Originally inspired by a post by @scanman, this is a list of software and hardware that I prefer, own and work with. If I think of anything worthy of disclosing I will do so in the footnotes of the article - and place an asterisk ("*") by the relevant tool. I figure if other nurses or nursing students are curious about what my favourite and regular go to tools are they can check out this page.

Go to Software

  • Evernote: a digital note books. Great for saving articles, notes, and all things digital. I have a premium account and learned about the powers of this tool from @geek2nurse
  • RSS Feed Reader: Reeder: Great Mac App that was recommended to me by Jared Sinclair - really like it on iPad and iPhone too. Gruml: My preferred RSS feedreader for my computers.
  • Skitch: Great application for quickly taking a screenshot, annotating and sharing images. I use it to help explain where to find options on a website or to quickly draw an image explaining what I mean in a visual way.
  • Mint.com: Fantastic free financial service that provides budgeting and up to date information on your net worth. This is a web service that I made a desktop app using Fluid (see below)
  • Mendeley*: fantastic tool for organizing research papers and developing your academic profile. I made a post with screencasts about why I like Mendeley
  • MarsEdit: a desktop application for updating wordpress and other blogs. This makes it easy for me to update information on multiple sites without having to go to each WordPress site, login and then work on the update.
  • Fluid.app : is an application that allows you to make a website into a desktop application - this is helpful to create easy access to websites you regularly use.
  • Seesmic 2: Trying this application out to see if I will like it, I also use the official twitter app for short quick updates.
  • Twitter: I like the simplicity of this app, so I'm sticking with it.
  • iWork & Microsoft Office: I like iWork for making PDFs and reports because the templates are easy to make visually appealing. MSoffice is still essential due to is pervasive nature
  • Photoshop
  • Lightroom & iPhoto

Testing

  • Time Rescue: currently testing out this product to get some hard data on how I spend my time on my computer. This program monitors your activity, gives you a report and can blog distracting websites after you go over a quota or when you are trying to focus. Result: Didn't do a good job of measuring what I'm doing with my time away from my laptop, also timing how long a have a program open is not a good proxy for productivity. Interesting, but not extremely useful for more than a wake up call as to how busy you are and how much time is sucked up by email.
  • Billings: This is a billing program which you can calculate cost for your time and expenses and easily generate an invoice. I'm using it for my consulting projects, and to track expenses for various boards, committees and other types of paid travel to make sure I'm getting reimbursed.
  • OmniFocus: For a long time the lack/poor implementation of syncing on Things has been a problem. OmniFocus has a beta way to sync tasks to an online server. It also has some great features like organizing a task by  context. For example, you can label a task with "Laptop: Office", "Email" or "Grocery Store" - surprising simple but extremely helpful. Now I walk into a grocery store pick up a few things and double check I'm not forgetting anything. When I'm sending emails I check if there are any I need to send and I cross a few more things off my to do list.

Gear


*Currently I am a Mendeley Advisor, for which I do not receive any financial compensation, the only benefit is an upgraded account at no cost. However, before they had paid accounts and before becoming an advisor I made posted this post about why I like Mendeley

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