Tool Changes

I’ve been mixing up my work environment in the past few weeks, standardizing on some newer applications. Here’s the short list of apps that I’ve started using recently:

Star – puts an icon on your menubar that lets you set the star rating of each song you play through iTunes. Useful.

MenuShade – makes the Mac OS X menubar dim when it isn’t active. Not really useful, but a neat effect.

kGTD – An automated way to use the Getting Things Done system for organizing tasks. Syncs with iCal. Useful.

TextMate – A really nice, deep programmers editor. It’s really nice, and has triggers for text – I set up a few so that I can type out part of an HTML tag, and it completes it for me. Very useful.

Subversion- a file revision control system. The website project I’m working on for Access Tucson has been going much faster after I started using this. It allows me to run identical copies of the website on my laptop and the server, make changes on both sets of files, and then recombine, reconcile, and possibly rollback the changes. I also spend much less time moving files around, and versioning is automatic.