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Open Thread: What's your killer app?
Merlin Mann | Aug 21 2006
The other day I was talking with someone about the novel and non-obvious ways that people use Excel in their work and home life. Gotta say, I've personally seen some pretty amazing stuff happen when people take a favorite app, get really good at it, then bend it to their will. (And Excel is perfect for this.) This tracks to Danny's Life Hack concept by which the alpha geeks were achieving lofty heights of productivity partly by mastering 1-3 "killer apps" -- then using them to solve most of their information and functional problems in fairly novel ways. So my question for you: What's your killer app? Is there one place where 80% or more of your activity takes place (by choice)? Vim? Excel? Perl? Firefox? Post-it Notes? What's yours and when did you realize you'd become a badass at using it? 106 Comments
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 I'll get the ball rolling. No...Submitted by Merlin on August 21, 2006 - 5:15am.
I'll get the ball rolling. No surprise here: I'll pick Quicksilver for the way it's spackled together all the pieces of my world to the point where it's become virtually invisible to me. When did I realize it? The first (and every subsequent) time I sat down at a keyboard whose attached computer did not or could not run Quicksilver. It's like slapping at a missing limb. In some respect, I think my other killer app is ascii text in general and TextMate in particular. Almost everything I do or make starts as text or passes through Textmate at one time or another. Again -- it starts to feel sort of invisible and completely organic. » POSTED IN:
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