Every once and a while I like to make a post about what software is really important to the everyday workflow of Electrotap. It has been quite a while since I’ve done this. I’ll also mention some pieces of software which generally aren’t useful to us anymore.

Most Important

• TextMate—my everyday text editor for every programming, web, writing, etc. task that I need to accomplish. I even use it for editing Max patches.
• Ruby On Rails—the new electrotap.com site, this blog, many of our internal systems, etc. all are built using Rails. It provides a lot of things, not least of which is a really nice way to interact with databases.
• Subversion—SVN is used for everything, including documents, code, circuit board layouts, etc. SVN makes a lot of things that are difficult with other version control systems very easy.
• Trac—an interface to our SVN respositor, and a wiki and issue tracking system for our internal development. I really wish SourceForge supported this so we could use it with Jamoma…
• Backpack—to do lists, etc.
• Eagle—it isn’t the best software ever, but it’s cheap and works well for our schematic and circuit board needs.
• Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop—the staples for anyone who needs to do graphics work. Too bad they are so expensive. I’m still using very old versions.

Basically Unimportant

• Microsoft Word—it is a rare month that Word gets opened more than once or twice, and even then it seems like an accident.
• Adobe Reader—Could this application be any worse? It can be avoided easily enough on the Mac where the superior Preview application is provided by Apple. But on Windows there is no real alternative. It takes forever to launch, when it finally does launch it starts bugging you to click on a bunch of annoying dialogs about updating, and then after some indeterminint amount of time it crashes. This happens on multiple machines, Mac and Windows, so I consider it utterly flawed and useless.
• FileMakerPro—This used to be the staple of my record keeping. But now with Ruby on Rails and it’s support for multiple database technologies, I don’t even have it installed on my newest computer.