πŸ‘‹πŸ½ We wrote a book! Order Wireframing for Everyone today β†’

Balsamiq

Toggle navigation

Tools We Use for Running Our Startup

Hi there. I've been wanting to write this post for a long time, but things were still evolving too much for me to come up with a definite list.

Now that we've been in business for a whole 15 months, the dust has settled a bit on the tools we use in our day-to-day operations.

We're pretty happy with our tool set so I thought we'd share it in hope it will be useful to some, and hopefully to get your feedback on it!

We are NOT affiliated with any of the companies that make the tools below, just happy customers.

I do know some of the companies below are Mockups users, which makes me SO proud. Come out in the comments if you are, it will be a big lovefest! πŸ™‚

Also, apologies for the OS X-heavy list...perhaps someone has a Windows-heavy list of equivalent tools to share?

Internal tools

Apple laptops - our hardware of choice. Mariah and Valerie work off of their MacBook Air laptops and Marco and I each use a 17-inch Macbook Pro (with external 24-inch LED Cinema Displays). We also have a mac mini (our "cash register"), and we'll probably get Valerie a new 27-inch iMac soon (the Air is awesome for traveling, but not the most powerful machine for work.)

The iPhone - the first thing you get when you join Balsamiq as an employee. Aside from being a great perk, it's so useful in so many ways that I can't imagine life without one. Also most of the tools mentioned below have an iPhone client, so it's great for us to "carry the whole office" with us at all times with no extra effort. Last but not least, I find it a great source for UX inspiration.

Typinator - I cannot count how many hours this has saved Mariah, Valerie and me. If you use email for work, you need this. It's a tiny little tool that listens to your keystrokes and expands what you type if it matches a certain shortcut you previously specified. Just like typing "lorem" in Mockups expands it to a full "lorem ipsum" paragraph. We have A TON of shortcuts (email replies, URLs...) saved up and we share our shortcuts via DropBox. I found this tool via a Guy Kawasaki tweet, and we now each have a license. Awesome.

DropBox - If you don't use DropBox, I will shake my head at you in disapproval. πŸ˜‰ It's "shared network drives" taken into this millennium. Nothing to set up, works across firewalls, brilliantly easy to use, insanely cheap. If they go public one day, I'll be buying stock. We use it for ALL of our internal files, from graphic assets to contracts, invoices, UI mockups, screenshots, and accounting data (we're totally transparent internally, even more than externally). We even built a feature of Mockups that enables near-real-time collaboration by using DropBox!

Confluence Hosted - the other place where we keep our documents is an instance of Atlassian Confluence (hosted by Atlassian). It comes with Mockups for Confluence pre-installed, which is killer. πŸ™‚ It's basically our Intranet (and our browsers' home page). It has a list of links that we share, an RSS feeds for all the mentions of Balsamiq on the Internet, and most importantly meeting notes, documents we want to collaborate on (like drafts of new pages for the site or blog posts). Confluence is the best wiki software I know of, and every time I use it I wish I needed to use it more...I used to live in it when I was back at Adobe and I miss it! I'm serious. Good software has that effect on people. πŸ™‚

Yammer - Yammer is like a "Twitter intranet". We use it to share links and to help each other with internal issues. We also use it to tell everyone else what we're working on, and to share an occasional viral Youtube video. Since our team is distributed, this is our water-cooler. Very effective and took no time to get adopted (even faster than Twitter itself). To give you an idea, if we didn't have it we'd be looking for a replacement or try to build our own. We use the Gabble client (it's native OSX, uses a ton less ram than their AIR client) and their own client on our iPhones.

Microsoft Excel - we use this for our "beans", i.e. our big spreadsheet where we record all sales and expenses. We keep the file on Dropbox and update it daily (Val updates it with the help of a script Marco wrote and I double-check it). Excel has its quirks (1904 date format anyone?) but overall there's no better tool to manage thousands of rows of data and make pretty charts out of it.

PivotalTracker - you probably heard me rave about it before. PivotalTracker is as simple as a TODO list you might write on paper, but online, shared and collaborative (try the real-time collaboration and be amazed). Every bug or feature request we get ends up on our pivotal list. Once in a while we go through and prioritize the next few weeks, but we're not religious about following it (customer issues always take precedence for instance). We have 3 projects in Pivotal right now: one for Mockups as a whole, one for the web app and one for Valerie and mine's shared TODO list, so that we always know what we're working on. The only problem with PivotalTracker is that it's free. I'd feel MUCH better if I was paying for it, I need them to stay in business forever!

Apple Preview (for PDFs) - I find that I use the Mac's native PDF-handling abilities quite a bit. We print stuff ot PDF for our records, sometimes remove pages, sometimes merge two PDF files together (a simple drag and drop!)...it's nice. If we were on Windows we'd probably be buying Acrobat Professional to do most of the same things.

Parallels - we use Parallels mostly for testing Mockups on different flavors of Windows and Linux (I have an Ubuntu Hardy image as well as an XP, Win 2000 Server and a Vista one, while Marco can run Vista , 2 flavors of XP, Ubuntu and soon Windows 7). The other reason is to run QuickBooks, but hopefully that will soon be a thing of the past (see below).

Writeroom - Writeroom is what I'm writing this post in and what I use any time I have anything to write (I usually end up copying and pasting the text into Confluence or WordPress). It's a wonderful piece of ZenWare and it inspired me to keep Mockups as clutter-free as possible. If you need to focus on your writing (and you should!), I highly recommend it.

Adobe Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop - Fireworks is my "go-to" graphics editor, I use it almost daily. It's just fast and easy to use. Illustrator is what I use when I need to design something, though thankfully I am now able to outsource as much design work as possible (it's better for everyone). Photoshop I can barely use any more, I learned it maybe 10 years ago and haven't touched it much since, but that's what designers use so I'm using it to interact with them, plus there are a few things that Fireworks just can't do.

Skitch - if you need to put an annotated screenshot online, Skitch is the fastest, easiest and most fun way to do it. I just love tools like this: it doesn't try to boil the ocean, it does one thing, does it well and makes it fun. Killer. Marco says he likes LittleSnapper as well.

Screenflow and Screenr - I use Screenflow to record all the screencast for the website. It's very well done, very mac-like. Great UX. I usually record the video first, then record the audio and add it to the video track. Screenflow lets me do that easily without having to launch GarageBand or other audio-editing software (which is a software category that generally makes me queasy πŸ˜‰ .) I also use Screenr if I need something quick to show a customer for instance. Also great UX, and cross-platform (it's a Java applet). Awesome. Some people also use Jing for this stuff but somehow it never stuck with me (it used to crash quite a bit plus that little non-standard "yellow ball UI" never really sat well with me).

QuickSilver - I use this over the built-in Spotlight because I find it faster. It also has a ton of plugins and cool features. Thanks to Elliot Winard for showing this to me back in the day!

Last.fm - I used to be a Pandora enthusiast when I lived in the US, but alas, that's not available here in Italy. Last.fm has proven itself to be even better, with the "social discovery" features helping me not get totally bored with my music all the time. It's worth paying for an account just for the "only play my loved tracks" feature.

Tweetie and TweetDeck are the Twitter clients we use. I like how little memory Tweetie uses but it's been a bit flaky lately (the search column doesn't update any more?), so I'm back to Tweetdeck for now.

Google Reader - is what we use to read (and share internally) RSS feeds. I follow quite a bit of blogs (here's an OPML file with a subset of them about startups), and Reader has the best UI. I used to use it as part of iGoogle but I have now come to love the full-screen UI of it.

Coding Tools: Adobe Flash Builder, Flash Authoring, Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio Express. Mockups is a Flex app, so Flash Builder (I still call it Flex Builder, sorry) is our IDE. The UI controls in Mockups are hand-drawn by my wife Mariah, and taken into Adobe Flash authoring (via Fireworks) to turn them into something that Flex can use.

For our server-side coding, we use eclipse for java development (Mockups for Confluence, JIRA and XWiki), NetBeans for the web app (the back-end is in grails) and Visual Studio Express for C# development (Mockups for FogBugz). We also use Firebug to help us with jQuery development.

Charles - Charles is essential if you do anything client-server. It inspects requests/responses like nobody's business. The problem with Charles is that I've been able to use the free demo for years, their limitations are too loose! I know tons of people that use it, but don't know anyone who's paid for it. I think I'll go pay for it right now, it's a really good piece of software.

Deployment tools: for source-code-repository, I used to use Perforce when I was alone but it's too expensive for a small business like ours, so we switched to Subversion, mostly because it's mature and has lots of 3rd party tools that support it (before you have a fit, we'll be using git for sharing some open-source scripts soon). One such tool is Versions, an OS X native client for it with great usability. I still use the command-line interface for merging and other complex stuff, but for day-to-day coding Versions is quite nice.

For building our products we use a combination of Ant and Maven scripts, all continuously built (and deployed!) via CruiseControl. I know that CC is like living in the dark ages when it comes to CI servers, but I'm pretty happy with it, it's very reliable. Plus it's free. We might invest in something that lets us run parallel builds sometimes soon, as we have 8 different builds going off after every check-in right now, which takes about 10 minutes. We'll be sharing some of our build scripts soon (see below).

We also just installed Atlassian FishEye. I was REALLY excited about it for about two days, but haven't really looked at it since. I suspect that for a team of 2.5 developers like ours it might be overkill, but maybe I'm not using it right. I thought I'd mention it because it really seems like a very well-made and powerful product.

Slicehost - we chose to host our web app on Slicehost for 3 reasons: reasonable price, outstanding customer support and the best technical documentation I've ever seen (I might write a blog post about it one day..it's concise, to the point, funny and makes you feel like a super-human). I hope Slicehost realizes how important PickledOnion's articles are to their overall success and compensate him (her?) accordingly. A word of caution, Slicehost can get pretty pricey if you install memory-hogging apps like Tomcat on it. Still reasonable, but their cheapest option won't make it.

Apple Keynote - I only just recently started using, for my WebExpo talk in Prague last week. All I gotta say is WOW. Keynote's usability kicks the pants off of Powerpoint...it's really a wonderfully designed piece of software. I was especially impressed with their progressively disclosed snap lines, which are SO MUCH BETTER than the ones we have in Mockups. It must be nice to be Apple and have tons of brilliant engineers and designers to help you, I'm jealous! πŸ™‚

QuickBooks - oh, man. We use QuickBooks Assisted Payroll for Valerie's payroll. It's nice and automated, but still requires Val to launch Parallels in order to launch their Windows-only application, which is NOT the pinnacle of usability...we just asked our accountants if we could pay them a monthly fee to take this painful part of Valerie's job away from us. There's plenty of great software to replace QuickBooks (our friends at LessAccounting know a thing or two about it), but IMHO the best software to use for certain things is one that you don't even use yourself! Much better to have professionals use whatever they like best.

Our own scripts - we wrote a bunch of little scripts to automate some of the most tedious tasks. We plan on sharing those as open-source soon, and we're going to be hosting them on GitHub because that's where all the cool kids are these days πŸ˜‰ , and actually looks REALLY nice for open-source projects.

Customer Facing Tools

GMail - we use Google Apps for your Domain so all of our mail is handled by GMail. I actually end up forwarding all of my email (personal and for business) to balsamiq@gmail.com because the "consumer" version of GMail gets Google Labs features earlier than the other one. GMail's search, threaded view and filters are absolute must-have for us, we couldn't run our business without them. Also, the "Default to Reply All" feature in Labs is effectively replacing our need for a CRM tool (even though we looked into ZenDesk and it looked nice, especially since it integrates with GetSatisfaction).

Marco wanted me to mention that he's a mac purist and uses Mail.app instead. Oh well. πŸ˜‰ We also use Mail.app on our mac-mini to run the cash register...but that's a subject for another post. πŸ™‚

Skype - where to begin. Our phone number +1 (415) 367-3531 is a SykpeIn number, meaning that if you call it both Valerie's computer in Foster City and mine in Italy will ring. When one of us answers, the other laptop will stop ringing. How cool is that? Valerie and I use Skype internally for our daily catch-up meetings...we use it as an instant messenger, we use Skype chats as "war room" for development, we use the new screen sharing feature all the time (which is a bit flaky but nicely integrated). I have been interviewed for a number of podcasts via Skype as well. If there was one piece of installed software in the last 7 years that changed the World we live in forever, Skype might be it. Can you believe Skype is only 7 years old? Can you remember life before it? I can't.

Adium - for instant messaging. This stuff is boring by now, but Adium connects to everything and just works.

Freshbooks - when I first started Balsamiq I dealt with invoices and estimates by hand, I used one of the default templates that came with Microsoft Word. I am SO glad that we make enough money to be able to afford the (very affordable) Freshbooks. It has great usability, it's very fast to use, it's a web app so Val and I can access the account at any time, and most importantly it has APIs! I just spent a couple of days last week cooking up some PHP scripts that allow our customers to generate estimates (quotes) and invoices by themselves when they need them. This freed up an hour of Valerie's time EVERY DAY, just like that. Better living through scripting! πŸ™‚ Freshbooks also has GREAT customer service, plus they seem to be really nice people overall. We're happy to support them.

GetSatisfaction - you've probably heard me rave about GS before. I was lucky enough to be one of their first paying customers so I've seen it get better and better. I REALLY love what they stand for and how they put the customer and the company on the same level. They win on UX as well, with the smiley faces and the "gardening tools" being right there where you expect them to be. I hope they do well, I really do.

Payment Processors: Paypal, Google Checkout, E-Junkie and Spreedly - We use E-Junkie as a shopping cart. Their name is terrible, but their admin UI is pretty good and flexible enough for all the different things we need to do (generate keys based on the names, etc). It integrates nicely with both Paypal and Google Checkout, and I recommend using both since Paypal won't accept as many credit cards in as many countries as Google Checkout does. We also decided to pay $30/month for Paypal's Virtual Terminal (I think that's what it's called), which lets us take credit-card orders over the phone. Best $30/mo ever spent, I wish we had done it earlier. Pays for itself immediately.

We just recently started using Spreedly as a payment processor for our hosted offerings, and we're very happy with them. The APIs are super-easy to pick up, they have good docs, accessible support and overall seem like good, trustworthy people. I like their administration's UI as well. Thanks to Ryan Carson for recommending them in this talk.

Delicious - I think I'll write a separate blog post about this, but I use delicious extensively. Want a few examples? Look at the balsamiq_press tag, or the balsamiq_reviews tag, or the balsamiq_love one. It's SUPER useful, I'll write more about it I promise.

Twitter - I wrote about Twitter before, and can't wait to buy as much stock as I can afford in it when they go public.

Facebook - I admit that I never "got" Facebook much before Mariah and Valerie showed me the way. If Yammer is our internal water cooler, our Facebook page is our "community water cooler". Valerie, who has effectively taken over our page there, says that it's like this blog, but less formal (I know, can you be less formal than this? I didn't think so either). πŸ˜‰ I love it! The best part about it is that we can see actual FACES of our fans and customers, it's so magical. We are not a company selling software to customers: we are people helping other people ridding the World of bad software, one wireframe at the time. Social media really brings this point home, I love it. I wouldn't want to live in any other time in history actually.

For this website, we use Drupal for every page except for the blog section, for which we use WordPress instead. I think I use about 10% of what Drupal can do, but it works well enough for me. WordPress is WordPress, there's a reason it's the standard.

Posterous - ah, another one of my favorite tools. SO simple. No, you don't understand, it's SO simple. We use it for MockupsToGo, our community site. Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal are awesome and always put my own customer support response-times to shame. I swear they respond INSTANTLY! They also implemented a feature "just for me", which makes me feel all nice and special. I heart them!

That's it for now!

Ok so first of all, I have made a Twitter list of all the tools I mentioned above that I could find: http://twitter.com/balsamiq/essential-startup-tools.

Then, are you using these tools? Do you think we should swap out any of them for a better one? Note that what we care the most about are usability, customer service and the people behind the tool. Features come a distant 4th.

Note: I plan on deleting comments that are too "sales-y" or "pitch-y". If you want to pimp your product, get someone else to do it. If it doesn't strike me as a truthful endorsement, I'll delete the comment for everyone's sake. You have been warned. πŸ™‚

P.S.There are some interesting comments over at Hacker News about this post.

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

Leave a Comment

Comments (45)

  1. Pingback: Start Small, Don’t Overcomplicate Things | Matt McCarty

  2. Pingback: Design: What's a good solution to handle requests to your design team? - Quora

  3. Hi David, we’re still pretty happy with ejunkie + paypal + google checkout (now called google wallet) + spreedly, but I did look around and my finalist should I choose now would be BrainTree I think.

    Peldi Guilizzoni
  4. Hi Peldi – Is the payment processor section still accurate? I’m investigating options and am curious to know if anything has changed for you on this topic in the last 2 years since you posted this.

    David

  5. Hi Peldi,

    I read this blog when you first wrote it and again now. All these tips are great – we’ve done a similar thing over on our Bright Green Project blog.

    We’ve been using Balsamiq at Bright Green for a while now – I really love using your tool for mockups. I’ve also used it to create Process Flows and other diagrams for our clients. Love it.

    Bright Green is an Agile PM Tool in the cloud to manage sprints, requirements, issues and risks. We’re always uploading mockups for balsamiq to requirements, which we then share with our development team. I hope you build an API one day so this process can become even easier for our clients!

    Please take a look at our product if you have the time;

    http://brightgreenprojects.com

    Adam

  6. Hi Peldi
    great blog

    just wondered if you solved your quickbooks problem – do you know about quickbooks hosted solution which obviously works with mac ?
    http://quickbooksonline.intuit.com/finance-accounting-solutions/
    I have not used it myself but here it is quite good.
    I am not sure why they don’t advertise it at all on the main quickbooks site – a friend found it by chance.

    Or maybe you decided to just get someone else doing the accounts stuff now?

  7. Pingback: Internet Apps Every Start-Up Must Have | The View from Harvard Business | BNET

  8. Pingback: Π˜Π½Ρ‚Π΅Ρ€Π΅ΡΠ½Ρ‹Π΅ ссылки β„–200 - max - Π±Π»ΠΎΠ³ Ρ€Π°Π·Ρ€Π°Π±ΠΎΡ‚Ρ‡ΠΈΠΊΠΎΠ²

  9. What do you use to integrate your blog into your site? Or in other words what is your blog running on?

    [Peldi: wordpress. The rest of the blog is run by Drupal]

    Eric Malamisura
  10. Why not using free and open source java application instead of Charles. Like JMeter which also can record http and https traffic?

    Kirill Stasenkov
  11. Do you have any opinion on Etherpad: http://etherpad.com/

  12. This is an amazing list. We might write reviews of some of these tools in out tools blog at http://tools.theindianstartup.com

    Thanks for sharing!

    -Kunal

  13. Glad you like Connie πŸ™‚

    If you push your sales data into some sort of database, you can use the {sql} macro in Confluence to chart your sales. It’s the kind of stuff we do internally – see Jim’s blog series: http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/08/confluence_business_intelligence_part1.html

    Cheers,
    Dave.

  14. I love lists of things that people actually use!

    I personally love Scrivener (Mac) as writing software (and it’s got a built in Darkroom type function). It was created to help write novels but I find it useful for any sort of extended writing project like how-to guides and manuals. I also love that the developer posts alternatives if his software isn’t for you, that’s so cool.

    I have also recently discovered the pomodoro technique and the focus booster app which has revolutionised my working habits.

    I like http://www.colorschemer.com – it makes it really easy coming up with a good looking colour scheme.

    (I did put in links for all, but the comment system thought I was spamming so wouldn’t let me post – however, a google search should find them all easily enough)

  15. Great list. We used Balsamiq to mock up our SaaS software testing product and it worked great. I like your taste in tools. I’m going to check out a couple, including Typinator and Drop Box. Thanks.

    Justin Hunter
    Founder of Hexawise
    http://hexawise.com/video_intro

  16. Peldi!

    When I saw your choice for online music I felt compelled to tell you about a site I am totally addicted to.

    Grooveshark.com is BY FAR the best music listening site I have come across. Listen to the songs you want, as many times as you want in the order you want. It’s free and there are no ads (other than skyscrapers on the page). No idea if this works in Italy, but I just love it.

    Yours,

    Laura

  17. For a build server I’d suggest taking a look at JetBrain’s TeamCity – which is hugely capable, free up to a point and relatively affordable thereafter.

  18. Peldi,

    Go back to Pandora. Check out Hot Spot Shield and enjoy the sweet sound of Pandora music πŸ™‚

  19. Great post, I definitely use many of these myself and learned about a few that I am going to check out. Regarding QuickSilver, I have recently started using Google Quick Search, it seems like a simplified version of Quicksilver that does most of the things Quicksilver did (that I used). Apparently it is written by the same guy who did Quicksilver since he now works at Google. http://www.google.com/quicksearchbox/

  20. Great stuff. I use several of these myself and I plan to take on a few more that suit. I hear that Quicksilver rocks but I just never got round to climbing the learning curve.

    I would also recommend feedly as an improved interface for google reader. It’s just more pleasant to use and a bit sexier. reader is just an engine and it’s a shame google hasn’t really been developing the UI for a few years.

    Surprised you didn’t mention Evernote too. Like a portable scanner (on the iphone) and brilliant for gathering and editing info quickly.

  21. Awesome post! Tons of useful tools and tips. Lot’s of overlap with what we use at Flowtown πŸ˜‰

    Re: Cash register do you have this setup for the whole team? Even those who are virtual?

    [We only have one here at home-base, but it would be really easy to set up for other offices too. We’ll document how it works when we release the scripts that make it run as open-source]

  22. this is a great list! I found a couple of really nice apps i’ll definitely try

  23. Awesome list!!

    If you or any of your readers are looking for good, reliable subversion hosting, do have a look at http://xp-dev.com – it has a free version as well, and for a more commercial feel, you can upgrade for quite a low price.

    [We host SVN ourselves (it’s really easy), but thanks for sharing!]

  24. love the list, many ‘friends’ there already, and others to check out. another shout out for dropbox. big omission, however, for the rest of us–balsamiq itself! has to be on the list.

    [Aww Steve, you’re too kind! ;)]

  25. Hi Peldi,

    AvanGate seems very promising!

    Thank you very much Peldi,

    Alexandre Gomes

    Alexandre Gomes
  26. Hi Peldi,

    I’m located in Portugal and looking for a payment gateway to launch my service.
    I’m a bit frustrated because the main payment gateways seem to be available only for companies in the US.
    Do you use Paypal and Spreedly from a company legally based in Europe (Italy) or do you have to have a company based in the US to use those services?

    Thank you Peldi,
    Alexandre Gomes

    [Hi Alexandre, we use our american branch to sign up for those services. Have you looked at AvantGate? That’s what Enrico from Napkee.com uses (he’s based in Europe) and he likes it]

    Alexandre Gomes
  27. Ditch CruiseControl in favor of Hudson (http://hudson.dev.java.net/) ; try it once and I bet you drop cruise like a hot anvil. I just got it set up at work to use slaves out on EC2 for the longer builds so the in-house master can spend its cycle managing the build queue and running the short & fast jobs.

  28. Kiss skype and all phone companies
    goodbye and try a sipgate team account.
    mind blowing.

  29. Hi Peldi,

    Thanks for a great post! We use Balsamiq daily at work and love it – just want to say thanks (I think we might be one of the first paying customer). Also thanks for this great list, some of the products I haven’t heard of before and will be sure to try them out.

    I notice you didn’t mention a good online web form builder. I just want to let you know of a new startup I’m involved with called Formbinder (http://formbinder.com). It is a super-easy wysiwyg way of building and hosting web forms online. It’s so new, I haven’t even made that first inaugural blog post. πŸ™‚

    Anyhow, thought I’d mention it. Happy to also give you and your readers a good deal to say thanks for Balsamiq.

    Keep up the great work.

    Best wishes,
    dave

  30. Charles is a great product. It is developed by a friend of mine here in New Zealand so you should definitely buy a license!

    For accounting you should check out Xero. It is a SaaS product with a great UX and an API for hooking into your existing tools. It actually makes accounting fun.

  31. Actually, they’re on it. PickledOnion has been a Slicehost employee for a while now.

    Israel Orange
  32. That is a huge list!!

    Just curious: how many passwords ?

    Stephan

  33. If you want a new millenium “shared network drive” in the cloud that actually manifests itself as a drive instead of a folder, check out http://www.zumodrive.com/. Similar to DropBox but it treats your local storage as a cache (files are streamed down on-demand) instead of syncing everything everywhere. Great for bandwidth as well as for devices with limited storage, like iPhones.

  34. Hi Peldi,

    Fantastic post! I am sad only because I know I am going to lose hours checking out all those great tools you mention. But happy because I am sure they are going to save me a tonne of time.

    I love lessons learned and shared things like this.
    Still using Balsamiq. Still loving it.

    All the best,

    Jonathan

  35. Peldi,

    Can you give a quick comparison between PivotalTracker and JIRA hosted?
    e.g. what does PT do better for you.

    Best wishes,

    ~Matt

    p.s. Say hi to Val

  36. +1 on using Excel to track your sales numbers.

    Awesome list, Peldi!
    Glad to hear you’re doing well!
    -e

  37. Peldi,

    I don’t think you’re giving Quickbooks a fair look. I think it could get rid of a few of the other applications you are using, #1 the excel spreadsheet you are using via dropbox to record your sales. I’d suggest either getting this info into QB, or putting it into SQL Server/MySQL or some other kind of database (but not Excel — seems scary to me).

  38. This reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago: the apps I use

    One thing that surprised me was that you are using Excel for number crunching job and you put it on a share drive; I would have imagine you using Google Spreadsheet.

  39. Awesome post…. Been following you for long time…..Gr8t progress…Good compilation of tools….

    Thanks for making your OPML file public…..loved it…Importing to my RSS.

  40. I just switched from Mac to Linux, because I realized the only two apps I use are the terminal (vim) and Firefox.

    I’ll occasionally use xpdf if I need to read a PDF, but that’s it.

    I admire the people who have found great tools and learned to use them well. It sounds like you’re just doing much more than I am, especially more communication between members. (I just use email or twitter through the browser for that. Or pick up my cellphone.)

  41. BeanStalkApp.com is great for hosted Subversion. Super easy and affordable…

  42. Great post. Thanks so much for sharing. What do you guys use for todo lists? I use taskpaper on my laptop with simplenote for sharing and syncing with my iPhone, hoping for a taskpaper client for the iphone someday soon. Oh and email? I am a new big fan of newsberry.com.

  43. Thanks for the list. Haven’t used Typinator so far but seems usefull, I’ll check it out.

  44. Do you host subversion yourself or use a service? (Great list, btw. So far I’ve been surviving with a Linux desktop but I’m thinking I’m going to have to migrate to a Mac).

  45. Hey Peldi, hope you’re well.

    Thanks for the detailed list.

    Have you heard of Tender app? It’s like get satisfaction but we like it better.

    Also, do you have any suggestions for usability testing? We’re using Silverback right now.

    Talk soon,

    Max