@alexgieg: That's wonderful news! We'll add this provider within the next week or so! Sorry that we had trouble finding it...language barriers sometimes get in the way.

@alexgieg: If you can find any Brazilian cell carriers that offer SMS for free via email gateways or as a special service to developers then please let me know and we'll happily include them! Unfortunately at $.15/SMS we have to charge. In the US, it's free because it doesn't cost us. Honestly we'd love to be more…

@tgrantt: That's an awesome idea...but it doesn't necessarily grab the relevant bits of a message since SMS is 140 char and emails are often a bit more than that. I did in fact use this approach at one point.

Thank you, Gina, for this thoughtful writeup! I hope you find a chance to use it : ).

@UnMicD: For the free version of the product, one has to enter a confirmation code that's sent to one's cellphone. No, we definitely don't want people spamming with it!

@DeadPlayerWalking: actually it integrates directly with Gmail—you don't even have to leave the AwayFind setup and it'll setup either an auto responder or an email signature for you.

I disagree with Shirky here. The problem taking place now is not the same one as 600 years ago. It's not even the same one as 3 years ago.

I've been using TimeSnapper for 2 years and it's the first application I install on Windows when I rebuild my machines. Every week it pays for itself.

Thanks so much for all of these comments. I hope that some people will look to all the discussion of each of the features and decide for themselves what makes sense. If I wrote from a biased perspective, I guess that's because my conclusions are personal and the analysis my own—as a productivity trainer in Outlook…

Poking in for just a couple minutes. A few quick points:

Thanks for all the feedback—just trying to shed some light on the fact that a business CAN function off either product and that there are some tangible reasons why. If you head to the Valley, many startups are on Google Apps. Where I am in DC it's mostly an Exchange world. But there's merit to both sides and I just…

Sounds pretty cool and "bit.ly" is quite short! I've been using [snipr.com] (aka snipurl.com) for a long time now and I love how it lets me track all my snips, keep click counts, unique click counts, and choose custom URLs (the best part).

Wow, origami that even I can accomplish!

@Torley thanks for that; your tutorial here (as well as pretty much all of your tutorials) is a big help! :-)

@Torley: thanks for all those additions! Just a few thoughts—I didn't mention the copy/paste or dragging of images because I had mentioned the advantage to naming images (which you don't get when using those methods). But when you're in a rush that's an awesome feature. As for notifications of updates, the new…

@FizzyPopMan: Regarding the version difference, you'll want to be sure you grab the Technical Refresh from here. Hope that helps!

hongjun, thanks for the warning on line numbering with the syntax highlighting

I've used elance for similar tasks. The really important thing is to be THOROUGH in the specifications you give for your task. In addition to the usual issues with communicating electronically there are often language barriers. And, most importantly, if you don't ask for something explicitly you're not going to get…

Well, I'm a Windows guy first, but these are seriously important apps for me that don't quite have equivalents:

Awesome tip, Kevin! I'll definitely be sharing this with some clients.