Almost a year ago I wrote a now somewhat outdated article titled Startup 101: Tools for the Job. A suggestion on my Skribit account asked me to delve into the software I use on a regular basis, so I decided to put the two together and briefly discuss some of the tools that keep me going. Many of my solutions are very common, but in writing this I’m hoping to hear about what you use for your needs.
Development
Skribit has since stopped using Assembla for SVN and Trac hosting, and we’ve made the great decision to switch to git and use GitHub. For ticket tracking we started off with LightHouse but since it really is just myself and Calvin, we have adjusted our workflows to include using local to-do list app Things (as discussed here). It’s important to note that since we both continually communicate most days via Campfire, it’s not as big a deal that we don’t use ticket tracking as much as we should.
While Campfire can be considered glorified IRC (for which I use Colloquy), it is accessible from my iPhone (although there is now a Colloquy iPhone app) and remarkably easy to setup compared to IRC. Conversations are logged and searchable. To make Campfire even easier to use I created an SSB for it with Fluid.app and employed a userscript to remove Campfire’s oft-annoying user notifications. I keep going on and on about Campfire but it is truly the most useful service I use every single day. The cherry on top? GrabUp. Pasting an automatically-created image URL via GrabUp into Campfire actually loads the image within the chat window.
Sharing a GrabUp-created and uploaded screenshot of a business card idea on CampfireWhen it comes to project management, we still pay for a Basecamp account although similar to Lighthouse I have found that it’s not exactly something I access daily or even weekly. I recently created a Highrise (CRM) account to make personal notes of people and past conversations that I don’t want to lose within my busy inbox, and I quite like it. Of note is the email dropbox feature which lets you BCC a special Highrise email address and have it log your conversations. Highrise also lets you email it to add tasks to your to-do list (if only it synced with Things).
No development tools list would be complete without the typical Firefox + Firebug mention. I also use FireRainbow (JavaScript syntax highlighting in Firebug), Inline Code Finder for Firebug, ColorZilla (eyedropper and color swatch tool). In addition, S3Fox is always welcome in my Firefox browser, particularly with its recent support for Amazon CloudFront management. The Inquisitor search add-on for Firefox is a must-have as well.
Speaking of Amazon, I have two scripts that backup this blog and Skribit to S3 every night.
And lastly, TextMate needs no explanation. It’s just a shame how many people use TextMate and don’t realize how powerful it is, passing it off as a simple text editor. If you fall into this category, you should consider purchasing this Pragmatic Programmers TextMate book:
Photoshop CS4 usually makes an appearance in my daily workflow, either for tweaking a button for Skribit, cropping photos for my blog or using it to select hex colors (even though the Colorzilla Firefox add-on does this, I’m a bit set in my ways with Photoshop).
And if I am so unlucky as to need to test something Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8 beta, I can quickly fire up Windows XP in VMware Fusion (thanks in no small part to the Intel X25-M SSD in my MacBook Pro). I did run into an issue where the VM did not like accessing http://localhost:3000, which is address of locally-hosted Ruby on Rails web applications. I got around this by using the IP address provided by the following OS X Terminal command:
ifconfig vmnet1
In my case, I use a 172.XX.XX.X:3000 address in VMware and it works just fine, although I have to manually change the URLs of some files to avoid errors (and then change them back when I’m done editing in VMware). As for how I am able to use Internet Explorer 6 and 7 simultaneously, I employ IE7s.exe – a standalone IE7 browser.
Testing a Skribit page in IE7 with VMware Fusion
And of course, who can forget Terminal.app. I usually have a few tabs open: one for running Rails script/server, a bash prompt for git work, a MySQL session for poking around tables and usually one other tab for miscellaneous *nix tasks.
Play
It took me a while to get used to using something other than simply Twitter.com, but I have fallen in love with TweetDeck. The Adobe AIR-based application does have its obvious performance drawbacks and crashes at least once per day, so there are better alternatives. EventBox is becoming popular but I did not like the RSS aggregator-esque interface when I tried it out.
TweetDeck
As for feed-reading, I use a mixture of Feedly (as reviewed here) and FriendFeed. If you don’t know who to follow on FriendFeed, you can start with me, Steve Rubel, Louis Gray and find your way out from there. With FriendFeed important/popular stories tend to float up to the top with frequent comments and activity, so it’s quite hard to miss a big item. Feedly is more along the lines of an RSS aggregator but it’s unique layout highlights stories recommend by your friends and other Feedly users, making it easy to skim through your feeds.
Browsing my car-related feeds in Feedly
When something noteworthy comes through the tubes, I quickly Cmd+D to save it to my Delicious account via the Firefox Delicious Bookmarks plugin. If it’s not too important and more short term than long, I’ll click the star in the Firefox address bar and deal with it later.
For my music needs I have several Fluid.app browsers setup for music sites like the Hype Machine and Mugasha (Startup Weekend Portland).
This doesn’t look like 100 items..
That’s where you come in! What applications (web or local) do you put to work daily?
eCalc is a great online calculator that includes a built in unit converter. The calculator works in both algebraic and RPN mode and runs in your browser without requiring any plugins.
Good post, Paul.
Like you, I often check my websites with different browsers. Instead of using Fusion, I use Parallels, and have every standard browser installed. Firefox, Chrome are installed alongside IE7, 6 and 5.5 by using a program I found called Multiple IEs. http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
Do you really test your sites in IE 5.5 still?
Vim
Thats awesome. Saw that Mugasha made it to your 100 apps. BTW one thing we started using in our team is Pivotal Tracker. I know its a pain to move project management systems. Although, this is a killer. This has really made our project, tasks and ticketing much more efficient and streamlined. Pivotal built this tool for their own use and thought they would just share it with others. Its built on the concept of Extreme Programming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming
Check it out at http://www.pivotaltracker.com/
The best of all its free for now. I just realized that I sound like a sales guy for pivotal. Anyhow great stuff.
Is there any type of SVN / tickets integration or plugin?
I use Highrise on a daily basis to track clients and projects, Gmail to do most of my communicating and Twitterific to track ongoings in the world. I guess WordPress would count as well, all my sites use WP as a back end. It seems like one or more of my tabs are open to a WP admin screen.
I live and die by a single text file that I dump everything into (todos, serial numbers, servers/IPs, etc.) and honestly the best thing that ever happened to me was http://getdropbox.com/ because now I can use one text file across all my computers as well as get automatic versioning (even if it’s really basic).
I’ve been using TaskPaper daily to keep track of my todos. Much simpler then say Things. I also use xScope frequently when I want to know quick on screen dimensions for designing.
Fluid.app is really useful. I find that a physical calendar works must better than any internet/iCal alternative, as you can see it without having to use the computer. I use google docs quite a bit for planning purposes.
Few more from me: Mail.app, Remember the Milk.com, Mint.com, Sequel Pro, wordpress, reddit, google maps (always somehow use this), quicksilver, Ubiquity (ff extension), caffeine.app, adium, twitterific. Other than that I use a lot of the same things, although I’ve been trying out Propane for Campfire.
I’m the boring self-leadership guy: Things, iCal, Mail.app, Address Book, and Yojimbo for all the stuff that seems valuable, but I don’t know where to put it. It’s also used as a place for temporary notes.
Apart from that there is Safari (I hate it more and more, but Firefox is still lacking keychain support and Flock is too slow), NetNewsWire, Quicksilver.
Online I use Google Maps and Analytics. I don’t like their other applications very much, both because I dislike online “applications” and because Google sometimes seems really scary in terms of what they have access to.
My most recent addition is Dropbox, which I love.
I use quite a few of the apps you have mentioned. I just have one alternative to Text Mate (which looks great by the way), I use Coda and I love it!
Just ordered the book you proposed! Thanx Paul!
The apps that I use everyday and I totally adore are: Papers, Tags, Textmate, Transmit, VmWare, Things, Photoshop and DreamWeaver!
I use Coversutra a lot as an iTunes shortcuts app and Teleport to share 2 Macs with 1 mouse & keyboard. I also use Precipitate to launch Google Docs content from Spotlight.
I’m just now checking it Highrise. The service looks like it might be able to help me keep tabs on why and who I’m communicating with better. As great as it is to have threaded emails in Gmail or Apple Mail (non-Gmail accounts), it’s still a challenge to keep maintain a fresh history.
As far as regularly used apps, I really enjoy Remember The Milk – in Gmail (gadget), Fluid, or iPhone. I was a big fan of Things but the lack of true OTA syncing killed it for me. Big fan of Billings 3. Even bigger fan of TextMate.
StumbleUpon toolbar in Firefox, Mint.com for finances, Tweetdeck for twitter, Pidgin.im for various Instant Messengers, PandoraFM.real-ity.com for last.fm listening. SQLyog for SQL management on MySQL databases. Visionapp Remote Desktop for RDC management. Xfire for gaming IM and playtime tracking….
I think I should write an article now that you’ve helped me notice how much crap I actually use.
Most have been mentioned, but
-NetNewsWire
-Adium
-Twitterific
-Transmit
Also, some design-related programs:
-DigitalColorMeter (it’s in Apps > Utilities): just drag it to your dock, open it, and find out the hex of anything on your screen
-xScope: gives you pixel rulers, horizontal/vertical rules, 800×600/1024×768/etc windows, etc that you can overlay anywhere on your screen to help with sizing/alignment
-OmniGraffle
@annie thanks for mentioning DigitalColorMeter, I just tried it and I love it! I have ColorZilla installed in Firefox because I like to be able to take note of hex values for colors that I like, and I use it when I get jobs to change color schemes of WordPress themes. But DigitalColorMeter blows it out of the water – it just rocks! And to think it was sitting there in my Utilities folder all the time.
I couldn’t go a day without using MindNode Pro! It’s such a simple and elegant program and works the way my brain works. I definitely second, TweetDeck. I was skeptical because its a monster application (in terms of screen real estate and resources) but it is the best way to tame the Twitter beast.
Thanks for the Mugasha mention, glad we got you hooked ;-)
Paul. we are really thrilled to see feedly in this shortlist. We are going to continue to work to stay in there. Note: your car page looks really good..Reminds me that it would be nice to over a way for users to mark some tabs as public of that other users could look over their shoulder. All the best for you in 2009.
Edwin
Like bunches of people, I’m constantly in Google Apps for Domains for email, calendar, and document syncing. I still use iCal and Mail.app to access those services, though.
My main workhorse combo is Textmate and CSSEdit, with Transmit and Terminal.app rounding out the team. Sure, I could have just bought Coda, but I love each of these apps on their own (and Textmate is also great for so much more than just web dev).
At school, we are still very Windows-centric, and our senior project is built on .NET. Therefore, I’m in Visual Studio 2008 nearly every day. In my personal time, I’ve started iPhone apps, so Xcode gets a ton of time.
Photoshop CS3 is my go-to for all graphics, though I have been known to play with Pixelmator some after getting it from Macheist last year.
I use Billings to keep track of contract work because I love the built in timer that stays in the menu bar. Finally, Coversutra is the only way I’ll actually use iTunes to listen to music.
Oh. And Twitter. Twitter, twitter, twitter. Via SMS. That is all.
I love these kind of posts. I’m a sucker for trying any app I haven’t played with yet.
Awesome list here Paul but I love the fact that we are on your feedly “car” screenshot! Thanks for the support!
Im surprised nobody has mentioned Evernote. Unless I missed it. Evernote for me currently is a place to store the “stuff” that has no other formal place.
On the way to full software switching (after hardware switch completed last autumn with the iphone), biggest news for me is the new Pages 09 which supports Endnote and that allows me to dump the slower MS Word. I also predict I will be a frequent user/trainer of iPhoto 09 and the other apps of iLife. That still leaves Powerpoint as a mandatory app, since it’s the de facto standard for presentations in medical meetings. Sometimes I use keynote to present only to department where I can control the settings (and Keynote Remote makes it tempting to see reactions… :)
On the cloud side of apps, I still prefer and enjoy the ones that offer integration between mac, iphone and the cloud. So, I am a regular user of Evernote, NetNewsWire and ToDo/Toodledo. I was using del.icio.us for some time, but I now prefer the hierarchy of Safari bookmarks vs the tagging chaos. Google Docs, a favorite last year, is now rarely in use, especially after the introduction of iwork.com which makes it really simple to share a doc and get feedback through Pages. Well, my workflow may look totally mac-centric but it’s precisely this time-saving integration that got me hooked at the first place ;)
Good post man. I use textmate and might fall into that category who doesn’t know its powers. I am gonna check out that book and figure out what else Textmate can do.
Interesting post! Programs or apps I use daily are Photoshop CS4, Dreamweaver CS4, Flash CS4, and Celtx. I use Songbird for music.
With my web projects piling up, I am going to check out some of these apps. Thanks for the heads up with Campfire and I am interested in hearing more on how you use TextMate.
I use Twitter and http://juiceapp.com daily.
Daily is a tough shot. Firefox & Mail.app are givens.
For work?
TextMate – I’ve just recently come to discover this fine piece of software. It’s incredibly flexible, and though I haven’t gotten to the point of customizing it in great detail, I’ve moved all of my programming into it. PHP, Javascript, Actionscript. Pretty awesome. I’ve moved to editing my conf files from emacs, which is a jump for me. I have yet to find a better editor than TextMate. (one minor gripe has to do with the brace/bracket highlighting… I’d rather it stay lit when you’re on the item.)
Transmit – Great piece of FTP software, works beautifully.
Versions – I tried out a handful of SVN apps before finally setting on this. Versions is the only app that I’ve found to be absolutely intuitive in it’s use. Everything else seems to be feature incomplete, or not user friendly. I’m not an SVN guru quite yet, and when I needed to do something, I couldn’t figure out the commands for terminal, I bought and installed Versions and I was going in minutes.
Stickies – I use stickies when I’ve got to put something down that I want to keep track of. It’s up or down on my desktop in less than 2 seconds, and is maintenance free.
I just wanted to mention that assuming you have sshd going on your Mac you could use putty to tunnel your XP VM’s localhost:3000 to your Mac’s IP:3000, then you wouldn’t have to tweak any pages for testing.
Just configure putty to connect to the IP address of one of the Mac’s vmnet* interfaces and forward port 3000 to localhost:3000. If you use a public key for authentication and save the tunnel settings as a session it would be super easy to reestablish the tunnel from XP.
My smaller list
Dreamweaver
FileZilla
Kuler (I use the web app)
Putty
among other things.
"This doesnât look like 100 items..Thatâs where you come in! What applications (web or local) do you put to work daily?"
Really…?
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Sorry, let me be more verbose in my commentary. I’m not trying to be bitchy, I’m just taken aback. If you title something "100 Applications and Services I Use Daily" I don’t expect to find 10-15 things used every day and a question about what the readers use. It just doesn’t make any sense.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Sorry, let me be more verbose in my commentary. I’m not trying to be bitchy, I’m just taken aback. If you title something "100 Applications and Services I Use Daily" I don’t expect to find 10-15 things used every day and a question about what the readers use. It just doesn’t make any sense.[edit: also, I appreciate the time you took to write that stuff up, I did learn about some things]
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Sorry, let me be more verbose. I’m not trying to be bitchy, I’m just taken aback. If you title something "100 Applications and Services I Use Daily" I don’t expect to find 10-15 things used every day and a question about what the readers use. It just doesn’t make any sense.[edit: also, I appreciate the time you took to write that stuff up, I did learn about some things]
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
I would prefer if, in the future, list posts are preceded with the number, even if the number is a lie. This will tell me that the post is low-value filler, and I can skip it accordingly.Seriously, though, when was the last time you extracted actual business value out of a list of 100 things. 97 of them were on every other list of 100 things, and the 3 novel insights are both buried and underdeveloped.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
I’m on a Mac, here are some of the stuff I use daily:Terminal.app + Visor + start on login, since I use the command line for a lot of stuff.
LittleSnapper to catch those design inspirations.
iShowU + iMovie to make demo videos.
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ – for quick checks in IE, when I make little changes and don’t want to launch VMWare
DrawIt for making icons and graphics. I used to use Photoshop Elements, but DrawIt’s workflow just makes so much sense to me.
cron + Mercurial to backup almost everything daily except iTunes/iPhoto, which I just backup to DVDs
Inquisitor for really quick web search results
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
> This doesn’t look like 100 items.. > That’s where you come in! What applications (web or local) do you put to work daily? Totally misleading title. I really thought this would be some sort of demonstration of how integrated are web services in one’s life, but he only lists 10 or 20.
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Live writer is my top one as far as blogging is concerned.I’ll try to use some of your top softwares.
Thanks for sharing your desktop and backend s/w’s list man.
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@Lax
I am not too happy with WLW, but it is best available. Zoundry Raven was promising client but collapsed. :(
As you see Wakoopa did most work for me. It’s good to have flexible tool that does most of work instead of you, isn’t it? :)
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http://tinyurl.com/aocvbc 100 Applications and Services I Use Daily
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100 Applications and Services I Use Daily – PaulStamatiou.com http://tinyurl.com/aocvbc
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100 Applications and Services for daily use http://cli.gs/WdjeEZ
This comment was originally posted on Twitter