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Open Thread: What's your killer app?
Merlin Mann | Aug 21 2006
The other day I was talking with someone about the novel and non-obvious ways that people use Excel in their work and home life. Gotta say, I've personally seen some pretty amazing stuff happen when people take a favorite app, get really good at it, then bend it to their will. (And Excel is perfect for this.) This tracks to Danny's Life Hack concept by which the alpha geeks were achieving lofty heights of productivity partly by mastering 1-3 "killer apps" -- then using them to solve most of their information and functional problems in fairly novel ways. So my question for you: What's your killer app? Is there one place where 80% or more of your activity takes place (by choice)? Vim? Excel? Perl? Firefox? Post-it Notes? What's yours and when did you realize you'd become a badass at using it? 106 Comments
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 The following cluster of apps/scripts...Submitted by nic (not verified) on August 21, 2006 - 3:43pm.
The following cluster of apps/scripts has just hit the high note for me. Mail +Mail Tags +Mail Act On +send to kGTD Advanced +OOP/kGTD +iCal +Address Book +VoodooPad It took me a while to get my head around the integration of them all into my processes but it's humming right now. Anything I throw at it works a treat; shopping lists, project tasks, calendar events, brainstorming, proposal writing, list making, reminders & alerts [sent to & from my Nokia 6600 via iCal & iSync]... I've yet to find a task that i do regularly that isn't made more efficient by these tools. I've only just got into VoodooPad but it is truly a fantastic piece of software. Its intuitive nature and quickness makes it an auto start app for me. I can see that in a short while VP will be my killer app. Others that are essential in my day to day work as a director of a design studio - Excel [for managing money/time] - Illustrator/InDesign [for typographic goodness] - BaseCamp [for managing a team and keeping clients up to date] - Firefox [for wasting the time that I save :] » POSTED IN:
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