I just though I’d take a brief pause to explain my criteria for these 100 tools that I’ll be covering this year. All of the tools I will cover are tools that:
- I use every week, perhaps less often, and for a few I will have at least installed and tested out.
- Have an active user and developer community
- I know I can get my questions answered from the community
- are good enough so that you can get real work done using the tool (in fact, under most circumstances, you could do mission-critical work with it, if your mission called for it.)
- You don’t have to code to do what should be basic tasks using the tool (for instance, this eliminates a good time tracking program, which at some point I might blog about, but that you have to learn scheme[1] to get customized reports with any complexity. )
I’ll describe what you’ll give up with these tools (if anything) compared to their popular proprietary counterparts. These aren’t half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in organizations.
[1] Scheme is an obscure programming language that most Computer Science students learn, but almost no one else does, and almost no one produces production code in scheme.
{ 0 comments… add one now }