Cool Tools
We love the technology that makes our lives better. We often share with friends, but we thought we’d make a list of our favorite life enhancement tools. (The list is in alphabetical order.)
Apple Mac Computers (apple.com)
We mostly use Macs because they save us time and ultimately make us money. We have no spyware or virus issues, like our PC friends. Everything just works. And most of the time, Sonia can figure out how to update her own programs and maintain her own computer. The time we save is worth the extra money that the computer costs. Plus, there’s the cool factor.
Basecamp Project Management (basecamphq.com)
If you work closely with others on projects or have to get a lot of approvals on text, this online service is worth its cost. We use it to communicate with clients on large projects, plus keep our shared to-do lists as a company. We also use the whiteboard group editing function for text that needs approval by many people. The to-do list is also useful for communicating with others and following up on progress.
Delicious Social Bookmarking (delicious.com)
Delicious has two useful functions.
- 1. Delicious provides an accessible place to organize all of your bookmarks.
- 2. You can search the site to see what other people are bookmarking; this is a great way to find out more about a particular product, service, topic or business that you are interested in researching.
Dymo Labelwriter (dymo.com)
Want to be organized? Get a Dymo Labelwriter. We love this thing… we’ve has labeled everything from files to CD racks. It’s a beautiful thing.
Flickr Photo Sharing (flickr.com)
Flickr is a great service for sharing photos online. It’s free for limited uploads each month, but you can get unlimited storage for $25/year. We use it as a back-up for our iPhoto library. We’ve often suggested that people use it as a visual component for their personal work porfolios. It’s also a social networking site, so you can choose to make your photos public or private. Sonia’s only hangup is its creatively spelled (i.e. misspelled) name.
Harmony Universal Remote (harmonyremote.com)
The Harmony Remote is a godsend! You can connect it up with all of your various audio visual devices (man toys) through its extensive database online. Then you can set up simple buttons like, “Watch TV” or “Tivo” or “Watch DVD” and it turns everything on to the right setting. Sonia couldn’t even turn on Brett’s TV set-up for a long time. Now, it’s a snap.
iPhone (apple.com/iphone)
The media has already covered all the great features in the iPhone, so let’s just say it has greatly improved our lives.
Google Calendar (google.com/calendar)
We’ve ditched Outlook/Entourage and opted for Google’s free online calendar. We can have several different calendars for work planning, plus we can share calendars with each other and with clients. And don’t worry about clutter: you only have to click each calendar to show it or hide it. It’s easy to add events through the Internet, cell phones, and text messaging. (Bonus: Nice iPhone interface)
Google Reader (google.com/reader)
This is another free useful tool from Google for reading RSS feeds from websites. If you haven’t tapped into the power of RSS readers yet, you should. It will help clear up a lot of the clutter in your digital life, plus help you stay better informed. You can subscribe easily to most sites, and then you can organize and group them within Google Reader. From the Reader website, you can see the headlines and a summary of all the articles on each of those Web sites. Plus you can search all your RSS feeds for keywords, enabling you to review hundreds of Web sites in one location. (Bonus: Nice iPhone interface)
Remember the Milk (rememberthemilk.com)
This is a free, incredible tool for managing tasks and to-dos. RTM, as we affectionately call it, has tagging, date, location, time estimate, frequency, and notes. With keyboard commands, you can enter everything in quickly and easily, plus you can email your tasks to it. We use it for our to-dos (including the productivity system, GTD – Getting Things Done) and to clean out our email inboxes. Sonia also finds its weekly planner function to be very useful. (Bonus: Nice iPhone interface)
ScanSnap Document Scanner (www.fujitsu.com)
We have the ScanSnap S510M, and we love it. It can quickly scan documents two-sided, in color to PDF. You can also OCR the text (which in non-techie terms means it types the words in for you). This has helped us communicate better with clients, do away with our need for a copy machine, and convert many paper files into digital ones.
Social Networking (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter)
We participate in each of these Websites, and we’ve found them to be not only helpful to our business, but also fun to do. We suggest that you consider trying out these free resources, and you’ll find there’s a whole other world out there.
