The end of the year traditionally comes with tons of end of year lists. Like many people I have a love/hate relationship with these kinds of lists.
I love them because I like to discover new things. I hate them because they always promote the latest and greatest when it’s not always the latest and greatest that’s the best.
If the hdmyboy project excites me more than the offerings of the latest consoles, maybe I am just getting a bit older. I fully realize how stupid this statement sounds to those reading this well in their forties and older but hey, that’s just how I feel.
I used to make yearly reports with the best films or music I discovered that year. After a while I couldn’t be bothered with keeping these lists. Every year has great new music albums and great movies. I will leave these kinds of recommendations to the relevant publications.
Talking about yearly reports, I admire how Nicholas Felton has been doing his Feltron report since 2005. I wonder how he doesn’t go crazy tracking all these facts about his life. I track the business side of things but tracking my personal life? No thanks.
I like Marco’s qualification that you need to have used a product for at least a year to recommend it.
So these are the things I’ve used for more than a year and I can heartily recommend, starting with hardware:
- Bluetooth speaker: Big Jambox by Jawbone
- Laptop: Macbook Pro retina
- Phone: iPhone (5S)
Then, on the software side:
- Cloud syncing service: Dropbox
- Photo editing software: Adobe Lightroom 5
- E-reader: Amazon Kindle
- Project management software: Basecamp
- Browser: Google Chrome
- Todo sofware: Omnifocus
- Bookmarking service: Pinboard
- Read it later service: Instapaper
- Feed reader: Reeder
- Text expansion software: TextExpander
- Quick sharing software: CloudApp
- FTP client: Transmit 3
- Text editor: Textmate II
- E-mail client: Gmail
These are some newcomers that still have to prove their worth – but it looks like these are here to stay:
- Document scanner: Fujitsu Scansnap S1300i
- USB Hub: Anker USB 3.0 9-Port Hub
- E-mail replacement: Slack
- Compact camera: Sony DSC-RX100 III
- Noise cancelling headphones: Bose QC-15
- Graphics software: Sketch 3
If you know similar lists like this — preferably from single bloggers and not from big sites like Ars — please let me know.
2 Comments
Good post, I’ll make an inventory of my own and make a post of it.
Aha, a fellow pinboard-er! I only registered there half a year ago but before that I already visited the “popular” page almost daily since it gives a great idea of what’s living in web-(dev)-land.
When it comes to hardware … this is actually the first thing I’m posting on my Macbook Pro Retina. I’ve always been a Windows user but the advancements in (front-end) web-dev with Sass/Compass/Live-reload … forced me to start switching. You can get all those things working on Windows but the manuals to do so are 10 X times longer and more complex compared to systems like Mac.