When you work in IT, you spend the vast majority of your time focusing on making the experience of using technology better for other people. Sometimes though, you need to spend some "me" time thinking about how to use technology to make yourself more efficient and effective. This article dives into a few tools I use plus some problems I need to solve.

Note taking - Evernote

I am a big fan of Evernote. Evernote is the core of my toolset. With Evernote I can take notes on my work computer, my home computer, and my iPhone and have those notes appear in all three places as well as the web. Besides basic text, I can even use my phone to take photos. If I come across a web page with useful information, I can have Evernote grab the body of the web page plus the URL and put it all together into a note for later reference. This functionality provides much greater context than just a bookmark.

Whiteboards and diagrams - Evernote + JotNot Pro

If a photo in Evernote has text in it, Evernote will OCR the text to make it searchable. This is a nce feature that is made even better with the JotNot Pro app on my iPhone. I can use a whiteboard in a meeting to take a picture of the notes. JotNot will adjust the colorand make the text clearer. It will even let me put multiple pictures together into a single PDF if I need to send the notes and diagrams to someone else. The same thing works for diagrams made with paper and pen.

To-dos - Evernote + Egretlist?

Keeping track of meeting follow-ups or to-do items can be difficult. Evernote lets you put checkboxes into your notes and then quickly search for notes that have to-do items. The context is useful, but perhaps I'm just not a to-do list kind of person. Egretlist is an iPhone app that goes the extra step of pulling out those checkboxes to make individual to-do items. Since my work is focused around Evernote, this solution works pretty well most of the time, but I'd be happy to hear someone's better suggestion.

Cloud storage - Dropbox

Dropbox is my current cloud storage option although I've considered changing after their security issues this summer. For my use case though, it still works very well. I can store files on my home computer and work computer and then view them on the other computer or even from my iPhone. I may make the switch to Box if the University ends up partnering somehow with box. Right now though, I can use my personal resources to do University work, but I can't use University resources to do personal work, so that may always be an obstacle.

Web applications

I've been working on launching a beta service at the University to enable students, faculty, and staff to easily publish to the web. The service is being built in WordPress, and I've learned something positive and something negative. WordPress is a great web publishing tool for a "typical" person or group with limited resources. That's it, a positive and negative in one. It will work great for what we want to accomplish with the publishing service. For web application development though, I would still send someone to Drupal or even to a specific Drupal distribution depending on the need (Open Atrium, Commons, and Conference Organizing Drupal).

PHP development

Now that I'm doing some PHP development work again, I'm finding that vi only gets me so far. Yes, I am an old veteran of the vi vs. emacs text editor wars, and it frightens me that I still remember most of the vi commands. I've been trying out different editors like NetBeans, Xcode, Aptana, and more, but I'd really like to hear what other people use.