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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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 Launcher Bar - I'll echo...Submitted by Charles (not verified) on August 22, 2006 - 7:27am.
Launcher Bar - I'll echo some other people's comments, but quicksilver just doesn't do it for me. It's slow and I hate the fact I need to set up triggers (or search contents of) to find things. Working with iTunes through quicksilver is such a mess compared to launchbar. Devonthink Pro - I use this to store articles, class notes, project information, random notes, translation notes, todos, meeting notes, presentations and everything else. Features like auto classification, wiki style links, importing via the print menu and services, see also just make finding and searching my information so easy and I don't have to spend a lot of time organizing it. Backpack - I'll admit I don't use nearly all the functionality of backpack, but the reminders are worth every penny. 30 boxes, gcal just don't compare. Their calendar isn't bad and I'm using their pages functionality more and more to keep track of information that I need when I don't have devonthink. Vim & Textmate get a lot of use, NetNewsWire, iTunes, Proteus (I hate the email reminders in Adium that were added a while back) » POSTED IN:
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