Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#1

Post by juliend2 » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 1:38 PM UTC

I can't live without Freshbooks. Recently i subscribed to BaseCamp (and loving it so far).

What are Your web apps that you can't live without that boost your creativity/productivity?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#2

Post by xsc » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 1:50 PM UTC

Google Calendar.

Saves me from calling my fiancée at work to see what we have going on.

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#3

Post by jcapote » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 1:51 PM UTC

Our shop runs effortlessly thanks to a combination of google apps, freshbooks, github, basecamp, and heroku

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#4

Post by teej » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 1:51 PM UTC

Rescue Time. It's hard to cheat, it "just works", and it's dangerously good at picking out my unproductive spurts.

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#5

Post by rjurney » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 1:57 PM UTC

teej wrote: post #4

Rescue Time. It's hard to cheat, it "just works", and it's dangerously good at picking out my unproductive spurts.

Thanks, signed up immediately. Am over-stretched and want to see where I can improve my time use.

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#6

Post by rjurney » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 1:58 PM UTC

PBWorks. I find PBWiki much more effective when collaborating on documents than google apps or Trac. Its actually a joy to use, and I can't say that about many apps.

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#7

Post by 9oliYQjP » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 1:58 PM UTC

I'm going to adopt a liberal definition of web app here. The only web app that appears to increase my productivity is Twitter. But I use a desktop client to access the service. I use it for live-searching of programming problems I need to solve. Why is this so funny? Because I didn't comprehend Twitter at all, so much so that I originally joined only to leave my account languishing for months before actually beginning to use it.

I tried Basecamp and it just got in the way of things. When your app is so simple that it can be replicated by email, a calendar, and some shared disk space, don't be surprised when clients refuse to use Basecamp and "degenerate" to using email, a calendar, and some shared disk space. At least, that's been my experience, so I cancelled my account.

Most of the other web apps are pure fluff and/or not productivity enhancers. Freshbooks et all appear to be exceptions to this rule. Online accounting web apps are so much better than their desktop counterparts. If I had a nickel for every time somebody has asked me about an Intuit software problem they're having, I'd be rich.

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#8

Post by cousin_it » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 2:00 PM UTC

Ask the commenters in this thread: What webapps decrease your productivity? Preferably those we haven't yet heard of? I imagine the answers could turn out much more interesting :-)

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#9

Post by madmotive » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 2:01 PM UTC

This changed my life: http://freeagentcentral.com

Biggest benefits if you are UK based. Blew Freshbooks out of the water from my perspective.

Re: Ask HN: What Web apps increase your productivity?

#10

Post by thorax » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 2:05 PM UTC

Assembla

Google (if that counts)

Featurelist.org (our own site) -- specifically the user feedback widgets that dump all the feedback from all of our different sites into a handy place (per-project) so I can respond/escalate/investigate/etc.

Google Apps / GMail

Defensio (for avoiding having to manually inspect spam comments on our apps)

__ These aren't in the "can't live without category", but still quite helpful:

Feedback Army (for quick usability/sanity checking)

Paypal

Jing (both a tool and a web service)

Amazon S3/EC2 (once you get over the initial hurdles, it pays back in productivity)

Authsmtp (is that a web app?)

StackOverflow

bug.gd (another of our sites, in the process of renaming to ErrorHelp.com) -- since I log every error/solution I ever run into, often I run into my own errors again later and the solution is waiting for me even if I don't remember how I solved it before. Often enough someone else solved an error I had, too.