Your favourite home-office software
16/06/2010 send to a friend
Every morning, between 11am and 12pm, we host a live chat for homeworkers on Twitter called #watercoolermoment. A couple of weeks ago, I asked about your favourite software. Here's what some of you said. You might want to Google some of the recommendations and leave some of your own in the comments below.
- Outlook for e-mail, Chrome for browsing, Tweetdeck for Twitter, Imgburn for CD writing and Notepad++ for text editing (@dpoyser)
- Favourite apps for my PC? Gotta be Tweetdeck! Customisable colours and I can keep track of my favourite trends and tweeps easily (@DigitalDoris)
- Trillian Astra for instant messaging, Microsoft Mesh for syncing my files, Avira for anti-virus and Outlook for e-mail. And favourite utilities: CCleaner and Auslogic Disk Defrag to help keep your PC running smooth and fast (@Printfetti)
- I like Grab, small but perfectly formed. And it's only a small one, but I really like Image Capture. No mucking around, just does the job nicely! (@shedworking)
- I'm liking Google Reader at the moment - I can view all of the blogs and websites I follow as well as Twitter searches, all in one place (@JANMINIHANE)
- Mac: Photoshop Elements, Spotify. Cloud: Hootsuite, WordPress. iPhone: Tweetie, FourSquare (@EmilyCagle)
- Winamp for all things music, including managing my iPod. It's great - and not iTunes (@shortcouture)
What would you recommend?
Tell us about the software you use in your home office and the apps you'd recommend to other homeworkers in the comments below.
San Sharma
San is community manager at Enterprise Nation, as well as the voice of @e_nation on Twitter.
Photo credit: blair_25
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Comments
Author: Mrs Green @ littlegreenblog
Date: 15/06/2010
Comment: Great post with some ideas I'd not heard of, so thanks to your readers for the inspiration!
One of my favourites is the immensely simple "Teux Deux". I'm a lists gal, and this is list heaven without feeling guilty about wasting paper.
I also like Backpack which takes the panic off wondering if I've backed things up or not.
I like Chrome or Firefox for browsing and zoho for everything from email to spread sheets.
I can't stand tweetdeck - that constant peeping in the background decreases my productivity, because I keep popping back to check! I now use Twitscoop which I really like.
Website: http://littlegreenblog.com
Author: Caroline Jones
Date: 16/06/2010
Comment: Great post San - I can't resist trying these out. Already got sorted with Teux Deux is really good (Thank you Mrs Green!).
I like Google Alerts because it searches out everything I to find without me lifting a finger, Google mail, Jing is a great screenshot tool, Skype is fab. I could go on..
There's no real need these days to pay for software!
Website: www.wrappedinyourownwords.com
Author: Colin Shelbourn
Date: 16/06/2010
Comment: Bean is a great little text editor for the Mac. It has a live word count at the foot of the window and, glory be, it will go into full screen mode so all you see is text and no distractions. (www.bean-osx.com)
I'm also enjoying the new Reader view on Safari 5.0, which turns websites into easily-read, single column text, mimicking the page of a book.
Website: www.shelbourn.com
Author: Catherine Warrilow
Date: 16/06/2010
Comment: I really like Time Tracker a free piece of desktop software to log hours against clients/projects.
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Website: www.publicityoxford.com
Author: Paul Tansom
Date: 16/06/2010
Comment: I could get carried away with a topic like this, but to be brief; Twitter wise I use Twhirl, although favourite is an over statement, it's just the only Windows client that I like that supports Identica too. I'd prefer to be using Gwibber, but that's a Linux only application. Of course Linux would likely be high on the list as it makes me much more productive than the restrictions of Windows. Office wise it is OpenOffice, with Firefox and Thunderbird for web and mail (although I usually use Mutt for mail over SSH using PuTTY - that's techie though!). Personally I can't stand Office or, worse still, Outlook. For IM I use Pidgin which handles all networks together (or Empathy on Linux). My guilty secret on Windows is using PagePlus and PhotoPlus for DTP and graphics instead of Scribus and Gimp (although that may change soon). Unison handles Windows client backups.
Website: http://www.linuxlore.co.uk/
Author: Rob Scott
Date: 16/06/2010
Comment: I use Firefox for the internet, Thunderbird for e-mail, OpenOffice for spreadsheets/word documents and AVG for virus scanning. All are free and superb, why pay lots of money to Microsoft when you can have applications that do the same thing (often better) for free!
Website: www.rsbookkeeping.co.uk