Where we tell stories

Summer is near, which means the world is thinking about leaving their busy lives behind for a few weeks and taking a vacation.

While vacations are relaxing, organising them can be quite stressful. Luckily, technology can improve the experience.¹

So, we made a list of apps that can be helpful before and during your holidays. They all get the “XAOP Approved” seal.

Translate Pro

A free translation app that looks a lot better (especially on iPhone 5) than Google’s Translate app. It also has a Library for commonly used phrases in different situations (e.g. “In a restaurant”).

With In-App Purchases, you can remove ads and buy voices for a number of supported languages.

Yelp / Foursquare

Both apps for discovery of places and events nearby, so there’s certainly an overlap in functionality. They both have their strenghts and weaknesses, though, so we’d keep both apps installed.

Yelp, for example, is especially handy in certain countries for restaurants and bars. Foursquare, on the other hand, can be more helpful in discovering crowded locations and nearby friends.

TripAdvisor / KAYAK

Searching for hotels and flights is a part of most vacations. But there are so many choices that choosing the right one is almost impossible.

So, keep these two apps in mind the next time you’re looking for a place to stay, have dinner, or how to get there.

TomTom

When you’re travelling by car, you absolutely need an app like this. There’s a version of the app for each region (e.g. US, Canada, Europe, etc.)

They’re kind of expensive (prices range from about 30 to 75 Euros), but the important thing is that you can access these maps offline.² So it will still a lot cheaper than using an alternative like Google or Apple Maps while roaming.

Passbook

While it hasn’t yet reached the level of support it should, it’s going in the right direction. Not having to keep a number of documents, passes and tickets in your pocket feels like a huge relief.

While students all over the world prepare for their exams, we are really sad we have all this spare time. Apparently, though, quite a few people at XAOP were pretty lousy at planning enough time for studying. (But don’t worry, we all turned out OK!)

Luckily, it seems we’ve gotten pretty good at it today. Combining a few good habits with handy tools gives us the ability to estimate the needed effort for most projects with high accuracy.

The reason we keep getting better at planning as time progresses, is that we keep evaluating our previous estimations. Our system is essentially made up of three recurring phases.

1. Estimations

We estimate the time necessary for the activities that will make up an entire project. We do this in OmniPlan, a wonderful tool by The Omni Group where you can outline a number of activities and assign them to resources.

We make these estimations based on what we’ve learned from previous projects. When it’s a new type of project, estimating is done by looking at similar activities in other projects, but, more than anything else, it is based on instincts.

2. Tagging

During a project, we always log what project we’re working on and what kind of work it is we’re doing. We do this with Timetag, a tool we built ourselves.

We log our activities in this way for a number of reasons, but one of them is…

3. Self-reflection

At the end of each project, we analyse our performance thanks to the log we kept of our activities. We can export and inspect reports with Timetag, which in turn gives us the ability to put estimations and actual work next to each other.

This kind of information is invaluable. It shows us exactly where we got our estimations right or wrong. The lessons we learn from this, are remembered and applied for the next project we plan.

So, now you know how we tackle planning for a new project. We’re always interested in hearing about how other people do this stuff. So if you’ve got your own system for this kind of thing, make sure to share it with us!

We recently started offering a service where we take large amounts of old, archived documents and bring them into the modern, digital world. With our AfterPaper service (and accompanying software), we aim to bring sensitive documents from dusty archives to clean document management systems in a controlled way.

However, we’re not here to talk about what AfterPaper actually is or does. We’re here to share an interesting experience and insight we’ve had with it so far.

While there are a lot of necessary and important parts in such a digitalisation process, a large chunk of it is still basic scanning – at one point, thousands of paper sheets will have to pass through scanners. It would be so cool if this could be done by robots, but XAOP isn’t that high-tech. (Yet.) So we still need to do this job ourselves, which isn’t optimal because it can be quite boring after a while.

But during a past scanning project, we stumbled upon something that could make the job more fun, as well as increase the scanner operators’ productivity.

During the scanning phase, we noticed we might not be able to finish in time. To fix this (apart from a lot of extra hours by our scanning operators), a third scanning operator joined the group when possible.

This new guy’s enthousiasm was over the top, which had a positive impact on the others. He was constantly challenging the two main operators.

• “I will surely beat both of you today!”
• ”I’ll show you guys what scanning is about!”
• ”I’ll scan more than both of you combined!”
• “Olé, one more binder down!”

Apparently, these taunting phrases were thrown around more than once by the new guy. Being a group of well-educated adults, we manually started tracking the results so that we could settle who was The Lord of the Scanners once and for all.

At the end of the day, though, it seemed the new guy (who was, by the way, no other than the project leader!) was still no match for the two veteran scanner operators. They clearly won, even with the occasional cheating from the boss. (He intentionally picked all smaller binders!)

So, what did we learn from this experience? Yes, it’s fun to poke fun at the boss with the results. But also: adding a competitive or co-operative element to a repetitive task can increase the fun, engagement and productivity.

This means that while we’re working to perfect our AfterPaper service, we’ll be looking for a way to integrate this experience into the process and software.

Greetings from the scanner operators!

Logging in is an unpleasant, but necessary and important part of most of the apps and services we use. Today, credentials are practically always made up of a username-and-password combo. A lot of people don’t play it safe, especially because they:

1. Choose passwords that can be relatively easily hacked.
2. Use the same password for all their accounts.

At XAOP, we take security very seriously, so we like to minimise risks like the ones above as much as we can. That’s why we’ve all been using 1Password for about a year now.

1Password lets you manage and fill in passwords when logging in. ¹ This means you don’t have to remember your passwords, and you can have a different, auto-generated, extremely strong password for each of your accounts. So the next time Linkedin, Sony, or whoever, gets hacked, you don’t need to worry about other accounts.

Also, it’s been months since we’ve had to go through one of those Reset Your Password flows. It’s a wonderful world.

It’s not all rainbows and unicorns, though.

Remember you’ll still need to choose and protect a good master password. It’s also a best practice to make sure you always have access to your password database², even when you don’t have immediate access to the 1Password apps.

But as long as you keep this in mind, using 1Password can be great. The combination of Dropbox synchronisation and mobile apps lets you take your passwords with you on the go. Its automatic form-filling feature works like magic.

So if you’re not using a password manager yet, make sure you’ll at least consider it, because it sure made our digital lives easier and more secure.