Question: What software is absolutely essential to you

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 1, 2011 at 01:24 PM

This is a very interesting question, but one that I find difficult to answer. The truth is, none of the programs I use is “essential” because there is so much redundancy among them.* The ones, however, that I would least want to do without could be Zoot (on my office PC) and Tinderbox (on my MacBook). Zoot remains my information dumping ground. It’s so easy to drop information into Zoot and organize it later. It can handle light-weight database tasks too (if I could print mailing labels from Zoot, it would be even better). I use a combination of PersonalBrain and OneNote for managing most of my projects, but I could, if need be, use Zoot for that—in fact, it could handle that pretty well, I think.

With Tinderbox, I could handle any number of information management/writing tasks. Still, I would hate to surrender Scrivener.

Steve Z.

*I’m referring specifically to that generalized category we call information managers. Some specific applications, such as QuickBooks, are essential for my job.