Travis Vocino

Today someone asked me what applications I use constantly. What’s open on my computers all day that I use to run my business or reference in general. After going into it and having the discussion he noted, “You should make a blog post about this.” Great idea!

I’ll save all the development stuff I use for a later post (e.g. Photoshop, TextMate, etc.) and for now just focus on the everyday productivity applications that live on my desktop and laptop.

Mailplane

A while back I switched my email services from my MediaTemple (dv) server to Google Apps for Domain. For a long time I simply continued to use Apple Mail and iCal—adding the Gmail services to Mail as accounts in the standard way.

Unfortunately, Apple Mail doesn’t play as nice as it could with Gmail IMAP. It also sucks to have to give up a lot of the great Gmail features. Of course, the trade off is that you get to use the nice native Apple interface instead of opening your web browser to check your mail.

Enter Mailplane.

Mailplane brings your Gmail to your desktop. It’s basically Fluid.app (referenced below) with a lot of Gmail-specific features and utilities. It encapsulates Gmail, thus giving you the advantage of dealing directly with your Google interface while still being available to you as a desktop app would. It even handles multiple accounts with ease.

Basecamp

Since I spend a lot of time in Basecamp, I wrapped it in a desktop app using Fluid. This helps a lot if you spend tons of time in it and especially if you use OpenID to connect the other 37signals apps together.

While we don’t use Basecamp for tracking time (see Freshbooks below), we do use it to keep track of all of our project milestones, deadlines, as well as creative and code materials. We don’t even really use it for communication with clients except when we’re dealing with a larger scale project. It’s mostly for internal organization in our workflow.

I tried getting more into Backpack, which I hear is great for some people, but since I use Google Calendar the subscription doesn’t really make sense for me.

Freshbooks

I’ve written about Freshbooks before and I’ll probably write about it again. It’s a great webapp and a great company. I do a lot of invoicing and a lot of time tracking for myself and my employees, contractors and vendors. Freshbooks not only makes this easy, it makes paying for it easy for my clients. That’s a great thing.

In order to track time with Freshbooks, we use a little desktop app called Timepost which I would also recommend (although it is indeed a little pricey for what it does).

Fever

This is a recent addition to my desktop. Fever is an RSS reader with a twist.

Over the years I had accumulated hundreds of RSS feed subscriptions. Keeping track of them was absolutely impossible. So basically I would just have my feed reader (NetNewsWire) open all day with the unread count climbing and climbing. I would occasionally jump in and absorb some content but eventually I would get so behind I would just mark all as read and move on.

Fever solves this by analyzing your subscriptions and generating a what’s hot list based on who is linking to what. This saves unbelievable amounts of time while still allowing me to keep updated on what’s going on in the genres of content I’m interested in.

Tweetie

I use Tweetie for iPhone and on the desktop. I’ve tested just about every single Twitter app I can find and I landed on Tweetie a few months or so ago.

It really is a smooth and elegant application—both on iPhone and Mac. It handles multiple accounts very well, as well as all the standard Twitter API features you’ve come to expect.

It’s not as crazy with features as some of the Twitter apps out there but I actually prefer that. I don’t want some insane dashboard command center. I just want a nice little window I can hide over on another monitor and have it live happily and not bother me unless I need it.