Jorge Arango

It’s a special day whenever one major, everyday-use app is updated. Today is an extra-special day: both Camino and NetNewsWire – my web browser and feed reader of choice, respectively – received major upgrades. The NNW update is especially notable: feed loading and caching seems much faster, and the UI seems much improved overall. Now if only I had some time to play!

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Testing Campfire, the newest tool from the good folks at 37signals. Looks like a productivity booster for my team. However, I have a couple of questions/comments:

• How do we export our conversations if we decide to leave? Basecamp has this option, why not include it in Campfire? Update: Transcripts can be saved as HTML.
• Speaking of Basecamp, why isn’t Campfire integrated into Basecamp like Writeboard is? I suspect that it’s more a decision driven more by business than functionality concerns (“it’ll make more money rolled out as a separate product”). Campfire would be much more useful to us as part of Basecamp than on its own. Update: may be coming later this year.
• I believe I heard Jason Fried state in a podcast something along the lines of “all of our products will have a free base version.” This is not true of Campfire: there is a 30 day free trial, but after that you gotta pay. I don’t mind paying for a great tool, but it’s interesting that Campfire seems to be flouting the traditional 37s account plan structure.

Initial conclusion:We’re gonna test Campfire thru the 30 day free period. It may be useful enough that we add it permanently to our arsenal. However, the lack of an export feature and integration with Basecamp are real downers for us.

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I’m testing the new Flock browser—this post comes from its blog posting tool. So far so good … (How did they ever manage to secure the flock.com domain? I thought all five letter common word domains were surely taken by now!)

One kinda crappy thing about this blog editor is that it doesn’t seem to have a categories selector. I’ve been considering dropping categories on my posts anyways in favor of tags, but don’t wanna be forced into the decision by my tools.

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The Web Developer extension is one of the most useful tools you can add to Firefox. Among many great time-saving features, this extension offers an easy way to turn page stylesheets off, selectively or whole-hog. This comes in very handy when printing out pages that have very fancy formats — especially those with narrow text columns and / or tiny text.

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There’s been much talk lately in the IA mailing lists about tools: which do you use, what are their shortcomings / advantages, that sort of thing. With yesterday’s news of the Macromedia acquisition, I’ve been thinking about the tools I use to get my job done. Which are indispensable? What dependencies do I have on third parties? What would happen if x company were to shutter? (See Lou and Donna’s recent spam filtering woes for examples.)

I’ve prepared a shortlist of the tools I simply couldn’t do my job without, from most important to least…
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• Paper – Any kind will do, but I prefer loose leaf 8 1/2" x 11" white bond. (Note: manila folders are also important when working with loose leaf paper, as is some kind of folder container.)
• Writing instrument – Doesn’t need to be fancy. Currently I use a Pilot Dr. Grip Gel (yes, the name is awful) black ink pen. I can also work with regular wood pencils, and do so regularly.
• Mobile phone. – It doesn’t need to have bells / whistles. (Well, maybe bells. )
• Post-it notes – I buy them in bulk from PriceSmart. Highly recommended: Rapid Problem Solving With Post-it Notes, by David Straker — it’s like having an operating system for Post-its.
• Big, bold, black permanent markers – Sharpies, which I also buy in bulk at PriceSmart. I suppose any brand would do. Note: must be careful when using on Post-its tacked on the…
• Whiteboard – Actually, any large wall-mounted rewriteable surface will do. Blackboards, however, don’t play nice with Post-its, so whiteboards are much preferred. (I also like having an assortment of colored dry-erase markers for the whiteboard. Color is important in part so that I don’t confuse the markers with Sharpies.)
• Laptop computer – No, I can’t use a desktop — my computer needs to be lugged around to around to customers’ offices. I currently use a 15" Powerbook, but in the past I’ve used Thinkpads, Dells, Compaqs, Toshibas, and even a Canon, and can do OK with any of them.
• Fast internet connection – I also need air, and occasionally some food and water.
• Email / Contacts / Calendar / Tasks – I use Entourage, everyone else in the world uses Outlook. Evolution would be OK too, or even Emacs using one of its many guises.
• A good text editor – Currently BBEdit (and Dreamweaver, for some specialized XHTML things), but if need be I could always return to Emacs.
• A good spreadsheet app – Like most everyone else, I use Excel. I’ve tried OpenOffice, and for my needs it’s been alright. However, it falls apart when opening documents sent by third parties — that just won’t do.
• A good word processor – Word. See previous entry.
• A good diagramming app – In the Mac world, this means Omni Outliner Pro. In Windows, Visio. Are there any other choices?
• An image editor – Currently Fireworks. (Hence my preoccupation with the Macromedia / Adobe debacle.) I lived in Photoshop for a long time, but find FW more closely aligned with the needs of web designers. I’ve also tried using The Gimp, but it has many limitations, especially when coming at it as a previous user of either of the aforementioned apps.
• Google – No, not just any search engine will do.
• A PDF writer – OS X does this natively. There are many alternatives in the Windows world.
• Presentation software – Powerpoint. See previous entries on word processing and spreadsheets. (Note: I don’t need frills. No animations, etc. It does need to open third party files without too much distortion, since many people seem to think PPT is a native image format.)
• Digital camera – Huh? Basics? Actually, I use it for taking pictures of the whiteboard — saves incredible amounts of time, especially at meetings. My current tool of choice is a Canon S50: its resolution is just good enough to record the writing on Post-its when shooting the entire whiteboard, and it’s small enough to always be in my backpack. (OK, I guess I could live without it — if I had to. In any case, some day in the future a mobile phone will come along with good-enough resolution camera to make this item redundant.)
• Unix shell and its little friends – I’m approaching “nice-to-have” land here. However, Bash & Co. have saved my neck too many times; I can’t leave them out. There’s a good Windows alternative.

I think that’s it… I’ll update the list if I can think of any more. However, one thing’s become clear to me: I’m not as dependent on commercial software as I thought I was. Google, and the diagramming and image editing apps, are the exception. And like most everyone, I’m MS Office’s bitch. (However, I could live without it if I had to.) On the other hand, the first six items in my list — arguably the most important ones — don’t even require a computer.

I’d really like to know what tools you consider indispensable.

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