The four free web applications I can’t live without are Jing, PicniK, Firefox3 Addons and Google Reader
I wrote a post when I first discovered Jing and I’ve come to rely on it for tasks I’m sure the developer never thought of. I save account and password information using Jing. It’s so easy that it’s the fastest method for me to capture account and password information. I also use Roboform and sometimes allow firefox to store the password information.
I’m also creating a screen shot of receipts for online purchases. (I can hear my bookkeeper clapping in the background) My scheme for moving receipts to a separate folder in Outlook was less than successful and I’m not going to kill trees printing anything I don’t have to. Now I have the information is at least three place .. ready for tax time next year!
I’ve taken Gillian’s advice and set up a series of folders in My Documents (no more than three deep, my brain hurts after that).
Vista’s Live Search makes it painless for me to find files, so I find myself using he desktop less and less. I still use it for documents I’m working on right now and for temporary files. At the end of the day, I review what’s on my desktop and clean up.
This utility may not put Photoshop out of business, but it is a free, easy-to-use application that saves me a lot of time editing and resizing graphics. All the social networking sites encourage you to post a photo and the one you have is HUGE and resizing it is a pain. One simple step using picniK .. whoever wrote this app, you are my hero! You can add text, arrows and other graphics. It’s also great for creating handouts for training sessions. I have two graphics programs on my system and use this free utility more and more.
Don’t even tell me you haven’t switched to Firefox yet. There’s no excuse .. after about a week (to get used to all the bells and whistles) you will never go back to IE .. trust me on this one …
- Cooliris – “Just mouse over any link, and the Cooliris preview window immediately appears to show you the content. To email it, just click.” This addon finds links I never noticed before. It saves a lot of time, because you don’t have to open the link in a new window.
- Delicious bookmarks - the Firefox “awesome bar” is .. but sometimes it gives me too much information. I remembers everywhere I’ve been .. sometimes I just don’t care! I’m still using delicious (used to be called del.ici.ous)
- McAfee Site Advisor – I still use this utility even though Firefox3 has amazing security measures built in.
- Fission – okay, it’s just something to distract you while you’re waiting for a slow site to load.
- Better GMail2 – tarts up GMail’s utilitarian look. It’s easier to use GMail with these skins, so saves time.
Google Reader – the granddaddy or RSS feed readers. Ed Dale created a great video with tips to use Google Reader. I’ve been using this process for over a month and it works. I follow too many blogs to read every new post, but this scheme allows me to stay current and to return to some favorites when time allows.
What’s on your list of must-have Web applications? What Firefox addons do you use?
[...] Reading these bloggers a couple of times a week will give you a model for successful blogging. (see my post with a link to using Google Reader [...]