Software We Use
by Andrew CrowAs the year comes to a close, the web becomes filled with lists – Top 10-this, Top 100-that. I love these lists and wanted to throw one into the mix. Below is a list of software and web services that we use here at Adaptive Path. If you haven’t made use of these, take a peek:
Software
Adobe InDesign – All our proposals, project narratives and a good chunk of our deliverables are done in InDesign. It’s an amazing page layout tool that allows you to assemble all your models, charts, visual designs and wireframes into consistently designed deliverables for your clients.
Adobe Illustrator – Many of us use Illustrator for drawing models, graphs, wireframes and design comps.
Adobe Photoshop – We honestly don’t use Photoshop to any large degree. But for tweaking images, cropping, minor editing, etc., you can’t find a better tool.
Adobe Acrobat Professional – PDFs are our deliverable blood. So, making the most of Acrobat is important. Often, we’ll use the sticky note features to provide feedback on designs or ideas. We’ll convert our presentations to PDF for release to the public after events as well.
Adobe Flash – We use Flash for creating prototypes of interfaces and applications. Thermo looks promising for this, but we’ll have to wait.
Keynote – One of our most favorite applications. Keynote is not only used for our presentations for events, but also for deliverables to clients. When you absolutely need a fast, powerful and simple application to convey your ideas, Keynote is the one.
OmniGraffle – Graffle is a great tool for creating wireframes and other diagrams. It’s faster to get started in Graffle than Illustrator sometimes and it’s made for wireframes. Many of us use this on every project.
OmniOutliner – Another fine tool, especially for taking notes that later need to be translated into a presentation, narration or deliverable.
Coda – This is a great little app for code editing and FTP services. The guys at Panic make awesome software.
SubEthaEdit – We use this during client meetings and sales calls. The Bonjour enabled document editing makes it so easy for all of us to take notes on one page. This saves time combining notes later and allows us to make corrections on the fly.
Microsoft Office – We use this a lot less than we did a year ago. We’ve stopped using Word for our proposals and communication. But we still use Excel for accounting purposes.
OS X – Of course, we’re a Mac house, so OS X is our most favorite “app” of all!
Web Services
Twitter – Twitter is great service that allow us to maintain connections with each other and with the community. Not only do most of us have our own accounts, Adaptive Path has an account where people could follow our office antics.
AIM – Instant messaging is still king for instant fast communication. Since we’ve grown to use two floors in our building, we rely on AIM for quick intra-office check-ins.
Harvest – Rather than doing traditional punch-in timecards, or submitting our project hours via email, we’ve switched to Harvest. It’s a great online service that makes it easy for the practitioners and the project managers.
Basecamp – Couldn’t run projects as effectively without it. Though it’s basic in many respects, it does 80% of what we need and our clients love the ability to communicate with us in such a simple and direct manner.
Wordpress – Our blog is powered by Wordpress and we’re happy with it’s ease of use, configurability and industrial strength.
MediaWiki – Instead of an intranet, we maintain a wiki. All the office and personnel stuff goes here. Everyone can edit it and we use it daily.
We’ve also experimented with using Google Docs and Spreadsheets with clients. We’ve tried countless online file storage delivery services. Most of us are on LinkedIn and Flickr.
Software and web services are crucial to doing our jobs, but face-to-face interaction and clear communication skills are the best tools you can have in your arsenal.
December 6th, 2007 at 2:41 am
I wonder if you guys use any kind of mindmapping tools (other than OmniGraffle, which mindmap mode is no real match to dedicated mindmap software).
During my last projects, I found mindmaps extremly helpful to structure the tasks ahead, used it as an outline tool for documents we had to produce and to quickly whip up a sitemap.
Currently I work in a project which members work in three different locations, we used a mindmap in our last meeting to structure, annotate and prioritize the project ahead and we share the mindmap via mindmeister.com – an online colloborative mindmap tool, which lets you im- and export mindmaps to freemind and mindjet. I personally use the latter on my mac but can also recommendate novamind, althoug the new versions are too slow to run un old PPC hardware.
December 7th, 2007 at 7:42 am
I use many of those tools too. As for web-servises I prefer Wrike to Basecamp. Just seems to be more agile and brings more value through the email integration feature.
December 11th, 2007 at 12:27 am
Thanks Mary. I briefly looked into Wrike and it felt a little too much like Microsoft Sharepoint to me. I have strong feelings about managing projects through email. But, that being said, I’ve not used it so I cannot speak to it’s effectiveness. You’re not the only one who has suggested it to me.
There are other alternatives to Basecamp, as well. ActiveCollab has recently reached a point where it’s now a hosted (and paid for) service. And certainly our friends at GoPlan offer a great service.
December 11th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Henning, we’ve not gone hi-tech in the mind-mapping area. We still do it all on whiteboards and take photos of them to share. It’s not as efficient as some of the services you mention. But, it’s rare that our teams are split up to a point where they need a multi-location mind-mapping capability.
That may change in the future, so we’ll undoubtedly be investigating the options available.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:14 am
I can’t believe Visio is not on here. Someday I’m going to write a loooong post about Visio’s awesomeness. Until then, you can read about some of its powers in Dan Brown’s special deliverables articles, like http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/toggling_shapes_in_visio_special_deliverable_12
December 17th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
We use Mind Mapping at Objective all the time. I now have a Mac version of Mind Manager 7. Works really well! For sharing we have used Mindmeister. It is great, better than Comaping for creative stuff.
Yesterday I did a mind map with a client (qho has v. limited budget) about her IA. It was so amazing how many ideas we came up with and how quickly we broke all the concepts down into sensible groups and rearranged all the second level topics. Super fast!
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Great list, though I have to say that I love Photoshop and find myself firing it up several times every day.
It’s great for doctoring screenshots to show how something might be improved or just to make a point. We’ve also used it extensively on projects where it was important to do a sanity check on sizing — basically to make sure that what we were designing was actually doable with the amount of pixels we had available.
January 31st, 2008 at 7:25 am
Thanks for sharing! I went back to list today in trying to find out what you’re using for sharing desktops internally and with clients? Apps like ichat are great but not between mac/xp/vista. Have you any preference for an app or webservice like yugma.com or vyew.com?
February 25th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Great list, we tend to use tjooze.com also for making simple choices like “what presents do we buy for customers” this year
March 9th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Thanks for a clear honest listing of software and web tools. If you do your own web promotion I have a few goodies for you. GD.Australia
April 20th, 2008 at 11:32 am
I’m not much of a Word user these days either but I do like the combination of Excel and Outlook. I have been using this combination to help me with managing projects that tend to be somewhat cookie cutter. You can throw a few macros and VB scripts into Excel that can help you create email and tasks in Outlook to keep things scheduled and on track.
Excel and Outlook – two tools that I can’t live without!