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Design
Published Wednesday February 11, 2009 at 12:19 am
By Lorraine Nepomuceno
5 Work Tools I Can’t Live Without
As web workers, we all have our favorite applications. There are the big ones, of course- the ones that get installed immediately on all our new computers- Photoshop, Dreamweaver, maybe Flash. Today, however, I want to share with you five of my favorite work tools- little applications and utilities that work for me every day.
Before anything else: these are all Mac apps. Although I run and work both OSX and Windows (thank you, Bootcamp!), I do most of my work on the former.
- EverSave. This is an absolute gem, and you know why? Because most of the time, I don’t even know it’s there. EverSave will save all of your documents in specific time intervals- that’s right, I said all. Or you can set it to save only certain applications, or to ask you each time it’s about to save. I’ll tell you a little secret: I used to obsessively press Command+S every few minutes when I was working on something. With EverSave, I don’t need to do that any more.
- TextWrangler. Okay, I know you have your own favorite text editor: TextWrangler is mine. Not only does it have a cool rope-like logo (wrangler- get it?), it’s constantly surprising me with features I didn’t know it had. And, I’ll admit it, I’d be lost without its multi-file search function.
- Camouflage. How many icons do I have on my desktop? I’ll tell you: too many. Because I love the look of a clean and tidy desktop- not to mention being able to see my wallpaper- I love Camouflage, which, in one click, will hide all the icons on your desktop.
- Jumpcut. So much of the work I do requires copying and pasting, that discovering Jumpcut was a glorious moment for me. It does “clipboard buffering”- which gives you access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. Sort of like giving your clipboard a “history” you can return to. Pure genius, and something I use all the time.
- RPP. And finally, because I work with images so much- and sometimes those images aren’t of the best quality- I adore my RPP: that stands for Raw Photo Processor, and it does just that:processes your images. It’s a little hard to explain how wonderful this little app is- I suggest you visit their page of examples.
And yes, they’re all free. Yay.
But I’m always on the lookout for apps to improve my work life. What are your favorite work tools?
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Three programs I can’t live without, are:
Textmate – I’m a former PC user turned Apple lover and have found textmate to be possibly the OS X response to Ultraedit on windows.
Cyberduck FTP – Sure there is Fetch but cyberduck happens to have built in support for textmate (since textmate doesn’t have a built in FTP Client). Easy to use, fast to upload what else could I ask for?
And lastly Docks.. It allows me to choose different docks for different things, I have my work dock full of all the apps I use for work, a dock I use for programming … You get the idea..
Unfortunately two out of the three programs I listed are shareware.
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I work in both Windows and OS X as well (usually side by side). Here’s a couple of apps for each that I really stumble without:
TextExpander (mac) – You can set up customized abbreviations for frequently-used text strings and images. It also auto-corrects selected words that I type incorrectly all the time. It’s better than spellcheck, it’s typefix.
PathFinder (mac) – Does everything Finder does and a zillion other things. It’s one of those apps that I find some trick new feature every week or two.
XYPlorer (windows) – Like Pathfinder for mac, it does everything the system file explorer does with loads of additional convenience features built in. This one has great options for batch file renaming and mp3 tagging (among many other features).
Sizer (windows) – Sizer lets you resize any window to an exact size and position with a right-click on the top of the window. You set up the sizes and positions you want in the prefs. I want this for mac more than anything, but haven’t found it yet..