What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC)
It's all about the web apps these days, right? Everything important's in the clouds? Not so fast! Spend some time separated from your physical computer and you'll likely be reminded just how much time and care you've put into setting it up like you want it. Even in this era of web app hype, we still love a good piece of desktop software, don't we?
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we'll be honest with you - we love our computers. Not just the web. In that spirit we thought we'd offer readers some short video tours of the apps we use every day. You may discover some things you want to try out for yourself.
Marshall's Macbook Pro
I recently got my baby back from the Mac shop and am so thankful! We kept these tours of our computers under five minutes, so they move pretty fast and don't include everything. Following this video is a list of links to the apps discussed, followed by a video of Sarah Perez's Windows computer.
Click these images to open the 5 minute videos full size in a new browser window.
Apps Discussed
JingProject Related: Screencasts Rock: Here's Who's Rocking Them Now
FFFFound See also: 3 Cool Sites to Bookmark Your Favorite Images on the Web
Iterasi See our latest write up
Agglom See our review
URLBarExt See our review
StumbleUpon Check out our latest coverage
Greasemonkey See also start using greasemonkey in 5 minutes
GreasedLightbox
HeadUp See our review
Smultron
FluidApp Marvel at an awesome use case
AirFoil
Snackr Here's our review
Skitch Here's every time we've mentioned Skitch here
Adium Our latest coverage
Yuuguu Our Yuuguu mentions
Screenflow
Screensteps Here's our review
CamTwist
JungleDisk
Tweetdeck
Songbird
Automator - Comes with your Mac, I'd never learned to use it until just a few weeks ago and it is awesome! I ran out of time to describe it in this video but I'll include a screenshot of one of its functions below just to give you an idea what it does and how easy it is.
Multiclutch - didn't get a chance to describe this, but if you have a Macbook Pro, just go try it! It's awesome!
Below: the Automator
Sarah's PC
Sarah Perez says of her Windows machine: "It's a pink Dell. I love pink. I know, I know...I'm such a cliche! I'm dying to replace it with a netbook that fits in my purse." Her computer is almost entirely unlike mine. I thought it was a lot of fun to see!
Again, click on the image below for a full screen video and check out the links below.
Software Discussed
Firefox
Twhirl
Windows Live Writer (Windows Live Download)
Skype
iTunes
FileZilla
Google Chrome (for Google Calendar) See our coverage
RocketDock
Tumbleweed See 10 Adobe AIR Apps Bloggers Will Love
Digsby All our mentions of Digsby
Snackr
TweetDeck
Pando
Doomi See 6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out
TrayEverything
Live Mesh See our review
What About You?
Are we missing out on anything that we really should try? Have you got a screencast of your computer laying around someplace? :) Let us know in comments and we can all learn from each others' computing experiences. We love web apps, but you still need a computer to use them!
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Nicely done, great resource. Here's mine on Feedly, the Firefox extension that turns your gReader into a social experience. http://tinyurl.com/6lkepn
IE8 - Love the Web Slices and actvities.
Microsoft Office Outlook for Calendar and Email
Microsoft Office Communicator
Microsoft Live Meeting
Marshall, you wouldn't happen to still have to URL to that desktop image would you? pretty please?
Here's my desktop screen cast:
http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/salesguy.html
P.S. I thought this "Here's our desk tops and the software we use" post was really good. Have everyone at RWW do the same thing. Screencasts make me ( the reader ) feel more connected to you guys ( the writers).
P.S.S. Doesn't anyone use Linux at RWW?!?!?
Thanks Marshall for sharing.
1. Appfresh www.metaquark.de/appfresh
This is one app I have wanted for years. It searches my hard drive and then lets me know if there is a new version and can automatically update my mac if I let it. It was what Wakoopa should have been.
2. Evernote which works on my Mac and iPhone
3. Photobook - Facebook Album browser for mac - http://www.caffeinatedcocoa.com/photobook/index.html
4. AppCleaner
This little app allows you to not only delete the all you want but also the secondary files related to the app.
5. Safari BookMark Checker
http://www.coriolis.ch/
Like Appfresh, this little utility checks my bookmarks in Safari to see which ones are still active.
6. MonoLingual
Not sure if this is on the standard build of leopard or a download as I have had it for so long. I saves a great deal of harddisk space by deleting the non-english version of apps on my harddisk.
I would love a similar post covering what plugins you have loaded in your browser.
heres a screencast of my PC. rockin RocketDock/Emerge Desktop & Samurize
http://www.realgt.com/2008/10/Free-Software-to-Pimp-out-your-Desktop-Windows
These were great. I'm currently just a Windows user (the Mac arrives next week, Yay!) and I have a couple of suggestions.
Evernote is a great note taking app that has built in OCR. The OCR isn't 100% but it's pretty impressive for a free product. You can easily add different image files types (even PDFs) and have them be searchable from a variety of locations and devices. http://www.evernote.com/
You both need to get yourselves some icon love for your SSBs. http://www.iconspedia.com/
Totally cool to see how you set up your 'puters!!
I could tour other people's desktops all day and not get tired of it. I am impressed that you guys are willing to share what some would consider "trade secrets" with all of us. What a wonderful opportunity to see how professional bloggers use these different apps to create their own workflow.
One of my favorite posts ever.
PS- My computer and desktop are so crazy, I should do a screencast to prove that it's even possible for a 6 year-old Dell laptop to do what it does. Seroiusly. I run Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash at the same time and have at least two browser windows open with dozens of tabs each!
@Todd - I run Linux on my laptop - been a happy Linux user ever since I bought my first SuSE distribution sometime in the late nineties. I mostly use Vista on my home-built desktop machine, though.
I just wrote about my Mac Apps here: http://blogs.sixninjas.com/mitul69/2008/10/14/me-my-mac-and-i/
I'll definitely be checking some of the ones that Marshall mentioned
@relagt: totally great demo! It was cool to see Emerge in action...I thought about using that but wasn't sure if I would like it.
Wow so many useful tools all in one post. This will keep me busy for a while.
Thanks for sharing this.
I see cruz has been released now, last time i checked it was still "to be released"
I'm slightly disappointed to see that RWW does not use Linux even though the usage of open source software is existent.
i use windows xp professional with sp2
windows live writter
MS office
Adobe Photoshop (some times)