As 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.
Share This
Dolores Blog showed thousands of colors to people and asked them to name the colors they saw. They then plotted those names on a color Wheel, printed in the color. They have a blog post describing the project. The resulting image is beautiful. They then added a filter so you can search for different color names and see where it is on the wheel. It’s based on a study to test the universality of language. 
Entries(RSS)