You know, Lifehacker and other blogs like it always feature different websites or web-based tools that help people do a given task or set of tasks. Sometimes I wonder if the editors ever really get anything done with all their trying different ways of doing things. But it is important, when you’re trying to be an effective person, to have a certain arsenal of tools at your disposal.
I’ll tell you about my list of tools. Mind you, this list changes over time, but probably not so quickly as the Lifehacker editors. But here goes:
- Google Apps. My life would be greatly diminished without Gmail and Google Maps, for instance. But lately I have become strangely dependent on Google Documents, where I keep lots of my important, daily-access kinds of files. It really solves the problem of using 3 or 4 computers on a regular basis, and version control is not a problem. Google Calendar is wonderful as well. The Gmail contacts sync beautifully with my Blackberry (yes I am a BB person until I get my Android this summer.) Google Tasks are cool as well, but I’m keeping them in my back pocket for the time being.
- Office Drop. This is a cool little service where you mail in your paper documents and they scan them in and host them online. It works great in conjunction with Google Docs, if there’s something you need regular access to.
- Picnik. This is the awesomest photo-editing software: all online. You can put a drop shadow in, straighten a photo, put a cute little border on it and boom, you’re done. And I guess I have good taste because guess what? Google just acquired them. Whatever. If Google ever goes evil, I’ll be in deep trouble.
- Diigo. This is a bookmarking app. I had used delicious for quite some time, however, but it wasn’t quite getting at what I needed. Diigo has a bunch of tools to help me organize my online research, and it gives you quite a bit more meta-data than Delicious did.
That’s about it, really. Like I said, I am overly dependent on the Google products, but you know, they work. Let me know in the comments which sites/tools you can’t live without, and I’ll see if I can remember some more too.