benjaminsterling.com

Jing

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

Why I think this tool should get more love? Ever needed to explain something over the phone to someone and they are just not getting it? So what do you do, you take a bunch of “print screens” and past it into a Word doc and send that over. They get it and they still don’t get “it.” Well, this is where jing comes in, you simply open the program – if you don’t already have it open be default like me – select a section of the screen to record, record what you are trying to explain, save and the send that SWF over and you just saved yourself hours of hassle.
http://www.jingproject.com/

Yugma

Yugma is the leader in affordable instant web conferencing solutions. Yugma provides Free, Professional, and Enterprise web conferencing software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to individuals, small businesses, and large enterprises across a diverse range of industries.

Why I think this tool should get more love? Inline with Jing, using Yugma helps you take client “support” to the next level. Sometimes a three minute video is not enough, you actually need to see what the client is seeing and the next best thing to actually sitting of the clients or co-workers shoulder is to share their screen. Yugma’s free account, although not as feature rich as the Pro account, it gets the job done in a pinch.
http://www.yugma.com/

Twitter

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Why I think this tool should get more love? Really, Twitter gets a ton of love from the average person to Steven Colbert to CNN but I don’t think it gets enough love as tool for Developers/Designers. Imagine you work is a firm, design/development/both, and you have a problem with some code or how to make a design better, you simply call over one of your co-workers and get their advice. But if you don’t work in an office where you can get help you alternatives are forums, mailing groups or IRC which are all ok, but not – in my experience – give off the truly “personal” help that Twitter can help provide. If you follow and build a rapport with other people a request for help can be fulfilled pretty quickly.
http://twitter.com | follow me

Virtualbox

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See “About VirtualBox” for an introduction.

Why I think this tool should get more love? I’ve had limited interaction with the other visualization apps but I really must say that I really like VirtualPC. “But you are talking about VirtualBox, am I missing something?” No, no you are not. VirtualPC in my mind is probably the best visualization app out there but it costs $$ and if you are not making a ton of $$ the next runner up is VirtualBox which is an extremely close second. In my development I try to test in as many environments as I can, I try to set up my VB to only have 512mb of ram running WinXp and Win2000 (don’t have Vista yet otherwise that would be my main install). The reason for setting up weaker environments then my custom built machine is because not everyone has 3.5gb of ram with a video card that has 512mb ram and so on. Some of the apps I build are quite JavaScript intense so I need to make sure it can still run as smoothly as possible in those systems.
http://www.virtualbox.org/