Wednesday 24 July 2013

So what do you actually use -Q2 update

Following on from my post back in April tracking what I actually use here's my quarter 2 update:

  • Dropbox – used mainly to sync files across computers irrespective of file format
  • Libre Office – platform agnostic document editor for off line writing. Often used in conjunction with Dropbox
  • Evernote – used as a notes and document management system (Nixnote is used on Linux to access my evernote files)
  • Wunderlist for 'to do' list management
  • Chrome – browser extraordinaire
  • Gmail – email solution
  • Postbox - lightweight email client for windows to cope with slow connections
  • Evolution - linux email client principly used in conjunction with Libre Office
  • Google docs – fast means to create quick and dirty documents irrespective of platform
  • Windows Live writer – offline blog post creation TextEdit – android text editor for note taking and integrates nicely with evernote and Gmail
  • Kate - my favourite editor
  • TextWrangler - my secondmost favourite editor
  • Stackedit - Google chrome markdown editor
  • Pandoc - converts markdown to a range of other formats
  • Microsoft Skydrive – used for document backup
  • Excel Web App – for these occasions when Google Spreadsheets or Libre Office Calc will not do
  • GanntProject for gannt chart generation
  • InoReader for RSS feed tracking
  • Twitter for tracking interesting things – rarely for messaging
  • Hosted Wordpress and blogger for blogging, and wikidot for creating structured web pages
  • Hojoki for tracking documents and tasks (Gives unified visibility of GoogleDocs, Skydrive, GitHub, Dropbox and Evernote)

Obviously my Chromebook is too new to have much of an impact. I was finishing off projects and doing documentation most of the last quarter so a lot of my workflows were like this

create meeting notes on seven inch tablet with Textedit as markdown document
  export note to dropbox
    finesse with Kate or TextWrangler
       feed through pandoc to create odt
          Libre Office to apply standard template and generate pdf
             export to evernote/circulate via email using evolution

I came late to Stackedit - a chrome based markdown editor - it has the advantage that one can post directly to a blog or project website and might have speeded up some of the above.

Almost all the initial note taking was on my seven inch tablet, serious report writing was either on my official work macbook or my personal windows laptop, and some of the text conversion and formatting stuff was done with my Ubuntu laptop.

Task and deadline reminders were managed with Wunderlist. At the end of it all I had three and a half weeks in Sri Lanka for which I took my Windows netbook, whiche meant the basic requirements of email and web access for things like flight confirmations.

Written with StackEdit.

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