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Question: What software is absolutely essential to you
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Posted by DaXiong
Aug 1, 2011 at 12:02 AM
I was reading through Steve Z’s blog this morning, and a thought struck me ...
What is the absolute one piece of software you have to have?
I would ask only that you limit to one (well, one Windows and one Mac *L*)
I’m looking for outline/organizing/productivity software, as an antidote to CRIMP (I know, what fun is that!)
I suspect many are like me, and haven’t found the perfect piece of software, but I’d love to hear what you feel the number one tool you have is.
Posted by Dr Andus
Aug 1, 2011 at 01:33 AM
It’s an impossible question because the answer depends on the type and stage of the project that I happen to be working on. But on the PC I’ve been sticking with Natara Bonsai for quite a few years now for essential outlining. In the Mac world, I use CarbonFin Outliner on the iPad and iPod (which export to Natara Bonsai).
Posted by JohnK
Aug 1, 2011 at 02:11 AM
Like many people here, I have spent way too much time looking for the magic bullet, a program which will collect, outline and organise all my data and thoughts, removing the need for other software. A fool’s game, to be sure.
Yet to answer your question, the one piece of software I now regard as essential is a humble clipboard manager, Clipcache Pro (http://www.xrayz.co.uk/clipcache/).
For years I have been throwing data into Clipcache while waiting for other, more powerful programs to come along. In all that time, the Clipcache (Sqlite) database proved to be reliable. Searches of my many years of clippings are quick. It uses a folder structure, so allowing crude organisation of data. It is the first place I look for any bits of information I know I must have squirelled away at some time. Development has slowed to a crawl, but the program is stable.
Meanwhile, countless more powerful and far more expensive programs sit on my computer, unused and unloved.
Posted by DaXiong
Aug 1, 2011 at 04:10 AM
JohnK ... thanks, both for offering the opinion, and for sharing that it is not an outliner/organizer. It doesn’t surprise me at all, hearing what you have to say.
Dr. Andus, I agree its impossible as I framed it, but that is what got me thinking. (And thank you too, for sharing).
Steve wrote comparing Personal Brain to Tinderbox (I don’t use either) ... and it got me thinking what I find I can’t live without. The closest I’ve found for me as an outliner is Inspiration, but I could do without it. Notepad++ is my pic - a simple text editor! I keep toying with the idea of converting everything to txt file and being done with the quest for the holy outliner (movie rights to follow).
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.