TOP 10 TOOLS 2008 & 2009
Nicola Avery

I work at the University of Surrey, advising on adoption of emerging technologies within learning. www.friendfeed.com/nicolaavery and  http://www.linkedin.com/in/navery

Nicola's Top 10 (Mobile) Tools as at 1 April 2009

1. Notepad / Notepad++ notes and writing / copying / pasting web coding

2. Screenshot - taking still screenshots from a s60 phone, using one of the phone cameras - I use it to show shots for experimenting and for showing how to do things

3. Find.mobi - brilliant mobile search e.g. enter any flight number in the search box and it will ping back the current flight status. Provides web and mobile web-friendly page searches.

4. Skype - chat and meetings

5. Nokia Maps / Google Mobile maps - steering myself around places

6. Zpen - note taking in meetings, scribbling random thoughts - works on any paper in theory - I've tried a few but mostly regular paper so far.

7. Friendfeed / Delicious - bookmarking and sharing bookmarks

8. Adobe mobile pdf reader - mostly using for work files and articles I've bookmarked on del.icio.us which can be read on the go.

9. Right-click and Open New Tab - save thousands of hours a year doing this !

10. OperaMini browser - free download and works on loads of phones/devices - I use it as a backup for any browsers I have on an older phone which for whatever reason may format pages strangely (hasn't happened with webkit but earlier browsers on older phones).

Nicola's Top 10 (Mobile) Tools as at 2 August 2008

1. Utterz - voice blogging on the go with publishing options on the spot.

2. Screenshot - taking still screenshots from a s60 phone, using one of the phone cameras - I use it to show shots for experimenting and for showing how to do things

3. Find.mobi - brilliant mobile search e.g. enter any flight number in the search box and it will ping back the current flight status. Provides web and mobile web-friendly page searches.

4. Mobile flickr - upload photos quickly

5. Nokia Maps / Google Mobile maps - steering myself around places (I like both equally at the moment).

6. Fring - Skype,AIM,GoogleTalk,MSN,SIP - see contacts all in one place and who is online, with options to chat/call/send files

7. Nokia mobile Web Server & extensions - starting to play with but finding useful, can blog, upload, IM, chat and manage a mobile site from the phone (have to pay data fees for transfer, according to your operator package).

8. Adobe mobile pdf reader - mostly using for work files and articles I've bookmarked on del.icio.us which can be read on the go.

9. Mobiseer - mobile bookmarking, tagging, sharing pages (I would prefer to use mobilicious but that is not looking too hopeful at the moment in terms of developing it for further use)

10. OperaMini browser - free download and works on loads of phones/devices - I use it as a backup for any browsers I have on an older phone which for whatever reason may format pages strangely (hasn't happened with webkit but earlier browsers on older phones).

Nicola's Top 10 Tools as at 28 January 2008

1. Notepad - any time needing to cut and paste particularly into web pages also I handwrite my html code with it all the time.

2. Pageflakes - my newspaper on the world, finding updated information via RSS

3. Searchcrystal for attractiveness and finding stuff

4. Yahoo Answers - not really a tool but use regularly to get quick answers to anything

5. del.icio.us for accessing my bookmarks, just discovering networking features at the moment

6. Babelfish - for quick translations, to get a general idea of meaning

7. WinAvi / DivX / QuickTime Pro for playing around with video and conversion to podcast friendly formats

8. Paint.net - when don't have access to Fireworks or Photoshop, easy to use and quick to convert for decent graphics

9. PDF995 - for quick PDF conversion, more functionality than CutePDF

10. iGoogle - not really a tool but quick access to Google Talk, docs, mail, calendar etc