. I have one for changes I need to make to my courses as well as day-to-day tasks. This also is a very fast program and all of the data is saved as XML. The reports that are created are very plain vanilla, but this is so you can use XSLT (an XML transforming language) to reformat the pages for virtually any output you need.

One of the features that I really like about the ToDoList is the timer. When working with clients I type in the task and hit the timer. This gives me excellent documentation for when I do my billing. Even if I’m not charging by the hour, by using the timer I’m able to keep track of how long a task has taken.

The ToDoList is very configurable, but at the same time I was able to begin using it immediately without having to make any modifications. It had everything I needed right “out of the box”. Thanks to .dan.g. for making this program available for us and thanks to the CodeProject for support software developers like .dan.g.

Here is a short tutorial I put together to help get you started with ToDoList.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 5:08 pm and is filed under css. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.