I suppose if I were really on the ball I would have posted this right after New Year's Day, but I needed to ruminate a bit on what was worth summarizing for 2009. In the end I decided to talk about the tools I found in 2009 that really made a difference in my life.
LaunchBar
When I first switched to the Mac, I discovered Quicksilver and it was like discovering something essential that you didn't know you needed. QS was a revelation to me because it drastically reduced the mental distance between the what I wanted to accomplish and executing it.
Over time though, I found some things in QS that just didn't work consistently. It would crash and some of configuration was pretty clumsy. It became pretty clear that there was little, if any, forward progress being made on it. So, on the advice of several local Ruby/Mac nerds, I tried out LaunchBar. At first I was disappointed that it didn't have the breadth of QS, but after investing a little time and effort I found that it handled 99% of the things I wanted. More importantly, there was somebody actually working on it which meant it was going to evolve and improve.
Now I can hardly use a machine that doesn't have it installed. I can't believe people use the dock to launch apps. Yuck.
Mailplane
By and large, I'm biased to using the built-in Apple-given tools where possible. Apple usually gets it right and most other tools are designed to work with these apps. I've used Mail.app since I switched to the Mac, but always felt the interface to be inferior to GMail's tag-oriented structure. But since I had some non-GMail accounts, and I wanted to have a single app, I stuck with Mail.app.
However, once I dropped my last IMAP-only account I was ready to switch back. The only parts I really missed were the tight integration with the desktop that Mail.app brought. Lo and behold, along comes Mailplane to fill the gap. It is, essentially, a WebKit view of GMail with some extra bits to glue the web application to your desktop. I think it's brilliant and was happy to part with some hard-earned money for the privilege to use it.
zsh completion
My introduction to zsh came many years ago from a co-worker who boot-strapped my entrée into zsh-land with his configuration files. For the longest time I treated them like mystic, sacred tablets to be worshipped, but never to be understood. But over time I found little gaps I wanted to fill in with my zsh setup, especially with command auto-completion.
I'm a keyboard kind of guy. I like the command prompt. I also like going fast, so anything that makes me faster in the command prompt is like gold to me. I love shell auto-completion and found lots of things I wanted completion for, like RubyGems. So this year I finally pounded through enough documentation and samples to put together a few home-grown completion bits. I still don't understand most of the incantations that make it go (guilty as charged of cargo-culting) but it has made my command-line work-flow that much better.
Dropbox
Since switching to the Mac, I've always had at least two machines that I needed to share files between. For the longest time I used to store files in S3 then sync them back and forth. This worked, but it sucked because I had to do it manually and I had to get the order right so I didn't clobber any files.
When Dropbox came along, the clouds parted and the golden light of heaven shown down from above. Dropbox makes sharing files super-duper, idiotically simple. Combined with tools like 1Password, having consistent data across multiple machines is like magic on a daily basis—it just works and I don't even have to think about it.
One Bus Away
The thing I love about the iPhone is how it's an Swiss Army Knife for information in the modern age. You can find apps that do very specific things, very well and put them in a single box that you keep in your pocket. The One Bus Away app is one of my favorite iPhone tools.
I ride the bus a lot and to have real-time transit data in the palm of my hand is fantastic. No guessing about when the next bus is coming. No extra waiting. I know just when to leave to catch my next ride.
Mint.com
I was a long-time Quicken user but finally had it last January. It's a bloated app with serious usability issues. I finally reached a point where using Quicken had a net-negative impact on my life. It simply drove me crazy to use it.
Enter mint.com. At first I was very hesitant to give my information to these guys. But eventually I was convinced to try it because: * if I use Quicken another minute I'll go postal * sometimes the future doesn't start until you acknowledge it, and this looks like the future to me * I'm probably already more open to financial security risk anyway, so what the hell?
I get exactly what I want out of mint: a high-level dashboard that just updates itself. I use a few of the budgeting features which are nice, but really it's all about automated data acquisition and display. Oh yeah, did I mention that they have an iPhone app too?
Instapaper
Several years ago I built my own news-feed reader and one of the features I really wanted to implement was a temporary "holding pen" where I could put URLs to visit later. These were things that didn't quite warrant a Delicious bookmark, but I wanted to get back to.
By itself, Instapaper satisfied my original need and worked great as a bookmarklet in my browser. However it went from a convenient curiosity to an essential tool once other apps started integrating with it (e.g. Net News Wire, Tweetie 2) and Kindle integration (see below).
Oh yeah, did I mention that there's an iPhone app for that too?
Kindle (device and app)
The final tool of 2009 that made itself indispensable was the Kindle. It's a great example of "good enough". The Kindle is fraught with polish and usability issues, but they don't overwhelm the utility of the device.
I've been on a long dispense-with-all-physical-media kick, with books being my primary target. I have lots of books, but I don't have lots of space. Since I'm not emotionally wedded to the form-factor of paper books, the Kindle solves my reading-appetite vs. space problem quite well. I can stuff that thing full of books and not take up an inch of extra space in my house.
Like so many of the other tools I've listed, it's the other things that integrate with the Kindle that multiply its utility. First, the Kindle has gained a lot of adoption by other publishers. The Prags and O'Reilly, in particular, have been eager to jump into the e-book biz with first-class Kindle support. I probably go through about fifteen to twenty tech books a year and having them on the Kindle is great.
Another great bit of integration is how Instapaper delivers me a weekly digest of links I've captured right to my Kindle. I can read the full content of every page I bookmarked right there on my Kindle without the need for a network connection. This is a great for travel.
So?
Looking over this list, if there's one theme that emerges, it's all about ubiquity and convergence. (Did I really just say that?) Despite all of the queasy feelings those "market-tecture" terms give me, I don't quite know how else to define it. For me, 2009 was the year that I could get to my stuff whenever I liked, however I liked, through a multitude of channels.
I wonder what the theme of 2010 will be?