Tools of the Trade

Posted by marcus

December 18, 2007

p>In the spirit of the Season - we are continuing to share our favorite online tools and all around geek-ness. As previously mentioned, yes - we are all fans of the little ol’ fruit company from Cupertino. You don’t need to be a hater about it, just appreciate Apple for its innovations if nothing else. In addition to Dino’s list (exception being the Blackberry mention), here’s my quick list:

Powerbook - This has been my workhorse for almost 2.5 years. Probably the longest I’ve ever had one computer! I can’t say enough about the sense of quality and detail that Apple pours into its products.
iPhone - This has been the single-most life altering tool I’ve ever owned. Not only are the phone tools indispensable, but with all of the new Webapps that extend it’s usefulness; itweet, Digg and Google.
Ma.gnolia - Online bookmarks are so handy. This one in prticular is my favorite. There’s even several bookmarklet tools you can drag up to your tool bar for quick bookmarking and tag it for later.
Twitterrific - Twitterrific is a handy application for reading and publishing posts or “tweets” to the Twitter community website. The application’s user interface is clean, concise and designed to take up a minimum of real estate on your Mac’s desktop.
Transmit - This Mac only FTP program allows me to cleanly and quickly update my websites. The User Interface is intuitive and has other features to work with; idisk, sidebar, previews, ftp/ssl, search, zooming, and tabbed websites.
BBEdit - The defacto text editor for the Mac. I know some peeps like TextMate, but I’ve just never made that leap.
CSSEdit - Visual CSS editor for my web design.
MooURL - Ever have a really long URL that you’d like to shorten up? MooURL is a service to do just that. If you have a really loooong URL, just paste it in the text field, and they’ll milk it, creating a moourl for you. Nice.
Moo Cards - Since we’re on the Cow tangent, people ask me where I get my nice little business cards from. Well, here’s the secret.
Skitch - Love, love love this tool. It allows me to quickly take screenshots and post them to my flickr account, or email, or even write notes on the image. How stinking cool is that?
Acquisition - Gnutella file sharing client - for those bit torrents you might be looking for, or whatnot, this is a solid P2P sharing tool.
Version Tracker - This site tracks software releases daily. Available for Mac, Windows and the Palm OS - updates, patches and new releases can be found here. It’s a one stop shop for all your new software!
Adium - Multi-protocol instant messenger client. Keep your AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, iChat, and MSN Messenger all in one App.
Skype - Uses P2P for phone-over-internet talking.
Grand Central - I just started using this phone service - It allows me to have several different numbers ring to one place and create a local number for where I want to be reached. I now have a Wausau prefix that I will start using for Citizen Desk. Best of all, it’s free.