Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just made it all the more useful and a large part of my day is spent within the browser.

Google Mail/Calendar/Reader

Here’s the first casualty of 2010 – Google Reader. I can date the day that I stopped using Google Reader to the day that Pulse for iPad was released. All my mail is delivered to one of two Google Mail accounts – either Gmail for home or Google Apps for work, and then pushed out to my iPhone with no fuss. Love it because it simply works.

Remember the Milk

According to Remember the Milk I completed 3,523 tasks with the service in 2010. I think that speaks volumes of how valuable it has become to me. I am often to be seen sat with my iPhone in hand tapping out a quick thought task into RTM. Only gripes are that 1. there isn’t a dedicated iPad application, although one has been promised and 2. I cannot sync my tasks with any third party apps. Come on guys, no one likes a closed platform.

Evernote

Another absolutely essential application. Evernote now has literally everything fed into it as I have gone completely paperless. I scan all paper documentation into Evernote and then can quickly search for it when it is needed. Both the Mac and Windows applications have been updated this year to be faster and more usable.

iPhone/iPad

When I first heard about the iPad I dismissed it as just a large iPhone – how wrong could I be? My iPad has transformed how I consume information, particularly news feeds and magazines. My main way of accessing both RSS feeds and twitter is the iPad – I love the ease with which the information is made available.

This has meant that I have used my iPhone less as the screen is just too small for some things, such as accessing the web.

Unfuddle

Unfuddle continues to be my primary work application. Using the web based service to record all enhancements and bugs in our product. It hasn’t changed all that much in the last 12 months but does now have the obligatory iPhone app.

Zumodrive/Dropbox/iFolder

Zumodrive is one of those applications that could easily be forgotten about it is so tightly integrated into the operating system that you might be forgiven for thinking it was part of Windows/OSX. It has become something that I am using all day everyday and would be lost without it now which is why I read with trepidation recently that Zector had be acquired by Motorola. I hope that they remain true to their word and the service stays as it is.

While I still use Dropbox it is not as key as it once was, particularly as it now is being replaced at work with iFolder where we get more control for free.

Skype

When Skype went down earlier this year it was a big deal for our business as this is the primary means of communications between us and our developers who are off shore. It really hampered out progress while it was down which is a testimony to Skype’s importance and the need to ensure that you have a contingency in place for when something like this happens.

Sony Reader

I read more books in 2010 that I have in any other year of my adult life and the Sony Reader is the reason why. Its compact design, clear screen and ability to hod more books than I would likely read in a lifetime make it great. It’s not without its problems and the price of ebooks and availability is just shocking but nevertheless it means I can and do read more than I did before.

Why don’t I read ebooks on my iPad? Simple the size and brightness of the screen is just makes it a tiring experience.

MacBook Air

A couple of years ago you would have been hard pressed to find an Apple product in our house, these days it’s hard to find a Windows machine. Apple’s build quality is just stunning and justifies, in my opinion, the premium you pay – and the MacBook Air is a premium product. Its size and its weight make it the machine to slip into a case and carry with me everywhere and it is instant on, perfect for meetings and quick presentations.

I am less bought in to OSX and think that Windows 7 has the measure of it.

WunderRadio/Subsonic

Subsonic is just brilliant and is not pretty much the only way that I now listen to music. Whether it is on a computer or portable device I can have my whole music collection available and queued up. WunderRadio does the same for me only for listening to music.

DOA

So that’s the list. But what about those that have dropped off the radar? Well the move to Mac has made me rethink how I blog and having been a staunch follower of Windows Live Writer I have now ditched it in favour of either Wordpress itself or Blogpress on the the iPad. Also gone is the Netbook the MacBook Air has seen that off pretty effectively.

That’s my list for 2010 – what have you found to be invaluable?

Now Google has struck back even allowing you to use your own pictures as the backdrop and the results can be similarly stunning – providing you have the picture to use. To add you own picture click the “Curious about today’s homepage? Add your own background image now” and select your own picture from your hard drive or Picasa. Couldn’t be simpler than that.

The picture left is of the Cape Otway Lighthouse on the Great Ocean Road in Australia and suits a Google search backdrop perfectly.

Firstly the good stuff. Gmail now allows you to drag and drop files to be attached – a real time saver. You simply drag the file over the attachment area and drop – job done. It works well on both Windows and Mac with Chrome. The second change in Gmail is the ability to add a calendar invitation into an email. Again a great improvement.

The other major changes have come in Google Docs where a new drawing app has been added and the engine that drives the applications has been re-written to make the applications faster. There have also been some interface improvements in the apps. In my limited tests there has been a noticeable increase in  the responsiveness of the applications, which is great.

Both Docs and Mail are more and more becoming really usable business applications and I can fast see the day when I wave goodbye to Microsoft Office. However, there are two things that are preventing me from doing that today. The first is the ability to be able to “attach” a document. I use a number of web-based services that allow me to associate a document, such as with a support ticket. I want it to be as easy to do this with a Google Doc as it is for any other document. The second issue is that of offline support. I travel and there are times when I have no connectivity. I don’t like it but it is a fact of life. Google Docs has offline support via Gears (at least it does if you are not running Mac Snow Leopard) but support for this is being removed shortly.

There is the promise of this reappearing natively in the browser at some unspecified point in the future – but at present there is no given date for when. Unfortunately until that has been re-introduced and it works on Snow Leopard Google Docs is still incomplete for me.

You can quite clearly see that I am holding a cup of tea but it also looks like I have positioned it to protect my genitals! Maybe I misunderstood those articles about Google taking your privacy and thought they meant privates!

One of my clients is going through a website refresh and was looking to put some screenshots on the home page but they wanted them to appear to be disappearing into the distance, rather like that shown in the picture to the left.

No problem I thought. I know how to rotate an image around the x & y axis so this is just rotating around the z axis, this must be possible and a quick Google would turn up the answer. Many searches later and I was till none the wiser. No amount of “3d rotate image” type searches turned up anything like what I was looking for.

Frustrated I resorted to phoning a friend who immediately said you can do that in Photoshop with the “perspective” tool. Bingo! Another search showed that not only could this be done in Photoshop (which I don’t have) but also can be done in GIMP and Paint Shop Pro. In fact, not only can it be done in Paint Shop Pro it has been there since at least version 5 which is over ten years old now.

So the moral of this story is that it is all very well having the worlds information at hand just a simple search away but if you don’t know how to describe what it is that you are looking for in a way that a machine can understand then you are lost.

I suspect that just as new forms of searching are emerging, such as searching by images, techniques will be developed to better understand the input that we enter and allow searchers to find what they are looking for when they don’t know what to call it.

I watched the introductory video of some mad Australian in a lab coat explaining what each area of the screen does and then decided that Wave is a lonely experience right now.

So I put out a message on Twitter to see who might want one of precious eight invitations (currently fetching $80 upwards on eBay) and I await the results.

With a bit of luck I will end up with eight new friends and a better understanding of exactly Wave does and how it is going to revolutionise my world. Until then I’ll stick to Gmail.

Already in Wave? Drop me an message to connect and help me discover what it is all about.