Browser – Firefox
My browser of choice for a while now has been Firefox. I used to use stuff like Networker, SlimBrowser and Maxthon which are all built upon the Internet Explorer engine and therefore are basically a different interface plopped on top of IE. The main reason I used them was for the tabbed browsing they offered that Internet Explorer (at the time) did not. However, due to stagnation of the browser engine and security concerns I moved to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
Part of the great thing about Firefox are it’s add-ons, of whcih I have several. Among my faves are: Adblock Plus, Evernote Web Clipper, FaviconizeTab, Tab Mix Plus and the must have Xmarks.
The one downside to Firefox for me is the longer its open the more memory it seems to chew up, so when things get sluggish it’s time to close down and re-open. Aside from Firefox the other way I would consider going is with Chrome, but I have so many add-ons (aside from the above) and Greasemonkey scripts that I’d be rebuilding from start and I just don’t have that kind of energy yet.
News Reader – Google Reader
What website doesn’t have an RSS feed these days? Not many for sure. With so many sites and so many feeds one needs a way to manage them and for me that way is Google Reader. I can organize my feeds by categories of my liking, star those I like or have extra interest in, share items, everything one would need. The mobile site is excellent on Android and there are a few Android apps that will sync with your feed and let you read off line (yes, i-Platforms, too).
But I Don’t Want To Read This Now – Instapaper
Every now and then you’ll come across an article that looks interesting and you want to read, but darn it, the thing is just too long for the time you have allotted to read your feed. What do you do if you want to read it later? Leave the window open for when you get to it? Bookmark it? Nah. Use Instapaper. Instapaper is a quick and easy to use site built specifically for storing things you want to read later. You add the bookmarklet to your favorites (after signing up for a free account) and when you come across something that you need to put off just click the link and like magic it’s saved to your list to read later.
The cool part is you don’t have to read it on your PC. If you have a Kindle you can set up to have your articles emailed to your device (remember that Amazon charges for this) or exported to a .mobi format that you can add manually. Instapaper has an iPhone app and a great option for Android is EverPaper. The EverPaper app integrates with your Android browser so you can send pages to Instapaper right from your phone, which is slick. And, if it is something worth keeping for later you can send it to Evernote straight from the EverPaper app (more on Evernote in a sec).
Notes and Such – Evernote
If you want to really organize your digital life seriously consider Evernote. Evernote is billed as a note taking tool, but it does so much more than you would imagine by reading that line. Evernote can be used to capture your own text notes, which are stored in user defined notebooks with user defined tags. Notes are search-able and you can save your search strings for quickly finding certain categories of notes. Evernote will also capture and save web pages or portions of web pages which is sweet if you come across a great article, say on ancient Mayan armpit hair weaving that you want to save. You can clip the article to your Evernote account denoting which notebook it should go in and what tags it should have, adding your own note along the way. Oh but it gets cooler. Upload a pdf or a photo and Evernote will perform OCR so that that any text inside the picture and the PDF is now searchable. How frickin’ sweet is that? Very, my friends.
I use Evernote all day long. I have notebooks for photography specific topics, watches, music, parenting, travel, recipes and even receipts; for any big purchase, or one where the item may be returnable, I take a pic of the receipt with my phone and send it to Evernote complete with the notebook and tags. Which leads me neatly into, yes, there are Evernote apps for the iPlatforms and Android. Slickness: you can do voice notes with your phone if you don’t have time to type. Ha! There is also a desktop app, which has better editing capabilities than the web app, but you have to perform syncs upon opening and closing to see all your notes. I only use that when I want to format the text in the note into a table. Evernote is free with a monthly upload limit in place, to expand that and upload multiple file types one can pay a monthly or yearly fee.
To-Dos – Todoist
We all have shit to do, face it. Remembering that shit is sometimes the hard part. I know it is for me, so I need help. For that help, I turn to Todoist. Todoist is a slick web-based to-do/task/project manager that lets you define your tasks into projects and sub-projects as needed. You can add contexts (those “@” things made popular by GTD like @home, @work), due dates and times, and priorities (premium features allow for alert reminders on due tasks, $3 a month).
Todoist has a slick view that puts a persistent toolbar type window in the bottom right hand corner of any browser window that when clicked it opens your tasks. It works just like Google Tasks in Gmail, which is where I park mine. Also similar to the Google version is the ability to take a Gmail and turn it into a task, can’t go wrong there. Once again, mobile is everything! mintTODO works great on the iPlatforms and for Android TodoistDroid (at $1.99) is the way to go.
Social – HootSuite
Forget actually going to Twitter or Facebook, who does that anymore? Well, lots of people, actually. Not me. Not anymore. Not since I found out about HootSuite. HootSuite is a social network manger that brings together your favorite (or not so favorite) site feeds into one place. It supports feeds from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, MySpace, Foursquare and WordPress blogs. You create your own custom views of your feeds on tabs for easy viewing. For example, on my main tab I have my Twitter feed, then Facebook feed, my @ mentions from Twitter, then my favorite tweets. Another tab has all my Twitter list and a third my Watches in Movies feeds from Twitter and Facebook. You can post to any network right from the tool and post to multiple if you want. It has a built in URL shortener, statistics, and a whole lot of other stuff I haven’t even scratched at yet. The HootSute Firefox addon makes sending a hoot (I guess) from any page easy. My favorite part for Facebook is it strips out a lot of the garbage and leaves the status updates from friends and groups, which is nice.
Sadly, mobile is not one of HootSuite’s strong points, I’ve heard bad things about both the iPhone and Android apps.
That will wrap up this installment of my favorite web tools. Guess we’ll call this part one. There’s still photos, blogging and stuff to cover. More later!
