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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 think your criterion of...Submitted by sgazzetti (not verified) on August 21, 2006 - 6:27am.
I think your criterion of "like slapping at a missing limb" is valid. When I sit down at a machine without Firefox + Greasemonkey + two or three dozen userscripts & extensions, I feel like a cat with its head in a brown paper bag. Same goes for TypeIt4Me. When I'm away from my machine I can barely type my own email address (in fact, I filled in the three mandatory comment data fields with a total of nine vs. four dozen keystrokes -- addictive indeed). And Quicksilver is getting there for me, thanks in large part to your excellent video a few weeks back. » POSTED IN:
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