It appears our blog has been neglected for a few days so I decided to write a brief blog about some tools I use on a daily basis that increase my producitivty and can’t imagine living without. I’ll break the list down into two categories: programs and FireFox Extensions (yes, I’m a junkie).
Programs

• Launchy - Launchy allows you to index your start menu, program files, and other common places programs / files reside and run them with a quick hotkey. For example the default settings have it set to where you hit “space + alt” and a little search comes up. Type in a common program such as “firefox” and hit enter - tada FireFox launches. My description doesn’t give it justice - this program is an absolute must.
• Pidgin - Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging application that is open source and light-weight. The reason I’m including it in this list is because its simple to use, no ads, and the UI is nice and quick so it won’t distract you (yea I know a bit iffy for the list but I love it :)).

• ZendStudio (Eclipse) - Tony turned me on to this - it’s a wonderful IDE created and maintained by the crew over at Zend (PHP). If you’re a PHP programmer this IDE will save you time from simple auto completion to built-in documentation. It also has other useful features such as built-in SVN support, error handling, phpdoc inserts, and much more.

FireFox Extensions

• FireBug - Anyone whose developing on the web should be using FireBug to help debug their applications. It allows you to debug and monitor CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and other things such as POST and GET requests (see those pesky Ajax requests!).
• ColorZilla - This is essentially an eye dropper tool for your browser. This allows you to select any color on screen and capture the code to use elsewhere. Extremely useful if you’re a web developer / designer.
• RSVP Reader - RSVP stands for “rapid serial visual presentation” which basically allows you to speed read by displaying single (or a couple) words at a time. Basically it takes the difficulty out of the speed reading technique (read more about it, my description stinks).

In hindsight this is really just a quick post of some applications I can’t live without - I may post a followup with a few more I use on a daily basis in the near future.

Until next time,
Cody

**EDIT**
I had the formatting all pretty but WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor is insisting on it being ugly. Who am I to argue?