I’ve been using Techsmith’s SnagIt for years for taking screenshots. It started as a Windows-only product but then a Mac version came out. It’s extremely simple to use and has most everything I want for a quick image including cropping, border effects, transparency, and annotations like arrows and text.
What’s your favorite screenshot and annotation tool?
If you’ve been around long enough to have used Microsoft DOS as your primary operating system, you might remember Norton Commander.
Norton Commander 5.51 running on MS-DOS 5
Managing files in DOS was a pain in the butt without something even remotely graphical. I loved the two panes and simplistic navigation in folders. In fact I think Norton Commander made me better at command line stuff after I got a visualization of the file structure.
After I got into Linux/Unix/Mac OS X I was so tickled when I found Midnight Commander. MC is a port (only visually) of the original Norton Commander. It’s awesome and I’ve used it for years.
Midnight Commander 4.8.13 running on Mac OS X 10.11.1
Recently I found a replacement for Finder on Mac OS X that looks shockingly similar. It’s called Commander One.
Midnight Commander is free and open source – which means you can dig into how it works and help fix bugs you might find. It’s a pretty stable product though and still actively worked on. Commander One is free but not open source. There are “Pro packs” you can purchase to add additional functionality.
My system for helping keep my brain focused during the workday is a system of lists in a note-taking program like Evernote or Simplenote. Every time I encounter an e-mail, talk to a coworker about something, or get assigned a pull request to review I turn that into a checkbox item. If I don’t get to an item in a day, those empty checkbox items get moved to the next day (or week). The system isn’t without faults but it seems to work. The only issue with the checkboxes is they don’t portray status of longer-running tasks.
This next week I’m going to try something different with how I keep myself organized. For simple TODOs, I’ll still use checkbox items. For longer running tasks with different states to jump through I’m going to try using a personal Trello board. We use Trello at Automattic for some projects as well as at RayWenderlich.com for project tracking. I’ve done simple Kanban boards before but I think Trello might be what I’m missing. Their mobile app is pretty good as well which helps with things I think of while on the go.
I’ll report back after I get some time in with it!
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