My latest tech fetish is GPS. I know I am a little late in the game for this, but I recently had to put together a training course for GPS devices (Trimble Nomad and Yumas) and it peaked my interest. That, coupled with me getting my first real smart phone, has meant that I have been obsessed with any app that has some kind of location-aware feature.

One of the first apps I found on the Google Marketplace was My Tracks. Basically, before you go for a run, bike ride, or drive you fire up the app and start recording your 'tracks'.

En-route, it can either sit silently in the background or you can view your location and the path you are taking. You can also look at aggregated statistics for your journey (for example, average speed, total moving time, total distance travelled), insert points that record the aggregated statistics up until that point, or view some of the stats in graph form.

After you have completed your journey, you can easily upload it to your Google Maps account or review it on your phone. Or you can tell the world about your trip by sharing it on Twitter (and it has its own hash tag #MyTracks).

My Tracks, is an amazingly feature rich application, especially considering it is free. And it ticks another of my software 'boxes' by being open source.

I do wonder how long I will continue to use it (that is, how long my GPS fetish will last) but I can see it becoming part of my (lately, somewhat hap hazard) fitness regime.

I have always liked to keep lists. Whether it is for work using a ticketing system or at home on the back of an envelope, I need a system of some sort that tracks what I need do to.

When it comes to organising the jobs for my one-person consultancy I need something in between. As much as I'd love to have a full-blown work request system (and don't think that I haven't considered it), somewhere in between that and an envelope is required.

Enter Task Coach.

Task Coach is ideal to organise one person's jobs. You can set up tasks giving them start dates, end dates, and priorities. This means you can easily organise your work and see the deadlines approaching and where you should concentrate your efforts. Tasks can also be assigned to multiple categories, so, for example, you can separate out billable and non-billable tasks or have a different category for each client.

Another big feature that I use is effort tracking to record the amount of time I spend on each job. I can start tracking by clicking the Task Coach icon in the system tray and selecting the job. You can also manually enter time against a job (if you forget to start tracking).

It is dead easy to get started with it, but has loads of features that you discover along the way. Others include, setting task prerequisites, recurring tasks, and attachments (although I haven't figured out exactly how this feature is meant to work). There are also a myriad of ways to display the task information (timeline, calendar, and even a task map).

My basic workflow with Task Coach is:

• As I hear about an opportunity I create a task. I tag it with a 'Lead' category so I can easily go back and see what opportunities I need to follow up. I also record any time against the task during this stage (to track how much time I spend on business development and help cost that into the job, if it comes though).
• Before I start the work, I do my estimate and enter the budget.
• As I work on the job I use the in-built timer to track my effort. It is also a good way to keep notes about what I have done – which can then be used on the invoice.
• When I am invoicing I look at the tracked effort and either use the total hours to invoice (if billing by the hour) or review how good my estimation was (if doing a fixed quote).

Overall, it fits well with my small-time operation and personal workflow.

Task Coach is free, can run off a USB drive, and is regularly updated by its developers Frank Niessink and Jérôme Laheurte (and a bunch of translators). It is available on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and even on the iPhone. I wonder when the Android version is coming ;)

I am please to introduce my new business Segue Consulting.

Segue Consulting provides professional technical communication, Author-it consulting, and online communication services.

We specialise in:

• Developing complex technical documentation and training
• Developing online help systems (both integrated and web-based)
• Deploying and customising Author-it
• Deploying content management systems (CMS)
• Developing and deploying websites.

I also have a new email address. To contact me, please use the contact form on the site.

Please visit the site and contact me if I can help you in any way.

By no means a replacement for hard core users of SnagIt, Screenpresso is a good, lightweight screen capture tool.

What I like about it:

• No installation required, so you can run it directly from your USB thumb drive (although, you can install it, if you prefer).
• It has the usual tools that are handy for tech writers (arrows, bubble text boxes, callout numbering, blurring, image shaddows, and torn edge effects).
• It has extra features, like automatic image resizing (to a fixed width, height, percentage, or maximum size) and automatic border effects.
• It is free.

It is not perfect and is not feature rich. For example, I did find it had some strangeness when editing text in text boxes and bubbles. Also, you cannot edit saved images using the free version.

Its place in a tech writer’s toolbox could be on their USB thumb drive as a good alternative when they are away from their own computer.
Find more information about Screenpresso and download it from http://www.screenpresso.com/.