I cannot do without a feed Reader and …

Among the tech bloggers at B5 a question was asked what was the most useful applications you cannot live without. At this point in one’s life when one finds oneself connected online there are always a dozen or more applications that one finds essential in one’s life. Take away the communication and social media applications this can be probably be narrowed down to seven or so. And then by personal criteria , based on nature of one’s work and lifestyle, one can short-list the set of apps further down to four. So here are the set of apps that I cannot do without.

Google Reader and Netvibes

Top most of course are on-line feedreaders – Specially those two and this is because: (i) Both delivers post, news, articles, videos, pictures and other forms of information in a no fuss and consistent manner. (ii) Both allows one to categorise the posts, articles, and other form data coming in from the data feed. (iii) Netvibes allows you to view the articles in a spatial manner and it is a un-stressful way of reading a lot of post. (iv)Plus Netvibes has widgets that one can use to communicate with, like its Meebo application.

A Net Browser

And as was pointed out in our discussion the app that one can do without is the web browser. This particularly useful to the new breeds of ultra portable computers, the Asus Eee and the Mac Book Air, that rely on the Web apps to get things done. I like in particular FireFox because: it is customizable, the plug-ins that can be used, and the tab feature. Furthermore, it is a document viewer.

A financial spreadsheet

A spreadsheet almost any spreadsheet because aside from using it to (i) do mathematical calculations it is useful (ii) presenting data via graphs and figures. While numbers or descriptive statistics are practical in proving a point nothing arrests attention like pie chart or even graph: At one look one knows that a goldfish and mollies are the most sought after aquarium fish sought in numbers compared to an exotic fish like the Pirarucu , also known as the Arapaima gigas, which grows up to nine feet. Also (iii) it can be used as informal database with its search and filter functions. Surprisingly, It can also be used as a text editor and mind mapping slate. A paragraph or idea are placed in the cells and buy doing this one can – (a) organize, (b) compare and even (c) develop one’s written work (Yes I know am weird for stating that but believe me it does work, specially when you are gathering your work).

NoteTab

Text editors are quite important. To begin with I would be unable to accomplish this post without one. My personal favorite though is NoteTab. A windows based text and html editor that can:

1) handle a lot of documents at one time. This app keeps all open documents under one viewer and can easily be accessed by clicking on the tab.

2) One can easily strip or add html tags to one’s work through its libraries. No need to type it down just highlight and click … voila the thing is done.

This app is useful when one writes a lot and do research online. And its not that big of an App.

So there they are my friends. What are the Apps you cannot do without?