The ocean has gone quiet as Google decides to halt development of Google Wave.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

- Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

For myself I have mixed feelings on this as I have been a Wave proponent but at the same time never really managed to integrate it into my daily workflow or the teams that I work with. Some of the features that drew me to Wave, like the ability to collaborate in real time with others has already been incorporated into other products, like Google Docs, so hopefully I’ll be able to take advantage of it there.

I do want to congratulate Google on this decision though and that might cause some to get upset with me but it takes a responsible Project Manager or Company to make the tough call of cancelling a project when it just make sense to continue it.

So, were you a “Waver?” If so, what are you going to use in its place?

This afternoon Lifehacker featured another desktop design submitted to their Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr group.

The premise is easy enough, take some of the better known desktop customization software like Rainmeter create some skins, set it against a unique looking background and maybe even put your todo.txt file on it. What you have is a fantastic desktop that looks cool and is the envy of all your geekdom friends.

Or, a complete waste of time – it depends on your perspective.

Here’s my desktop:

There’s no fancy background, not todo.txt file, not even an icon to be seen – just a black void with a script that shows the time and date (written by yours truly), a true picture of minimalism. In fact you typically won’t see the taskbar up on my screen as I love my application launcher – Launchy.

I will be honest though, I did take a look at geeking out my desktop at one point and I was also that guy in the office where you couldn’t see the picture of his kids through all the icons but a couple of years ago I decided that just black was fine with me.

Why the radical change at the time? There were two primary reasons and both in my mind were very practical.

1. Just couldn’t find anything

You do reach a point when the dumping ground that is your computer desktop is just too cluttered to find anything. If you’re desktop is littered with icons for programs, documents, bookmarks and so on, think back to the last time you had to find something – how long did it take? How long did you spend staring at the screen wondering where the item was? For me, there’s no looking for it – it’s filed with all the other items of a given project or topic. For those items that don’t fit into a project my good friend Launchy is set up to index all my main file folders and can usually pull it out.

Of course the setup I have has take a fair amount of discipline to maintain. Whenever I create a document, whatever the type, I need to be sure I store it properly up front, it’s not a time consuming act but one that requires you to develop the habit of doing and trust me I was a great “dump it to the desktop” guy.

2. I never see it

The other reason I decided it just wasn’t worth the effort is that I never see my desktop. All the cool trick outs in the world just aren’t any fun if you don’t see them. When I’m at my day job (blogging just doesn’t pay the bills yet) I can have upwards of two dozens application windows open at the same time and all I do is switch between them. When I’m working on a blog post (like right now) I’m in full screen mode (hit F11 in Chrome – a beautiful thing) – in both cases I just don’t see the desktop.

If you can’t enjoy it, why bother?

So while I enjoy the Lifehacker posts with all the cool desktops I’m happy with my black background, my clock script and no icons – my void of a desktop. As an aside, everyone that sees my desktop wonders how I can keep it so clean and when I start to explain it the response is along the lines of “it must be a geek thing.”

So you’re probably thinking that Scot has lost what few brain cells he has left and is putting garbage in post titles – you couldn’t be further from the truth.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you know that I’m an evangelist for Evernote. It’s steadily worked its way into just about every aspect of my life – to the point that I’ve gone ahead and forked over the money to be a Premium subscriber. It may not seem like much but this month I pass 200Mb of transfer without really thinking about it – notes to myself, pictures of places, pictures of receipts, scanned copies of documents I think I’ll need later, yes, Evernote has become my “second brain.”

What does that have to do with the subject of this post? An area that I decided to use Evernote was for managing my projects and lists – both home and work. I know, I know, I’m breaking a bit of that “separate work from home,” I posted about a few days ago (read the post) but while it is a single tool for the job using notebooks and tags I can keep the two from mixing together by using search queries.

You would think that as a heavy Google user (okay, most would call me a fan boy) search would come easy, it does but there are challenges when it comes to Evernote. It takes a bit of time to get use to the fact that searches are confined to the notebook you’re looking at so you need to take that into account. You also have to pay attention to how you name things as any given notebook or tag name can only exist once however, more than one note can have the same name (a small blessing). The other search item you need to get use to is that tags have to be called out in the search field, type something in without calling it out and you can get some strange results.

So, back to the post title: notebook:”Next Action” tag:@work -tag:@wf

That’s the search I have saved to pull out all my next actions that I need to do at work. For those that follow GTD you’ll notice the ‘@’ symbol that is typcially used for indicating the various contexts things are done in. In my case the search breaks down as follows:

notebook:”Next Action”

I need to define the notebook that I want searched, I don’t want to worry about where I am in Evernote when I kick off the search so I call it out at the beginning. The quotes you see are necessary as the notebook name has a space in it.

tag:@work

In this case I’m only interested in those items that are tagged to be done at work.

-tag:@wf

For those items I have delegated off or I am waiting on a response for I tag them ‘@wf’ for waiting for. This search parameter takes all of the ‘waiting for’ items out of the work list as they are not items I need to take action on – someone else needs to.

What’s left on the screen at this point is just the next actions I need to take at work – now I just pick and chose the ones I want to work on based on available time and energy.

So that’s just a peak into the way I use Evernote to help with my GTD system, it’s not the only tool I use as GTD is about method not tools but since I’m at my computer nearly all the time at work it makes sense to use it.

Of course since I have the iPhone app as well so I can take my lists with me.

Do you use Evernote for GTD? Why not share your experiences in the comments?