You probably won’t know what a ‘power user’ is unless you are (or at least consider yourself) one. You could be a power user of a particular software application, particular online service, or particular hardware platform – the requirements are more or less the same. Power users don’t just ‘use’ a tool – they wring it dry for every drop of utility possible. They know the ins and outs of every function, option, shortcut, menu and can achieve things using it that even the designer of the tool considers impossible. They are seriously clever geeks.

What does it take to become a power user? The hard way is to read, study, practice, learn and explore over a period of months, if not years. The blagger’s approach I’m suggesting is a lot more efficient: master the few core concepts and techniques that underpin most, if not all, systems and you’ll be prepared to become a power user in days, not months. And that goes for any new tool they care to throw at you, from mail apps to GTD apps to fully blown enterprise management apps.

Web 2.0 has given Non-9-to-5′ers the holy grail of technology: on-demand, go anywhere, be anywhere software. There are hundreds of online tools you can use to solve just about any business (or personal) problem and they can all be accessed from your iPhone whilst you’re up a mountain. But new technology brings new concepts, and where before you might have been a power user if you knew that ‘Ctrl+S’ would magically save your document without you having to touch the mouse, times have moved on.

The most useful web apps now demand that you now understand tags, feeds, mashups, APIs, social and search and how all these concepts interact. I’ll take application x. Pretty much any modern, cloud app. Click on the search field. Define a custom tag-based search using proprietary syntax. Save it. Publish the results as an RSS field. Design a widget to render the feed XML wrapped in CSS. Then hook the widget onto my blog’s sidebar.

Clear? Thought not. Now’s the time to look at some software ‘power user’ concepts that will take you beyond “I know how to put pictures in an excel spreadsheet”.

Author: Jonathan Pincas
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Cool mobile gadgets