My Top 5 Most Used Web Applications

In the past, I’ve written about several of the programs I use daily on my Mac. But as the web matures, I find that several of the “applications” which have become indispensable to me are web applications. I use every one of these on a daily basis.

Top 5 most used Web Applications

Gmail – I have about twenty email addresses, all forwarding to my main Gmail account. I use it for three main reasons.

1. Synchronization. The account is always in sync even when accessing it from different computers
2. Phone access. It is built-in to my T-Mobile G1 (Googlephone) phone.
3. Spam. I have had some of these addresses for almost twenty years. That adds up to a metric ton of spam. To be specific, I get about 3,200 spam messages a day, which works out to a little over two per minute. I used to run spam-filtering programs on my Mac, but Google is far far better at it. I get possibly one or two missed spams a day in my inbox. Amazing.

Freshbooks – I use Freshbooks to track time for clients, to provide trouble-ticket handling for them, and to generate invoices for hourly clients. It lets my employees log time to their assigned projects. It even has an OSX dashboard widget allowing me to punch-in/punch-out on projects as I work them. Simply beautiful, and extremely cheap, even free if you are just tracking a few projects.

Assembla – I use Assembla to manage version control, tickets, feature requests, and associated Wiki pages for my clients. They support Mercurial, SVN, and Git, which makes my life much easier. Not only that, but using them I have a dashboard showing the latest tickets from all clients, all in one place. Very cost-effective, much better than trying to “roll my own” on my own server.

Google Calendar – I love being able to share my calendars easily with friends. I have a “family/kids” calendar shared with my ex-wife where we plan out our visitation, holidays and the like. I share that (read-only) with my girlfriend, and I can also see her schedule. It works extremely well, especially since it is integrated with my phone. My only tip here is that you absolutely must only use one calendar. You cannot succeed if you use one calendar for this, another for that. One must rule them all.

HabitCal – This is an odd one, it is a tool I use to track the development of habits. Using it, I can mark each day as a success, fail, or exempt for each of the habits I am developing. It is simple, but quite valuable to me.

[tags]webapps,reviews[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Spamato after two weeks – incredible After two weeks, I’m pleased to report that Spamato has...
2. Training My Spamato Spam Filter Months ago, I threw in the towel with my old...