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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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 My first killer app was...Submitted by Brian (not verified) on August 21, 2006 - 7:23pm.
My first killer app was VISutil on the Harris/300 as I could script almost any activity with the databases using it (obscure, I know). Then when the PC became mainstream in the military it was dBase II, III, and especially dBase IV. I was developing business process management and business intelligence apps back in the late '80's, stuff that I'm only seeing come online these last few years. Yea gods that was fun. I would have done it for free! These days I can't live without csh no matter what box I'm on (Amiga, *nix, Windows). It allows me to string together all my small tools to create super-tools. » POSTED IN:
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