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Open Thread: Doodle & your favorite simple web tools
Merlin Mann | Oct 13 2006
This has been mentioned here before (just in comments, I think), but I have to repeat: I can't say enough good things about Doodle. It takes the idiotically over-complicated problem of figuring out when all of n people are available to do something, and in the simplest way conceivable, polls all the participants to find the optimal time and date. I'm always thrilled when colleagues send a meeting invite in the form of a Doodle email; it requires zero fiddling on my part and pleasantly skirts the need for the endless email threads that most people rely on to get a group of people extant in one time-space unit. I'm risking the indignity of a double-post on an "old" link for a good reason: with all the foam and fuss over "Web 2.0," and the ever higher (Ever! Higher!) technology we shovel to solve stupid human problems, it's refreshing to see adoption of a tool that ends up being no more complicated than a white board with electrical-tape columns. I wish stuff like Doodle would inspire more developers to start with the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. No Arial Rounded, no whizzy AJAX, and no angel-round-attracting gradients. Just a modest solution to a single dumb problem. That is a life hack, defined. What's your favorite idiotically simple web tool right now? 32 Comments
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 Office fu: What caught my eye...Submitted by Ernest Gunn (not verified) on October 16, 2006 - 12:00pm.
Office fu: What caught my eye was your mention of whiteboards with electrical tape. You can draw marks that are difficult to erase from a whiteboard if you use a thick Vis-a-vis overhead marker. I'm a teacher, and I use this all the time. I expect the lines on my assignment grid to last for half a year. While I'm at it, it took me YEARS to realize how much easier it is to tear the border strips off of a whole sheet of adhesive labels when you want to use them. » POSTED IN:
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