Gmail was the champion for the night. Everyone at the table used Gmail, if not for their fulltime client, for secondary accounts. We had a lengthy discussion about how to use labels, as well as labels in combination with filters to accomplish a "zero inbox".

One of the tools mentioned for organizing your tasks and todo's was Things for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It is a beautiful app which allows you to create time-sensitive todo's. Each day you can take a look at your "Inbox" to see what tasks you have to accomplish today, look at future tasks to prepare for what is to come and you can even stick items into the "Someday" category (for those things that you want to keep putting off or ideas for future projects).

When we began the bookmarks portion of the discussion, we heard two distinct methods: Delicious & In-browser. For those OCD organizers out there, the thought of keeping your bookmarks inside of Firefox or Chrome is a scary thought. LOL But, hey, I guess it works for some. Most of the group used Delicious.com full-time or in tandem with their browser's bookmarks. Delicious is an amazing solution which is almost automatically organized. When bookmarking a site, Delicious suggests tags for the link and you can then assign your own. For example, inspiration items bookmarked from Twitter to read leater, might be tagged: inspiration, stuff to read, twitter.

Lots and lots of options and methods were discussed. Much too many to detail here. In short: Photos - Flickr & Picasa, Music - iTunes, Windows Media and manual organization, - Videos: Windows Media, Delicious Library and DVD Profiler. Each has their own cons and pros. DVD Profiler (for Windows) was discussed in detail. It allows you to build a library so that you know what you have (details of DVD's are built automagically) and you can then check them out to friends without losing your collection one by one.

Ah, editors. We all have our own favorite flavor of editor. Surprisingly, the room was mostly in agreement that Notepad++ was the reigning leader. You would expect to hear about lots more software, but to be honest the only other two discussed were Crimson Editor and Scintilla's Scite. All have syntax highlighting and support for plug-ins. Scite was the lesser know of the three, but well worth a try.

We discussed several different types of remote access: off-site access to your own machine, remote assistance to others and in-network control of your own or others' machines. The usuals were discussed, including VNC, GoToPC, LogMeIn and TeamViewer. One app that most of us had never heard of was Snatch for the iPhone. It allows you to control your computer wirelessly via a WiFi connection. Input includes mouse, touchpad, application launcher/closer, keyboard and you can even create custom inputs (like a media player remote). Super handy...and a funny name.

Again, several different options were dicussed: Harvest, Bamboo, BlinkSale, FreshBooks, Word Templates, Excel Templates, custom invoices and more. There are tons of different options here depending upon volume, need to mail physical copies, accounting, integration with project management tools, cost of service, etc. It's up to you to evalute your needs and match them to a service or method. Here are a few links to get you started: