Tools and Productivity
Firefox - If you’re still using IE6 or 7 then skip this whole blog post! If you are a Firefox user then great! but make sure you’re exploiting its full productive power rather than just drinking the kool-aid. I highly recommend learning a few important keyboard shortcuts to reduce the amount of mouse friction you have to endeavour when browsing the web.
The ones I use most frequently are:
CTRL + L: Puts the caret in the location bar.
CTRL + T: Open a new tab
CTRL + TAB (and SHIFT+ CTRL + TAB) : Cycle through open tabs
CTRL + J: Open the downloads windows
CTRL + D: Bookmark this page - Now mapped to del.icio.us
ALT + LEFT: Back
For the hardcore keyboard jedis, you can also select text using the caret mode (toggle with F7) but for this I find the mouse a lot easier, let’s not go too nuts with keyboard.
Download, print and pin this firefox keyboard cheatsheet to the side of your monitor for a few days until you internalize the shortcuts.
Google Browser Sync, Foxmarks Del.icio.us - This is now my bookmark tool of choice, it replaces rather than complements my previous bookmanager sync tools. I have enabled the delicious bookmark toolbar as below, and whenever I need to add a bookmark (CTRL+D) to something I frequently use and want in the toolbar I just tag it with for example toolbar-work or toolbar-docs and voila! When bookmarking other sites just assigned the relevant tags and you can find them again in the Delicious Sidebar (CTRL+B). I bookmark and tag anything that I think I will need to refer to again and the tag method gives me less friction than traditional bookmark folders (in addition to being fully backed up and accessible from any browser or computer). I have del.icio.us enabled on my laptop, work PC and Mac and the sync works so much better than Foxmarks or Google Browser Sync, since there is one centralised authority. The only downside is that you need to be signed in to bookmark, but I’ve not come across an offline scenario where I’ve needed to bookmark something yet.
Google Mail For Enterprise - I’m a bit of a Google fan admittedly, Google Mail has served me well for the past few years and the upgraded enterprise account at $50 per year for 25gb, an SLA and no-ads makes me evangelise this product even more. I can access my mail from any computer and nearly all mobile phones, in addition I have it poll and import my old legacy POP3/IMAP mail traffic until I’m ready to properly close them. Google Mail makes a departure from using folders to organize mail instead preferring tags, once you can get used it, you won’t go back to the bloatware trap of Outlook - trust me!
Passpack - I use this to store all my sensitive passwords, credit card numbers and any pin numbers, I got sick a long time ago of having to use Forgotten my password functionality and equally my paranoid nature leads to avoid using the same password across multiple sites and services. I’ve complete faith in passpack due to the two phase encryption used (part of it is decrypted in your browser) so no one without the correct access key can read you data. Passpack also has a nice little password generator and also disposable logins that I save on my phone (no mentioning passpack obviously) incase I ever need to retrieve some information using a vulnerable computer.
Windows Live Mesh - Windows Live Mesh is a great folder/file sync tool when using multiple PCs, but also a great free 5gb backup account. Folders are synced across multiple PCs you add to your mesh, but are also backed up to the Microsoft cloud too, and you can access them from any computer with a suitable web browser. I had previously used FolderShare but this is like the steroid version of it. Oh and it’s free too. I sync my devtools directory and my ebook directory across all my computers and so far it’s worked great.
Arsclip - Not stricitly a web tool but arsclip is an amazing little clipboard ring that works across all applications. Simply press ctrl+alt+z and you can cycle through last dozen or so items stored in the clipboard. Don’t rely on the visual studio clipboard ring, install this app and be done with it!
