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Open Thread: What's your killer app?

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?

duus's picture

my three killer apps are: Quicksilver...

my three killer apps are:

Quicksilver and TextMate (both via this site) and !/bin/sh. that is, homemade bash scripts. i have one TM project called "morning" in which I keep my morning messages (messages I write the evening before to remind myself of what I need to do the next day) and I have a script which archives them and opens the new message in a TM project, and opens my FlexTime (10+2)*5 Hack schedule...ready to roll for the day!'

I also have a TM project for each project. It's like having a spread-out desktop for each thing I'm working on, or ever have worked on. It's awesome.

 
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