Having some spare time before starting a new job at Ubisoft in Montreal, I want to give a try of my old 2009 Products I Can't Leave Without post.
Update April 27, 2014: as many others, I have decided to stop using the Dropbox service. For now, I use Google Drive and QNAP qsynch.
2013
Blogger
Chrome Canary
Dropbox
Eclipse
Feedly
Firefox
Gimp
Git
GMail
Google App Engine
Google Search
KeePassX
SourceTree
Unity3D
VirtualBox
YouTube
Chrome Canary
Dropbox
Eclipse
Feedly
Firefox
Gimp
Git
GMail
Google App Engine
Google Search
KeePassX
SourceTree
Unity3D
VirtualBox
YouTube
Blogger
This is the tool used to publish this blog. I use WordPress in other projects. WP has definitely a larger feature set, without counting its amazing plugin list (commercial and free). However, Blogger is just fine for the type of edition I conduct here.
| Company: | |
| Website: | blogger.com |
| Launch Date: | August 18, 2007 |
Blogger is a blog publishing platform formerly known as Pyra Labs before Google acquired it in February 2003. Blogger blogs are mostly hosted internally with the “dot Blogspot” domain but they can also be hosted externally on a user’s own server.
Blogger provides bloggers with a WYSIWYG editor that allows them to drag-and-drop widgets, change fonts and edit page elements. Also, Feedburner’s feed management tools are tightly integrated with Blogger blogs due to Google’s recent acquisition.
Credits: CrunchBase
Chrome Canary
Google declines the Chrome browser in 4 versions, and Chrome Canary is its most bleeding-edge version. I still use Firefox for most of the Internet browsing, but I now use Chrome for my development related tasks: Webapp debugging on the desktop, remote debugging on a tablet, device emulation (iPad, Nexus, etc.). As the vast majority of mobile browsers are WebKit based as Chrome, it's definitely a must-have development tool.
| Company: | |
| Website: | google.ca/intl/en/chrome/browser/canary.html |
Google Chrome is an based on the open source web browser Chromium which is based on Webkit. It was accidentally announced prematurely on September 1, 2008 and slated for release the following day. It premiered originally on Windows only, with Mac OS and Linux versions released in early 2010.
Credits: CrunchBase
Eclipse
For an early adopter of IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains, I had to use Eclipse (company's tool when working with IBM Rational, cheap when working with Compuware). I should recognize that it is going better and better (especially with the refactoring features and the JavaScript support) and it has more plugins than IntelliJ. It is also a platform for OSGi and for Rich Applications.
- Eclipse Website
- IntelliJ IDEA Website
- OSGi Alliance Website and OSGi introduction on Wikipedia.
| Company: | FLOSS |
| Website: | eclipse.org |
Eclipse is a Java-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE). In addition to supporting Java (standard and J2EE), Eclipse supports other programming languages like C++ and Python thanks to plugins. It also offers extensions for developing on Android, BIRT, databases, etc.
Feedly
When Google Reader disappeared, I tried Feedly. It's not a great tool, but it does the job: I can continue to easily read the continuous new stream from the Internet ;)
Firefox
Having been a Web application developer for a long time, I adopted Firefox (then know as Firebird) in 2003. With the introduction of the Firebug extension (in 2005), it became with primary browser and it had never lost this status. Its early integration of Google search was also a serious advantage. These days, with the faviconize extension and Firefox ability to start with the previous configuration, my browser always starts with: iGoogle, GMail, Google Calendar.
| Company: | Mozilla |
| Website: | getfirefox.com |
| Launch Date: | November 9, 2004 |
Firefox 4 Hits 100 Million Downloads After A Month (4/22/11).
Credits: CrunchBase
Gimp
I never the budget and training for Adobe Photoshop. So I started using Gimp. If you can pass over its weird interface (too many windows, IMO), Gimp offer tons of features for Web application developers: to adjust pictures, to generate textures, to resize images, etc. And there are plenty of free tutorials on the Web.
| Company: | FLOSS |
| Website: | gimp.org |
My favorite video series on Photoshop, starting with the first episode: You Suck at Photoshop #1: Distort, Warp, & Layer Effects.
Git
As a developer, I always want to put my code into a source control system. It is not just because I am afraid that my laptop crashes, then wasting hours of work. It is mainly because I want to keep track of the update history. At work, over the years, I used ClearCase, CVS, and Subversion. For my personal development, I used Subversion a lot and now I use Git.
| Company: | FLOSS |
| Website: | git-scm.com |
Free hosting service of open-sources Github - Charges applied for private hostings.
GMail
When I started working, I dealt with many machines and I hated having to start one just to look at a specific inbox. With GMail, my account is available anywhere. When I read Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center, I started to use GMail as my knowledge database.
| Company: | |
| Website: | gmail.com |
| Launch Date: | April 1, 2004 |
Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free email service with innovative features like “conversation view” email threads, search-oriented interface and plenty of free storage (almost 7GB). Gmail opened in private beta mode in April 2004 by invite only. At first, invites were hard to come by and were spotted up for sell on auction sites like eBay. The email service is now open to everyone and is part of Google Apps. Paul Buchheit, an early employee at Google, is given credit for building the product.
Another Gmail feature is the organization, tracking and recording users’ contact lists. For instance, if you start typing the letter C into the “To” field Gmail will bring up a list of every email address and contact name starting with the letter. This feature helps when you can’t quite remember a name. Plus, Gmail automatically adds and updates email addresses and names to your contact list when you write emails.
Credits: CrunchBase
Google App Engine
My first job in Montréal, Canada, was with a small company named Steltor (bought few years later by Oracle). The core business was the development of a distributed calendar system (servers in cluster, native clients, web client, mobile client, etc.). Since then, I am used to tracking my work with an electronic calendar. Google Calendar and its ability to mix many agendas is excellent.
| Company: | |
| Website: | developers.google.com/appengine |
| Launch Date: | April 2008 |
Google App Engine offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. The service allows developers to build applications in Python, Java (including other JVM based languages such as JRuby) which can then use other Google services such as the Datastore (built on BigTable) and XMPP. The service allows developers to create complete web application that run entirely on Google’s computing infrastructure and scale automatically as the application’s load changes over time. Google also provides an SDK for local development and site monitoring tools for measuring traffic and machine usage.
Google’s offering competes with Amazon’s Web Services suite, including EC2, S3, SQS, and SimpleDB.
Credits: CrunchBase
Google Search
Google Search is an amazing tool: recently, I was trying to find a solution to a tough technical problem and I found it thanks to Google Search which pointed toward a blog post written the same day, just few hours before, in Europe! Incredible... When I give a conference into universities, I often say: “If I asked a question today and you have no clue about the response, that's fine. If you still have no clue tomorrow, you're in trouble...”
| Company: | |
| Website: | google.com |
| Launch Date: | September 4, 1998 |
Search is Google’s core product and is what got them an official transitive verb addition to the Merriam Webster for “google”. The product is known for its Internet-crawling Googlebots and its PageRank algorithm influenced heavily by linking.
When users type keywords into the home page search box they are returned with relevant results that they can further refine. Google also has more specific search for blogs, images, news and video. Google will also return search results from your own computer files and emails via Google Desktop.
Credits: CrunchBase
KeePassX
KeePassX is an open source Password Safe, an multi-platform extension of KeePass. I use it in conjunction with Dropbox so my precious list of account coordinates are available on all my devices (desktops, tablets, and phones).
SourceTree
As a developer, I much prefer using command line tools like maven, git, and other ant and Python scripts. Git is a really powerful tool but I worked with team members having some difficulties to deal with the branches, cherry-picking, and stashing for example. The freeware SourceTree offers a neat interface on the top of git. I'm more a command line user than a GUI one. Hoever
Unity3D
For my own company AnotherSocialEconomy.com, I only developed native applications for Android. As a software architect at Electronic Arts, in the (now defunct) Play Mantis franchise lab in Montréal, I worked with Unity developers. I then learned its cross-platform capabilities, it's physics engine, and it's powerful C# library. Since then, I've created few project with Unity and I think it's a powerful ecosystem.
VirtualBox
Developing software requires sometimes specific configurations. Testing them requires always specific configurations (at least to replay always the same test cases every time the source control system, like Git, is updated). There are the famous VMWare products (Workstation, Player, ESX) and Microsoft VirtualPC. VirtualBox is an open source product provided by SUN Microsystems, and it has nice features while being powerful.
| Company: | Oracle |
| Website: | virtualbox.org |
VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
YouTube
YouTube is famous because of fun videos. But it also hosts technical videos.
| Company: | Youtube |
| Website: | youtube.com |
| Launch Date: | December 11, 2005 |
YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. YouTube is the leader in online video, sharing original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.
Everyone can watch videos on YouTube. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky and unusual. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.
In November 2006, within a year of its launch, YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. in one of the most talked-about acquisitions to date.
Credits: CrunchBase
I hope it helps,
A+, Dom
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