5 productivity tools I use daily

Published on Sat 03 Jul 2010 by Will

I thought I would take the time to talk about some of the tools I use almost everyday as a professional Flash platform developer.

What is it?

A web application dedicated to the creation and storage of notes, snippets and images.

Why do I use it?

I use Evernote almost daily in my job. As a developer, I find myself constantly needing to keep track of various tidbits of information which I may need to recall quickly at a later stage.

I find Evernote is great for keeping track of things like obscure program commands or code snippets which I might only need to find every-now-and-then, like setting up a Django app, creating or fixing a Git repository or performing a specific MySQL query.

Notes can be titled and tagged and stored into specific ‘notebooks’ for organization. While I find using the web version sufficient; there is also a desktop and mobile versions of the app available for download.

What is it?

Online password manager and form filler that makes web browsing easier and more secure.

Why do I use it?

People who spend any amount of time on the Internet either casually at home or at work will no doubt have several logins/passwords for the various sites they visit. LastPass is a browser plug-in which handles your logins for you. It does this by storing your logins in an encrypted ‘vault’ which only you can access with a single password.

Assuming you have unlocked your vault with your master password, LastPass will prompt you to save your login details anytime you enter them into a website. On subsequent visits, LastPass will have populated the username and password fields on a page for you. You can optionally allow LastPass pass to login automatically for you without having to do anything. A great time saver.

The plugin also has a password generator which promotes the idea of having separate login/passwords for each of the sites you use. This is an obvious benefit over using the same insecure password for every site you use.

What is it?

A language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers.

Why do I use it?

Stackoverflow

is a helpful site to peruse when looking for an answer to a programming related question. More often than not, issues I encounter in day to day programming have been encountered by someone else at some point in time and chances are someone has asked it on stackoverflow.

The site has a strong focus on questions that can be answered, such as “How to I do x in programming language y?” over more subjective questions like “Why is language x better than language y?”. Questions are moderated frequently to remove questions that are more open to discussion like the kind you’re likely to find on message boards.

Interesting, stackoverflow features a ‘gaming’ quality which rewards users for contributing to the site. Users are awarded badges for things like voting or commenting on user submitted questions or having their own questions voted on.

What is it?

Social bookmarking site.

Why do I use it?

Like Evernote, I use Delicious for storing information I may need to access at a later time. I use the Delicious Firefox plug-in for bookmarking and categorizing sites which I may wish to access at a later time.

Delicious uses a tagging structure to tag any of your saved bookmarks. For example, I’ve tagged several sites with unique designs ‘inspiration’. I also have tagged sites ‘portfolio’ for peoples personal portfolio sites I’ve encountered, ‘flash’ for sites or articles relating to flash and ‘inspiration’ for sites which have unique designs I may wish to steal ‘use as inpiration’ at a later stage.

Delicious’ tagging structure really shines when you drill down into tags and tags of tags. For example I may wish to look at sites I’ve bookmarked containing several tags at once; ‘flash’ and ‘portfolio’ would show me the flash portfolio sites I’ve bookmarked.

What is it?

World’s largest search engine.

Why do I use it?

Despite Google’s obvious use as a tool for finding web pages, it also has a few other tricks up it’s sleeve. Namely it’s use as a calculator. I often find it quicker to simply ‘Google it’ than open up my calculator app.

Google understands a number of simple spoken english query such as ‘milliseconds in 3.63 days‘, ‘18 to the power of 5‘ and ‘10 kph in mph‘.