The Tools I Use

Sometimes I forget about half of what I use, so I thought I'd make a note of the tools I regularly use to get stuff done.

At home

First and foremost, my MacBook Pro running OS 10.4.8. I'm always running Firefox (with Greasemonkey installed), NetNewsWire, and iTunes.

When I'm doing school work, I use TextWrangler to take notes (it's Bob Slate narrow ruled, green, in class). I downloaded a demo of Yojimbo to organize my information, but I haven't bought it yet. I used to work with the guys at Bare Bones and everything they produce is excellent. I do use Word to type my final papers.

I use iPhoto to manage photos on my Mac and Flickr online. I don't love iPhoto, but it's at least faster on this machine than it was on my last.

I buy music from eMusic and iTunes and store it in iTunes. I use Audio Hijack Pro to record music.

I finally started forwarding everything to Gmail and stopped using a desktop mail client. I felt pretty insecure about that at first, but I'm so glad I did it now. I love the filters/labels solution rather than folders, which is what freaked me out at first. I'm so much more efficient now email-wise.

If I need to work from home, I run XP Pro in Parallels on the MBP. I wouldn't need to do that if the Ektron editor needed for work's CMS worked on a Mac. Their current solution is to use an RDP connection to a Windows machine, no thanks. I love Parallels. I don't often need to use XP and when I do, it's only for a short time, so BootCamp would've been a hassle. I love opening XP in a window on my desktop. Full screen is excellent, as well. Thank god the days of Virtual PC are gone.

I use OmniGraffle for charts and whatnot. Dreamweaver and BBEdit for web work (along with Fetch for FTP even though both apps have built-in FTP... old habits die hard).

Finally, for genealogy stuff I use TNG, a PHP/MySQL solution written by an amazingly dedicated guy.

At work

I use a Windows machine at work. My main tools are TextPad, Firefox, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Office (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook). I keep my entire calendar in Outlook and sync my Palm to it. Every once in a while I fire up Visio to create a map or diagram.

Elsewhere

When out and about, I use my Treo 650 and the new Gmail mobile app and the built-in web browser. Or else I take my MacBook Pro along.