I have been spending some time lately trying out new web apps, or, rather, trying to catch up with all the new stuff that is out there. Older (and, hopefully, wiser) I now try to just play around with apps that will actually make my life easier in some way, instead of motivating it with things like “Ooohh, rounded corners!”, “Oohh, Web2.0 buttons!” or “Oohh!! It uses a series of tubes!”.

I was happy to find that my favorite task list manager Orchestrate has been included in the still-growing application suite 8apps (although at the moment it is only 4apps). Even more happy when the fact that I had been using Orchestrate for some time got me invited to the 8apps beta. If anyone wants to try it out, give me a shout and I’ll send you an invite.
As the blurb states, 8apps is “Social networking for productive people”. This may be the case in the future, but not quite yet, as there are some kinks yet to work out. Still, you can share to-do lists and brainstorming sheets, and set up meetings with included maps (mashed up with Google Maps, of course). This might not seem like a big thing in Europe or the States, where you generally have street names and house numbers, making the process of finding places quite easy. Not so in Japan, where finding a place you haven’t been to before often involves convoluted descriptions, or having to look it up at an online map service from your computer or mobile.

So, returning to the usability perspective, I am still mainly using Orchestrate for to-do lists. Brainstorm and Pinpoint (the map/meeting app) are still a bit clunky, and of course there’s the small problem of getting people to use it. For example, it is not always clear what functionality this adds over, for example, Google Mail + Calendar + Maps + Documents yet (except of course for the beautiful interface). I tried making my girlfriend using it for sharing to-do list – she claims I always forget about things that I promised we should do together, naturally a false accusation – but she has still not gotten further than registering, so I haven’t evaluated this functionality much. And, most of the people in the office are so used to using the horrible Outlook to-do lists, or *shock and horror* actual post-its or normal paper, that it is hard to convince them to use this kind of thing. Plus, they are almost all *over thirty*, and maybe they can’t be expected to understand these things at that age.

Next week, continued adventures, this time using 37signals‘ stuff.