Our Favorite Tools Right Now
by Seward IncorporatedThe Seward Inc. staff describe some of their favorite tools they’re using right now to make life and work easier.
Nell’s Pick:
“The Yahoo! Style Guide–The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World,” by the Yahoo! Editors
I love this style guide! Yahoo!’s editors go into the nitty gritty detail of online style, such as form design, headline writing, punctuation, and more. I especially love their section on how to write user interface text, an often neglected area of software and website development. The book’s website has a lot of great content about web writing.
Paul’s Pick:
“Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition,” by Cern Kaner, Jack Falk, and Hung Q. Nguyen
I bought this book a few years ago to help me prepare for an extensive validation and verification effort and just recently read some of it again for another complex project that involved many test cases. It illuminates many of the problems encountered in software testing and is one of the definitive books on the subject. I would recommend this book to any developer wishing to improve the quality of the code that gets released to clients.
Alison’s Pick:
I’ve recently started using Gmail’s Priority Inbox tool, which rolled out about a week ago. The tool is pretty simple: it takes the concept of spam filtering a step further, by sorting out the “priority” messages that I’m most likely to read and reply to. So, for example, new messages from my mom or best friend would go into the top section (“Important and unread”) of my mailbox; while the poem-a-day emails I subscribe to go into “Everything else.” They’re not spam and I do want to read them, but they’re certainly not as high on the list as personal emails from my friends and family. Priority Inbox also comes with plus- and minus-sign buttons that you can use to mark messages up or down in importance, thus “training” the tool what should go in your priority section. So far it is working nicely for me—but of course, I’ve only had it for a short time. I’m interested to see how it continues to perform over time, and especially how well I will be able to “train” it. Any Gmail user can opt in to use the tool, and you can switch back to your normal inbox view with no hassle if you decide you don’t like Priority Inbox. I’d encourage any Gmailers to give it a try!
Matt’s Pick:
For anybody who gets their hands dirty developing the HTML, CSS, or Javascript for websites, Firebug or Firebug Lite is an absolute must! You can completely bypass the frustrating loop of making small layout code changes in your editor of preference, publishing it to the server, then reloading your web browser by using the real-time HTML and CSS editing capabilities of Firebug. The JavaScript debugging capabilities are second to none, and JavaScript logging is supported directly to the console. As an added bonus, Firebug allows you to monitor the network usage and performance of your page so you can easily track down the offending elements when your page is slow to load. Best of all, its open source and free to use and extend. I can’t recommend this tool enough for anyone that touches the development cycle of a website. If you haven’t already, give it a try!
Brian’s Pick:
Eclipse is an open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Originally written for Java programming, it supports an amazing degree of plugins. Different plugins can add support for programming in a wide variety of languages, including C++, C#, Lisp, PHP, and Flash/Actionscript. Other plugins add support for things like version control systems, bug-tracking systems, automated testing tools, etc. It’s so extensible that some people have even written games as Eclipse plugins!
Along with all the plugins comes a host of handy features for programming. Eclipse has very nice code highlighting and autocomplete in the editor window. It has a very nice file browser to help keep track of all the files in a project, and another view has a suite of specialized debugging tools.
All in all, Eclipse is a great programming tool that supports a lot of different programming tasks.
Vicky’s Pick:
This recently announced offering from Google enables you to make calls from your Gmail interface to people’s phones in the US free of charge. The people you call do not have to have a Google account to receive your call. Skype charges for these types of calls. There also is support for free video and audio calls. Like Skype, these are free also.
Nick’s Pick:
While a graphic designer recommending an Adobe product is for better or worse akin to a fish recommending water, Creative Suite 5 is fantastic. Having recently upgraded from CS3, I’ve been greatly pleased with the improvements. Specifically, the improved cross-compatibility between each program has greatly improved my workflow, and I’m impressed with the graphics I can easily assemble from multiple sources.
I’m reluctant to endorse software upgrades that arrive almost annually and at no small expense; but CS5 is woven together from golden thread by magical elves, or at least it seems so with the results I’m getting.
What are your favorite tools right now? We’d love to hear from you!
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Tags: Creative Suite 5, Eclipse, Firebug, Gmail Phone, Gmail Priority Inbox, Yahoo Style Guide
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