Earlier I was thinking about all the different tools I use and how neat they are and I thought I would share the (vast?) list of tools with everyone and individual thoughts on them.
Productivity
- Microsoft Office 2007
- Outlook: The best email tool, ever. I use outlook in conjunction with http://www.myhosting.com (for exchange server email @ $10/mo) and a couple other IMAP email addresses. I synch my phone up with my calendar, tasks, contacts and email and am able to track all of my day-to-day stuff in one single place. I even have pictures associated with each contact (where possible) so that my Windows Mobile 6.1 phone displays their picture when they call.
- Word
- Excel: The ability to perform in-line calculations on spreadsheets is wonderful. I love many of google.s apps, but they try to put too many of them in the browser. The browser still lacks a lot of functionality. The browser should display content, not provide a full user interface to a complex application like excel.
- Access
- Paymo: I like to keep track of all the time I spend while working on projects. This tool is absolutely great and free! When working as a contractor it even handles billing for my hours.
- KeePass: I have a great deal of passwords. I use this program to keep track of them all. My password database is encrypted with a public key and stored on my thumb-drive. My private key is stored on each of my machines to identify me as .me. when I try to access my password database.
- SnagIt: I deal a lot with copy and paste. Often I only want to copy a certain region of my screen and paste it to my email (sometimes after adding a bubble-note to the screen-shot). This does a great job of letting me choose what to copy and edit it easily before pasting.
- Delicious: I have several computers and I hate un-synchronized favorites or the idea of losing my favorites because my computer crashed. Declious allows me to associate my favorites with an online portfolio. I can even set certain favorites to .private. if I don.t want the rest of the world to see that particular link (such as banking locations, etc). There are also plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox so that I don.t have to go to the website every time I want to access a favorite.
Development
- Visual Studio 2008
- Eclipse JEE
- Eclipse PHP: I installed this about 6 months ago after not using PHP for quite awhile. Boy I.ll be the first to say that PHP has come a long ways. I was able to setup the debugger and step through the code amongst a number of other cool features that (at the moment) I had only seen in more advanced languages like C++/C#/Java. Very cool!
- TextPad
- Altova XML Spy: The most recent projects I have been working on have had to deal a tremendous amount in XML. I.ll admit XMLSpy is the only tool I have used for XML development, but it has impressed me so far. One of the neatest things about it (imho) is that I was able to debug my xsl transform). It popped up three windows, one to trace where the XSLT is at within the XML, another to follow where the XSLT is in the transform and a third to display the real-time output of the transformed XML. This saved me a huge amount of time.
- Enterprise Architect: Surely, there are plenty of very good modeling tools out there, but this is just the one that I chose. It has a reasonable price tag, has a veryfriendly interface, outputs very elegant and precise models and has many great features (such as collaboration). There are a number of leading modeling tools and it may just be up to personal preference, but this one is definately my choice modeling tool.
Communications
- Putty and PuttyGen: Everyone should have their own public/private key and a thumb drive, period.
- TweetDeck: A few months ago I got my buddy to install twitter. A few days ago I asked him why I never see him tweet, to which he replied .I just don.t get it. I don.t have the need to tweet the friend that lives down the street or the co-worker that sits across from me.. That made sense to me. I suppose social media tools like Twitter isn.t for everyone. For the last three years I have been telecommuting though and it.s nice for me to be able to read about what.s going on in the lives of the relationships I.ve built in that time though. I find that I generally use Twitter for my global (I don.t care who sees it) thoughts and Facebook for my personal (friends and family) thoughts. As for MySpace, well, I.m not sure why I have that. It seems almost too childish to me any more (especially in comparison to social media tools like Facebook) . Perhaps it.s because there are so many teeni-boppers on MySpace though.
- Myspace
- DimDim: Awesome (and FREE) web conferencing. Provides a full conference interface and dial-in access phone number. Wonderful for working remotely.
- Skype: Again, awesome for working remotely. I am on a $2.99/mo subscription where I get unlimited calling within the U.S. Even those overseas can talk to mecompletely free with Skype.
- Trillian: As this list of IM services will reveal, I don.t have an IM preference per .se. They all work very well, so I just use them all. It makes it especially difficult to pick any one particular service given that everyone uses something different. The latest version of trillian makes it very easy to manage these different .contacts. by utilizing what they call a .meta contact. (which is a grouping of several different IM .friends. into one single person so that if my friend Joe Blow has three different services I only have to display him once on my contact list).
- AIM
- MSN
- Yahoo
- Astra
- ICQ
Media
- Winamp: Seems to suck less juice than WMP (Windows Media Player) for just playing music. I don.t like it.s interface for movies/videos though.
- Windows Media Player: Great for video. However, I don.t like using it for music because of the Vista 1gig/Ethernet bug. It seems that when you have a gigabit network, Vista lags horribly over the network when streaming music and videos. So I only use WMF for my videos (because if I.m watching a video I.m most likely not working on the comp).
Browsers
- Internet Explorer 8: Great development/debugging tools now and a little bit more friendly of an interface.
- Chrome: Very fast, but mainly use it for compatibility testing.
- Firefox: Only used for compatibility testing.
What.s that saying? .A developer is only as good as his/her tools.? If that.s true, I must admit, I feel pretty good about myself .cause I find all of these tools quite amazing.