Whisper (three) Sweet Nerd Things in my Ear
[by Colleen Wainwright]
I’m not sure how I got anything done before computers, but I’m sure it involved a lot of sweat, confusion, and long walks to school five miles each way in the snow. Now that I’m a full-on digital junkie, here are three of my go-to resources for making life easier at the keyboard.
Skitch is a robust screenshot tool that lets you easily mark up, resize and crop screen captures without having to drag them into Photoshop or what have you, and export them as JPGs and PNGs (in the free version) or up to 8 file types (in the paid version, which includes a number of other upgraded features). Yes, screencap functionality comes baked into the Mac OS for free, but trust me, once you’ve enjoyed the flexibility and ease of Skitch, you’ll remap your <command-shift-4> combo to something more useful, like making microwave popcorn. (It’s 2011 — can’t we do that yet?) Free, ad-supported version or $19.99 in the AppStore.
Rapportive is a gmail plugin useful enough to entice the staunchest Mail.app user into switching. Once installed, Rapportive gives you a snapshot overview of every sender by pulling publicly available information from their social media profiles — LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, plus there are add-ons called “rapplets” that bring even more functionality (Klout scores, MailChimp integration). It also lists recent emails from senders, and includes a field to add your own, private notes on them. But by far my favorite thing about Rapportive is the little photo it displays of any sender, regardless of whether they’re in your address book or not. So nice for putting faces to names, and vice-versa. Genius, and FREE!
TextExpander is one of those “D’oh!”-so-simple tools you wonder how you ever lived without once you’ve lived with it for even a short while. A deceptively powerful piece of software, TextExpander lets you create customized shortcuts for frequently-used strings of text — directions, email signatures, timecode logging — or even images. It is, bar none, the most-used program on my Mac because it works in all the programs on my Mac — so far, it’s saved me a whopping 8.24 hours! Full disclosure: I now do consulting work for Smile, the parent of TextExpander. But my love (and shilling) for the product pre-dates my official relationship by a good four years, as shown by this prehistoric documentation. TextExpander is $35, with a 30-day free demo period.
Colleen Wainwright shares her favorite nerdy resources at every opportunity, including her free monthly newsletter and her modestly-priced talk on marketing in the postmodern age, both of which are liberally peppered with them.
