monkey!

October 17, 2007

Making your little productive mind work better, faster, stronger

I’ve been a little busy lately; Researching PHP MVC frameworks, installing Windows Vista, and just simply hanging out. With that in mind, I’ve taken the easy way out today and have compiled a pretty useful list of programs and/or addons that will make you work faster, and be more productive in the things you may have to do on a daily basis. (Remember this is coming from a developer, so if you’re a gamer my stuff will most likely not be too useful to you!)

General Usage

• Switcher for Windows Vista is my dream come true when it comes to desktop layout. If you’ve used Vista, you know about it’s Flip-3D feature, which although is pretty cool and fancy, doesn’t serve much purpose and doesn’t really make it easier to find what windows you are looking for. Switcher, on the other hand tiles out all your windows with a click of a button combination (Windows Key + ~ by default). It does a very good job of placing them in a well formatted tile and you can instantly see all your windows.
• StrokeIt is a mouse gesture program that rocks my world. Firefox and Opera both have mouse gesture setups/addons but this is for your Windows environment. I’ve been using it for over a year now and it’s hard to live without when I’m using other peoples PC’s. Why click buttons when you can just flick your wrist quickly? I love it.
• ShellFTP is a simple context menu file uploader. Right click a file, click upload, pick a path and/or server if need be, and you’re good to go. When I don’t feel like opening up SmartFTP this tool is perfect for the small things
• Stickes for Windows has come a long way since it first came out, especially with the introduction of multi-computer synchronization, this thing is awesome. I don’t have sticky notes on my monitor anymore.
• Windows Vista. Yes, I have been won over. If you do not have Windows Vista yet, give it a try. A lot of people do not like it for some of it’s more restrictive safety measures, but when you dig down deep and play around with it, it makes doing many things a lot easier.

Development because writing code is awesome!

• Firebug for Firefox. If you are a developer and do not have this, then you are a bad boy/girl. Has everything you’d need for analyzing code including support for AJAX (And in this day and age, who doesn’t love that fad)
• ColorZilla is another extension for Firefox but I use it nearly daily. It simply let’s you use an eye-dropper tool on any part of a web page/image and get the color codes for that. Sounds simple, and it is, but also damn useful at the same time.
• TortoiseSVN is a subversion client that is just so simple, so cute, and so awesome I don’t think I could live without it for major development any more. It’ll speak for itself once you begin using it, so give it a shot.
• KomodoEdit because it has won me over. I recently talked about finding the right IDE and I think I’ve found my soul mate. Although it lacks in a few features I’d love (Which are actually available in the pay version), this one does well for rapid development and managing large files and projects.

And there you go, with the power of all those combined you too can work so fast and efficiently it’ll hurt. Ok, it felt weird to type that. My ego isn’t that big enough (No hate, I actually read his blog.)