theParagon

Programs I use often

I’ve always enjoyed it when others talk about what software they are using to do their jobs because there’s always one program that someone is using that you’ve never heard of and it saved your life by now knowing about it.

So, here’s my list of programs I commonly use. Note: I have quite a few other programs but don’t really feel like walking through everything as it would get pretty boring.

Email

I’m one of those guys that does his best to keep his email organized and under control. One way I’ve decided to go about doing that is by keeping my personal/Elevator Up email completely seperate from my Image Group emails.

I use Mail.app for personal/Elevator Up and Thunderbird for all Image Group stuff. By keeping them in different email clients it helps in 2 areas. First - If I’m really sick of dealing with one (work or personal), I can simply close that email client while still being able to access and use the other. The second reason this work so well for me is differences. I like testing out new email clients (which is why IMAP is awesome) and by using various email clients on a daily base, I can know more than if just using one.

Browsers

I treat my browsers almost the same as I treat my email clients. My primary browser is Camino. I’ve tried various other but seemed to fall in love with the Mozilla powered, Mac style - Camino.

For browser testing (and viewing a few websites that don’t seem to like Camino), I use the nightly WebKit builds. It has some pretty nice features in it that help me debug various problems I may come up against while developing a website.

As for other browsers, I use Firefox on occasion and Flock when I just feel like having a little fun. On a side note about Flock, I’ve always described it to people as the “let your hair down and have fun browser”. You’re most likely never use it at work but when you come home to relax - Flock is the browser that will help give you a good experience online.

Instant Messanger

For the Mac - Adium is one of the coolest Instant Messanger tools that I have found. Not only is it cool with all of its xtras, but it allows you to login to various different IM networks (AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Sametime, ICQ, Google Talk, etc… ) with only one tool. It also has Growl support which I have become a huge fan of.

For those times I’m in a location that won’t let me use an Instant Messanger client - I browse over to Meebo is a web based Messanger that let’s me login through the web.

Text-Editor

TexMate is one of the greatest Max editors and at $40.00, it’s a much better deal that my previous text-editor BBedit ($199.00 USD). TextMate is also the Ruby On Rails text-editor of choice. If you aren’t using this editor, you’re not really writing code (ok, I made that last part up, I don’t really think that - it’s just easier to).

FTP/SFTP

I’m just a sucker for well designed software and that’s what lead me to Transmit. It keeps things simple and with a few extra features like Tabbing and Image Previewing (without downloading), its just a nice app to have on my computer.

Calendars

Meeting Maker isn’t really one I’ve been using by choice (came from work) but it isn’t all that bad for corporate scheduling. It’s really hard to find good company calendars that work on Mac and PC. A few of us have started using Zimbra for this (along with webmail).

We’ve recently started playing around with Google Calendar. It’s an amazing web-app that we use to to project planning but really ideal for company scheduling.

Time Entry

For personal projects I use iBiz. It’s great for keeping track of what the heck you’re doing and for how long. The thing that I like about it most is that it has a timer - start the timer when you’re ready to dig into a project and stop the timer when you’re done. It’s that easy.

I’ve heard that iBiz isn’t that great for teams though. It doesn’t have a server version but it doesn’t seem to be quite there. Harvest may be a better bet if you’re trying to keep track of things as a team.

At The Image Group, we use a tool called Clients and Profits (C&P) that takes care of our time entry and accounting. It isn’t the best tool by any means but at this point we’re so far deep into the product that it would quite an undertaking to switch. That said, I’m always interested in a better solution and will offer up recommendations if they are good.

Password Management

This is a tough subject for me as I should be recommending 7dots - the app I’m slowly trying to develop to solve the problem of password management. I’m however not finished with it yet and still have the problem of remembering passwords so I downloaded KeePassX which not only works on a Mac but also available for you PC users as well. I’ve been quite pleased with the tool but it doesn’t quite do everything I’d like it to - hence another development is on it’s way.

To-do Lists

I’m a huge list maker. I won’t get much done during the day if I don’t have a detailed list of what I need to do. I’ve been trying to get Jodi to realize the power of lists and showing her that if I get one from her, things will more than likely get done that simply a verbal request.

BurnOutMenu is the tool I currently but it is no longer being developed (as far as I can tell). I’m sure I’ll be in the market soon for another one but in the mean time - it’s great.

Misc Apps

Other little tools that help me get along through the day are:

• TigerLaunch
• RPG - A Random Password Generator
• Paparazzi! - a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages.
• iPhoto Library Manager - allows me to manage multiple iPhoto libraries in Mac OS X
• Subversion - a version control system

So that’s the better part of the tools that I use. There are of course other tools like Word, Excel, PhotoShop CS2, Illustrator CS2, etc… but everyone knows about those and would be pointless to talk about.

I would be very intereted in what tools make your life a bit easier.

posted on September 3, 2006 | 9:06 PM EST