We all use a lot of tools on a daily basis to complete our work and Jake and I have always been fanatical about ours. We suppose it's something that many creatives hold in common.

Here are a couple of the tools we've come to love and depend on, especially for creating App.

Task Management

Asana

I've tried more than a few task management tools over the years—OmniFocus, Things, Basecamp, Wunderlist, Taskpaper, Taskwarrior, text files + Vim. A lot of them.

When working by myself, I still have a soft spot for the simplicity of plain old text files. But unfortunately, they don't scale well to a team environment.

Around 2008 or so, I remember watching Justin Rosenstein's video introducing the thinking behind his new startup, Asana. I was intrigued by Justin's philosophy on collaboration and signed up for a beta. I've been using Asana ever since. Here are my two big reasons:

  1. Asana is built around a simple text editor metaphor. Press the enter key to create a new task. Use cmd+up/down to re-order tasks (a common keyboard shortcut in text editors). You can even paste a multi-line list from a text editor into Asana and it will make tasks out of each line. This made me feel right at home coming from a preference of managing tasks with a text editor.

  2. The keyboard is my favorite. The mouse, not so much. I try to do as much work as possible with my keyboard. I'm a huge fan of Quicksilver, Shortcat, OS X's Keyboard -> Shortcuts pref pane, and generally any piece of software that can be completely operated with a keyboard. Other than Gmail, Asana is the only web app I've used that can be used solely with a keyboard. It's a beautiful thing.

In my opinion, Asana accomplishes an elegant blend of these two killer features in a way that no other collaborative task manager has quite pulled off. Jake and I love it.

Disclaimer: Asana generously sponsored our project during our Kickstarter campaign, but like I said, we've been fans since before it was cool.

Chat

Slack

It's all the rage these days. After our friend Adam's company fell in love with and made a video for it, we knew we had to give it a try. Jake and I had been relying solely on Messages.app prior. Slack's integrations with services like Asana, Google Docs, Dropbox, et al and its fully searchable history have been big boons to our communication. Though we do still use Messages.app for friendship stuff and, occasionally, things that are urgent.

Screen Sharing

Screenhero

Jake lives in Long Beach. I live in Twin Falls, Idaho. Thus, we need a good screen sharing app when we're working on edits and various other tasks. As with task managers, I've used a number of these over the years—*VNC, LogMeIn, TeamViewer, Google Hangouts, and likely several others I can't recall.

I discovered Screenhero soon after they launched their public beta. I was intrigued by the promise of multiple, simultaneous input from each participant and decided to give it a try. Though the beta was quite crash-prone, the team did a stellar job of polishing things before the 1.0. Jake and I are now happy, paying customers.

While the multiple-mouse-cursor feature has come to feel obvious and right, here's the killer feature for us: we are able to do full-screen (Thunderbolt display, 2560x1440 resolution) sharing at a comfortable 24 frames per second. Which is perfect when Jake and I are editing our 24fps footage together. Of all the screen sharing apps I've tried, Screenhero is the only one that gave me this kind of performance. It's certainly possible that others have caught up since I tried them, but we've settled on Screenhero for the foreseeable future.