The Tools of My Trade

I'm going to be blogging from the festival this year, and to facilitate this (as well as general productivity) I have borrowed a netbook from my dad, hip techno-geek that he is...being restricted to occasional laptop access last year was less than ideal.


In preparation for this I have been readying my suite of software and services to make the netbook as useful as possible. This is what I plan to use:

• Evernote - Desktop Client for Windows

Evernote is a dream, I used it earlier this year to keep a production diary on the Storyland project I was producing. The notes are geotagged and the free clients for PC, Mac, Web, Phone & iPhone make it cabaple of ubiquity. The premise of the software as a service is that it's designed to externalise your brain. It's extremely useful as a research tool as well as a tool for diary-keeping, note-taking and blog-drafting. I plan to use it to collect thoughts, pics, web clips and voice notes to enrich this blog.

• Remember The Milk - Web Client (Google Gears for Offline Access)

Reinventing the to-do list, RTM is brilliant - anyone who uses GTD would love it, though it takes a little tweaking to set up properly, it uses Google Gears to provide Offline access and has a BRILLIANT iPhone client.

• Movie Magic Budgeting

Movie Magic Budgeting just released an open beta for MMB and the Movie Magic Scheduling. These are invaluable tools for film production, but are exceptionally expensive. This Beta'll only last for a couple of months, but it's brilliant to have fully legal free access until it expires.

• GMail

This one should speak for itself. I run our company mail through Google Apps, so I have offline access enabled for my work mail and use it extensively - I spent the plane reading and replying to mail, which then all synced up when we landed.

• Dropbox
  

Speaking of syncing, this is a WONDERFUL service. Dropbox puts a folder on your desktop and everything that you put in syncs to your online dropbox. The free version is 2GB, paid is 50GB, which you'll get for about 70 euro a year. The beauty is that you can put dropboxes on all of your computers, so when I update a word doc on my home computer, it updates on the netbook and my work computer instantly, and will be available online with a username and password via a slick AJAX interface. It also has very robust sharing options - a boon for collaboration.

• Chrome
  

Google Chrome is the dog's - it's fast, simple and just WORKS. I didn't think a search engine giant could make decent software, but they know what they want from a browser, and one look at other big browsers like Safari and Firefox will show a swift proliferation of their ideas.

• Google Docs
  

We're running things like schedules, contact lists etc through Google Docs - it's great not to have to worry about versions and e-mais...someone in Ireland changes something, it's instantly updated everywhere that has that document open. A collaborator's dream!

Now, all that's left is to get some work done! Cannes, Here I Come!