It's no surprise that I've been using computers since I was about 9
in one form or another, but in recent years the way in which I use them
has changed significantly, and I know for sure that I'm not the only
person out there who knows this.
The web, and i guess web2.0 in particular, has altered forever our
relationship with these tools that effectively run our careers for us
in many ways today.
So, I decided to put together a list of the tools I use on a daily
basis, and how they've evolved from one form into another over time.
Basically, a list of stuff that I simply can't do without on a daily
basis. Some of these are web based, some are at a higher level, and
some are even hardware.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but it's probably the more common things I use in both professional and personal life.
EMAIL - Gmail
My email life started out a long time ago but for
majority of my life i've really used outlook for my client. Since
switching to Mac that's become entourage and both of these are OK, if a
little bloated at times. But, and this is a no brainer, all of my
personal email, from five or so accounts, is now handled directly
within Gmail. For me, Gmail is the ultimate email client. I use it as
a spam filter, email aggregator, file storage, and on top of all that I
can use it on a PC or mobile phone. I was lucky to be in on the beta
and to be honest it's been non stop ever since. All of my personal
email accounts are redirected to gmail and I never log into the pop3
services any more. in fact, I hardly ever sync up my email by actually
downloading it onto a computer any more. All is done virtually within
gmail itself. my wife uses gmail. all my mates are on gmail, and so
is my dad. quite simply, it's great.
CONTACTS - Plaxo
For a long time I didn't have contact lists. I
had a little black diary stuffed with peoples names and numbers and
email addresses. That book travelled everywhere with me around the
world, and I would frequently go into a state of panic if I lost it.
Zip to about 1998(-ish) and i am using outlook for contact gathering.
Tom hedstrom, with whom I used to work at TDPL/Leagas Delaney, handed
me one day a Palm V and I was amazed. I loved that thing. All of a
sudden my little black book was redundant. disregard the PDA for now
(see below) and zip to a few years ago when Jason Smith at EA sends me
a weird email from a company called Plaxo, and in it is all of his new
contact details. Me being me I sign up for plaxo and, once again, i've
not looked back. Plaxo is amazing IMHO. All my different machines,
all my different operating systems, phones and other devices (even my
iPod) sync the contact into plaxo. my mates use plaxo (not enough of
them though!!) and I love it. God help me if they ever shut down (and
no, i am not a pro member - their price is still too steep - come one
plaxo! make it a micro payment and you'll get 1,000's of us signing up
I am guessing!) I know Soocial is coming out soon, and I look forward
to that, but it'll have a tough job to beat plaxo.
MUSIC - iTunes
I discovered MP3s in 1997. Way before Apple got
into the scene. Winamp was the app of choice, and MP3s were a rare
beast in the public domain. I remember a mate of mine, Matt Francis,
telling me how he was testing them out to see how the sound compared
with CDs and how he was amazed by the quality of something that came
out of a computer. Then Steve Jobs released iTunes and I dropped
Winamp as quick as you could say AAC (although i still use MP3 of
course). Now, it's a rare occasion that I buy a CD (linda buys them
all the time, but not me), and all (that's ALL) of my CDs (and that's a
LOT) are now encoded into MP3 format and stored on my Media Centre PC
as well as my iPod and a backup HDD. So, iTunes is, for me, the killer
music app.
CALENDAR - iCal & Google Calendar
Once again I've used Outlook for a long time. I could
never get used to Palm's version - seemed a bit clunky. But then OSX
came along, and I jumped onto iCal. It even syncs up both ways with
Entourage, so for work and home I can use it as required. Google
Calendar is as good as it gets in an online version, and it syncs
one-way into iCal, but not the other - which is a major pain. Apple -
work out a deal to sync with google both ways please! So, calendars I
use two - iCal and Google Calendar.
CHAT - Meebo & Skype
OK. Time to geek out majorly. I had a 5 digit ICQ number.
yes, I know - how cool is that! No idea what it is now - I lost the
email address it was on for a long time - so now I am on a 6 digit
one. 829889 if you're interested. At the same time as using version 1
of ICQ i was using a MUD called Sleepless Nights as a chat room to talk
with a few people, especially Gash. Now, I have accounts on all of the
major ones, and I use them all the time to talk to lots of different
people. But, I use them from one place - Meebo. Meebo is the best IM
aggregator for me in the same way that Gmail is the best email client -
because it's web based and you can access it from any computer in the
world. A phone version in Java would be great, but these things take
time. The only problem - no Skype Chat support. So, I still use Skype
as an app. Meebo is the killer IM app.
OS - MacOSX and Windows
OK. There's been a lot of these in my life, so here goes...
- BBC Basic
- Sinclair Spectrum
- Atari ST
- DOS
- Windows 3.1
- Windows 95
- Windows 98
- Mac OS 9
- Windows 2000
- windows XP
- Mac OSX
and now? well, who cares? MacOSX is great - I love it. But then,
so is Vista - I love that too, even with it's faults. But, to be
honest, I couldn't give a monkeys. I use the web for most of my
communication, if not all, and I use web apps to do what I need to do
(and with Adobe soon to release a web based photoshop probably using
Flex and Apollo, I won't need that either) so the OS, for me, isn't
highly important. I'm not sure a web OS is the key - because I think
the web IS an OS.
RSS - Sage
OK. So RSS doesn't have a history for me, but it's a killer
app and I use it all the time. Sage, for Firefox, is the RSS reader I
like the best. I've tried a lot but this is the one I prefer. So,
killer app for RSS is sage.
Browsers - Firefox
Firefox 2 - end of. Need I say more?
Howard
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OKA Direct, the last site I produced whilst at TEQUILA\ London, just got reviewed in the NMA this week. It scored a pretty healthy 88% overall. Congratulations to all the team still at TEQUILA\ as well as those moved on to different strokes.
OKA was actually three sites produced at once, RAPT direct and Cath Collins (although CC appears to be down at the moment for some reason) being the other two, all based on a common architecture.
NMA particularly liked the idea of being able to buy a whole room at once, rather than selecting items individually. Good - that was my idea :)
Well done OKA and TEQUILA\
Howard
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