Tools of the Trade

When at work, many of us are using Windows when are hearts might be elsewhere. As I wind down work with my current employer, I'm taking not of the tools I installed over the past 18 months which has significantly boosted my productivity. Here they are in no particular order.

Confluence

An enterprise wiki developed by a very switched on Australia company, company has been a great tool to share knowledge. Since we adopted it, I don't believe there has been a single file stored on the shared drive. Everything in Confluence is searchable, taggable and can be edited without opening Word.

Mingle

I've blogged about Mingle before, but its worth repeating: Mingle is a great tool. Its easy to use and does a very small amount of things reasonably well. Unfortunately, it was introduced into a team which wasn't very disciplined with project management (and our one project manager left several months ago) or time tracking so it didn't transform the way we work as much as I would have liked. However, if anything was going to work, Mingle was it.

ObjectDock Plus

ObjectDock is a Windows utility which mimics the dock on Mac OS X. Aside from the nice looks (it does suprisingly well, even with very low quality icons), it definitely increases your productivity. I have basically eliminated using the Start menu and can quickly open documents with specific applications just by dragging them to the dock. I use the Plus version and it money worth spending. I am able to move my system tray to the top of the screen (like the Mac menu bar) which makes a bigger difference than you would otherwise expect.

Google Chrome

The early adopter that I am, I quickly tried out Google Chrome when it was released. It turns out the speed is the killer browser feature. I've strayed to other browsers on occasion (Safari 4 Beta isn't bad) but I keep coming back to the Chrome. Lots of you out there rely on Firefox and her extensions. I hear you, but that's just not me.

Excel 2007

Nothing has improved my ability to analyse data more than Excel 2007. It seems to crash less than most Office applications, and the way it handles pivot tables is surely the way nature intended. The is extended to how it works with OLAP cubes; Excel is definitely my preferred OLAP client. For added value, impress your boss by using the data mining plug-in to do some incredibly useful tasks.

E

E is a text editor for Windows based on Textmate for Mac. I still prefer Textmate, but E comes close. I was never able to get the Cygwin integration working, but then again, I'm not as big a Unix geek as some. Still, e is a great lightweight text editor that gets out of your way, quickly opens files as text (even if they're not) and is always a right click away.

Jing

Jing is a very lightweight tool that allows you to quickly take screenshots or screencasts. It is free and has almost no features, but I wouldn't use anything else. It sits on the edge of your screen as a translucent sun, waiting for you to click it. When you do, you decide, image or movie, and off you go. You can't edit videos, but you can draw, highlight and annotate screenshots. Its always available, doesn't consume many resources and "just works". Combining Jing and Confluence can create a very simple but powerful platform to document your software systems and create how-to guides for your users.

This is an image taken using Jing that brings it all together: Chrome + Confluence + Jing + ObjectDock.

iPhone: Apple should support Google Gears

A major criticism of the iPhone is the lack of an SDK, which prevents developers from writing custom applications. The only way for your application to run is via the mobile Safari web browser as a standard web application (HTML + Javascript). So this really raises the question: what do you want to do with an SDK that you can't already? This isn't strictly an iPhone issue, as we could try to develop a framework for all applications regardless of their target platform, i.e. when should one write a web-based application or write a so-called "desktop" application.

Under most circumstances, a web application is probably preferred because:

• there is no overhead in installing or updating the application


• data is stored remotely, so it's accessible regardless of where you are or which computer you are using


• it will run on multiple operating systems with little extra work

So what's missing? Naturally, there are a few things:

1. Access to other applications, either currently running or otherwise installed on the system


2. Using the application when no Internet connection is present, although I tend to agree that also think that this has diminishing returns


3. Security; individuals often think twice about storing private data on third-party servers

I'm probably in the Apple camp with regards to the first point. We don't want applications to interact with each other (or with the Phone OS itself) because this may have security implications for the owner and the network. I don't want to have an anti-virus running on my phone or iPod, to be sure. And I don't want to risk the possibility of my phone being hijacked to run some scams using my voice minutes. The risk is just too great.

So how can Apple help mitigate the second and third point without introducing a complex SDK? Easy! Apple should support the Google Gears on mobile Safari (and regular Safari, for that matter). With Adobe's support for Google Gears in AIR and Apple's adoption, we may see the Gears API become the de facto standard API for occasionally connected web applications.

Wouldn't that be nice?