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TOP TOOLS 2007 & 2008
David Jennings
David has been an independent
consultant in e-learning and user experience design for
15 years, working for clients including learndirct,
Trades Union Congress and the British Standards
Institute. His company is called DJ Alchemi Ltd.
David's book "Net,
Blogs and Rock'n'Roll: How Digital Discovery Works
and What it Means for Consumers, Creators and Culture"
will be published in September.
David's
Top 10 Tools as at 3 March 2008 and
30 July 2007
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Eudora -
I've
been using Eudora since 1995. Since then I've kept
just about all of my incoming messages (apart from
spam and junk obviously) and all my outgoing
messages in thousands of searchable folders. Eudora
is now going open source. Better mail applications
may now exist, but I've got quite a lot invested in
Eudora
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Furl
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Similarly I've now got 3,000 web
pages bookmarked and annotated in my archive on
Furl. I chose it over del.icio.us because Furl saves copies of the pages,
so that if they later disappear from the web you can
still refer back to what you originally saw.
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Facebook
-
The thing I like about Facebook is the way it enables my friends and
I non-intrusively to monitor each other's
discoveries, group affiliations and connections --
and to follow up on those that seem most relevant.
More applications should incorporate this ambient
social awareness.
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Last.fm
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Billed as
the 'social music revolution', I mostly use last.fm for
designing a range of my
own personal listening
experiences that combine
familiar and unfamiliar
music on specific
themes. Then I can
share them with you:
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Safari -
The biggest asset of this web browser
for me is the integrated reading of RSS feeds: I can see in the
bookmarks bar as soon as I open the application how
many new articles are waiting for me in each of
several categories I've created.
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Yahoo Pipes
-
I'm sure there is much more I could
do with Yahoo Pipes after I get round to reading the
User Guide I've got (!), but for now I'm just using
the basic functionality to combine, republish and
share RSS
feeds for use by me and others.
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Wikipedia
-
You know a tool is close to essential
when you find that, even in those precious offline
moments, you wish you had access to it. I find
myself making mental notes to myself: "must remember
to look that up on Wikipedia later"
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Palm -
I have a need for a genuinely
pocket-sized device with a good enough interface to
write rapid notes and then sync with a computer. I
got a Psion 3 in 1992, and assumed devices would get
rapidly better from then on. I've been disappointed.
Until then I'll stick with 4.5-year-old
Palm m515,
which does the job adequately.
-
Oblique Strategies OSX widget and/or
pack of cards. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created Oblique
Strategies as a pack of over 100 cards, each
carrying a sentence or two of 'oblique' advice. If you're stuck with something you're writing or
responding to, pick a card at random, and follow the
advice -- like a practical, secular version of the
I-Ching. I've had a hard-copy pack for 15 years and
keep them on my physical desktop, but now also have
the free version for Mac OSX.
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Mozy -
I'm not sure if back-up counts as a
learning tool, but without it I could end up
forgetting a lot. I've only just discovered this,
and the Mac version is still in Beta, but it seems
to offer a very low-hassle way of doing regular
backups, with unlimited storage for $4.95 a month,
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