There’s something cathartic in sharing your experience of great products and services – especially if you can help someone find the thing that makes life just a little bit better or easier for them.

That’s the precise reason why I love telling everyone about some of the great products we find at CHNO; occasionally we find something that really resonates with people that they hadn’t heard of before, and it’s one of the really satisfying parts of the job that we do here.

So today I want to share with you five tools that I use personally that I’d struggle to cope without. Not every tool works for everyone, and some will take some use to see the benefit. But please take a look at them, and let us know if any of them have been useful.

EDIT: Since I wrote this article, I suddenly became acutely aware of a couple of other tools I use all the time, so I’ll do a second post on the same subject early next week.

1)   Evernote (Mac, iOS, Free with paid Premium accounts)

Evernote for Mac

Evernote for iOS

Best described as a digital scrapbook, Evernote is a repository for just about any digital media you have that you want to refer back to. The great part about it is that it indexes everything you add to it.  With our work, every time we find a fix to problem, we’ll either document it and add it tour company notebook, or we’ll add the link from the web straight in. Evernote then indexes the stuff we’ve captured and makes it really easy to find information later.

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If I’m reading articles on my iPad using Flipboard or any other app, and its an article I think I may want to refer back to at any stage, I’ll email it to a special email address that Evernote give me for adding notes to my notebooks (yes, you can have more than one, and you can choose which of them to share with other people if you wish). That way I always have that information in a searchable format and I don’t have to rely on Google finding me that link again in the future should I need it. It will also index any handwritten notes you add in the same way.

The free version does have a few limitations, but they shouldn’t hold you back at least while doing an extended trial. You will have a reduced transfer/storage limit on the free version, and you will also not be able to store your notebooks locally on your iOS devices (so when you’re offline you’ll not have access to your data on these devices, but on your Mac you will). On the premium version (currently £4 a month or £35 a year), the transfer/storage limits are significantly increased and offline storage on iOS is enabled.

2)   Skitch (Mac, iOS, Free)

Skitch for Mac

Skitch for iOS

Available for iOS and Mac OS, this is now owned by Evernote. It’s designed as an annotation package, so it’s become a useful tool for me to illustrate how my clients can do things on their computer. I can take a screen shot of my desktop (or section of it), then make notes on it (text, arrows, highlights etc.) to show them what they need to do. Often this is easier than talking someone thorough a problem, or showing them using remote access (and they have a permanent reminder if I email it to them). Anyone that’s had support from me most likely would have had  a screen grab with instructions on it (most likely in pink writing, it stand out well in most circumstances) – that’s done in Skitch.

Other people may use it to show areas on a photograph that need to be changed, or to highlight a problem on their car to their mechanic for instance. The best way to think of it is an application that allows you to take an image (photograph, screen grab etc) and make notes on it, much like if you’d ripped a page out of a magazine and ringed a section and drawn an arrow to a certain point saying “Important – Read this bit!!”

3)   OmniFocus (Mac, iOS, various prices)

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OmniFocus for Mac

Now this product is costly. But it’s been worth its weight in gold to me over the years since I first purchased it. After reading Get Things Done by David Allen (a well known task management methodology), I looked at several different software applications for managing my own work. This was the best I found at the time, and I haven’t ever felt the need to replace it.

Using OmniFocus and a few add-ins that I’ve found along the way, I’m easily able to add emails straight into my task list ensuring that I don’t miss out on important activities. With so much to do these days, its easy for an overnight email to slip through the net when you get up t next day to a couple of dozen activities unless you have a system for capturing them. I’m able to segregate tasks by what the methodology calls Context (i.e. at the computer, on the phone, with a certain person) ensuring that only the activities that are open to me will show at any given time (I find that if I’m swamped with too many to-do’s when I have a few minutes free to reply to emails, I’ll end up wasting that time trying to work out what to do). It’s a tricky area to get across without reading the book that supports the methodology, but having started using OmniFocus a few years ago, I can honestly say it has changed the way I remember what needs to be done for the better.

OmniFocus for iPhone

OmniFocus for iPad

For similar reasons as TextExpander (below), I strongly recommend purchasing the Mac version of this software direct from the developers. I’ve been beta testing V2 of the Mac version of this software for some time now and can’t wait for it to be released properly. Although all the different packages can work together (you can save all your data to Dropbox or iCloud or Omni’s own server (my preferred option) so you can work on any of your devices), the iOS versions are significantly more user friendly and the new Mac release will bring it more in line with those.

In addition to the sync functionality, using OmniSync you also have the ability to mail yourself a reminder to do something. Or for those who are thinking of a company system….to email someone else a task.

You really do need to read the book on the subject to get the best out of it, but if you want an easy way of capturing and remembering all your tasks I can’t recommend anything better. In my own experience it blows Apple’s Reminders out of the water.

4)   Text Expander (Mac, iOS, various prices)

TextExpander for Mac

TextExpander for iOS

Maybe it’s just me, but there are certain phrases I always mis-type. For instance, probably 75% of the time I try to write isn’t, wasn’t, can’t etc., I will replace the apostrophe with a semicolon (e.g. can;t), and when you’re writing a lot of text, you’ll be amazed at how hard it is to find every single mistake (many spell checkers don’t notice that mistake). That’s one minor use of TextExpander, but for me, it was worth purchasing just for that.

Its main use however, is to be able to create long repeatable sections of text that you can recall with just a few characters. For instance, when I want to write my email signature at the bottom of an email, I type lrgds, and TextExpander automatically spots those characters as being my cue for it to replace them with my Long Email Signature. Got a standard response to a certain kind of email? TextExpander can handle that; you can even set it up to request words to put into the expanded text (e.g. “What’s the first name of the person you are sending this email to?” and it might then expand to Dear firstname you entered etc.)
At its simplest this is a great way of saving yourself the trouble of typing the same email sign-offs over and over, at its most complex there’s a huge amount of complex expansion you can do with it, replacing commonly misspelled words automatically (there’s a downloadable add-in for IT related words that a former colleague of mine would have killed for).

I strongly recommend downloading the Mac version of TextExpander from the developer’s webpage and not the Mac app store; some functionality is not available in the app store version because of the limits imposed by Apple on software sold there. You may also find that reduced cost or free upgrades will be available in future direct from Smile Software, whereas Apple don’t allow this in their app stores.

5)   Hullomail (iOS, free with paid premium version)

Hullomail for iOS

Last time our mobile contracts were up for renewal we made the move from O2 to Three, primarily because Three offered free tethering and unlimited data on the contract we looked at. The only thing I was unhappy about was losing Visual Voicemail on my iPhone. For me, having to listen to an automated voice read the number that the message is from is a major pain, because I often can’t transpose those numbers to a contact’s name. The beauty of Visual Voicemail was that I could see I had 5 messages, 3 were from various unknown numbers (probably PPI calls, so they can wait), 1 was from the office and 1 was from that client I’d been desperate to hear from with regards to a massive order. I could listen to those voicemails in any order I wished to, or just delete them straight from the iPhone if I wasn’t interested.

So for a long while I lived without Visual Voicemail, before finally stumbling on Hullomail (thanks to a recommendation from a friend). Hullomail operates almost as a Virtual Assistant for you; it will just take your voicemails when you’re unavailable if you wish, but there’s much more it offers that you don’t get as standard from normal Voicemail. You can set individual voicemail greetings for contacts (work or personal for instance). You also get notification of calls you missed when your phone was offline (so if you’re underground when that elusive client calls you, there’ll be a notification of a missed call as soon as you emerge so you can call them back, even if they didn’t leave a message).
So far, these features are all free. I haven’t tried the premium options, but Hullomail also offer a transcribe service where they will attempt to convert any voicemail to an email for you; I can’t vouch for this service at the moment as I haven’t tried it, but I can certainly see a use for it with certain people.

Summary

I hope that you find at least one of these tools useful; if you need any help setting any of them up, please contact us. We’d love you to Tweet, G+ or share on Facebook the link to this page if there were anything you found that’s useful to you, or might be to your contacts. Also if there are any other tools you would recommend, let us know in the comments.