Once in a while I try to look at what I am doing. A lot of what I am doing depends on the Top 5 Apps I use. Here are my current top 5. Here is how I spend my online time. In my offline I try to keep my meetings to no more than 2 a day on an average.
- Firefox – I know that is too generic. I use it for Mail, browsing, blogging, reading blogposts, reading books (from Safari books online) and ebooks. 70%
- Skype/Gtalk – Most of my synchronous communication needs are met by these two. Project discussions, development discussions and most of the conversations I have with students take place here. 20%
- Tweetdeck – My main source of consuming and producing tweets – 5%
- Facebook – Interaction with groups and social media -3%
- LinkedIn – 2%
What are your top 5 tools? Where do you spend most of the time.
9 thoughts on “Your Top 5 Apps?”
My list looks pretty much like yours. Minor changes though and here it goes
1. Firefox: For just about everything!
2. Hootsuite: Web based Twitter app, looks like Tweetdeck and I use it via Firefox!
3. Gtalk: Chat/interactions
4. Facebook: Social Interactions
5. Mindjet MindManager: Its been ages since I thought and wrote using a paper and a pen. I was first introduced to MindManager in 2006 and it has since then changed the way I think and changed the way my ideas get generated and presented. Must have for ideators, creators, managers and everybody else in whose scheme of work managing thought processes is involved. The freeware alternative to this is Freemind but it doesn’t come anywhere close in terms of quality.
@Narayanan Thanks for sharing this. Isn’t it funny how all the Microsoft apps are missing from both the lists?
Yup! But not surprising, especially because we now have at our disposal a plethora of alternatives!
P.S: I really can’t do without PowerPoint – Being in Presentation Design, that brings in a huge chunk of my bread and butter!
Have you tried Cmap? From IHMC? It is free, it lets you label relationships too. That is what I use most of the time. But I may give Mind Manager a try.
– Firefox, except when it wonks out for a few days – then Chrome until Firefox gets “normal” again. 🙂 My favorite addon is Wisestamp.
– GIMP, for little graphics here and there.
– Evernote, for writing, research, and collecting thoughts.
– Quicken, for Quicken-type stuff.
– jEdit, for plain-text editing.
@Shannon,
Thanks. I will try out Wisestamp (you just gave me an idea to ask for a list of firefox extensions). I use Wikidpad. Have Evernote but not tried it much. Actually I use both FF and Chrome. Chrome for stuff I read for long periods of time (across days) and FF for quick links. I think keeping less tabs and closing it open makes FF much better. It is such a shame that even after so many versions FF has not fixed their memory leaks.
Dorai
Mine looks totally different:
1. Chrome – Since Firefox hogs my netbook’s memory, and I like Google’s Sync across machines. Most of my communication is done here (GMail, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, GReader, Google Chat, etc)
2. Emacs – Code, Blogging
3. IRC Client (XChat/ChatZilla) -Huge community of programmers and hackers exist on IRC
That’s it these days, actually. Used to be a big time Lightroom+Photoshop junkie back when I had a camera, and those days might be returning soon too!
Of note is that I use mostly the same apps across platforms – ArchLinux on my Netbook, or Win7/Ubuntu on my Desktop.
Thanks Yuvi.
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