MacDork.com

What?  More than a To Do List manager, Life Balance is more about managing your life.

Why?  I like the approach that the guys at Llamagraphics take to arranging your tasks -- it's not a simple priority-based system, it's a holistic approach to ensuring you pay attention to what's most important to you *at the very moment* you're looking at your task list. 

How, you ask?  It's a simple idea, taken to it's most logical extreme:  show you only that tasks that can be completed *where* you are, at that VERY moment, sorting that list by comparing the relative importance of them to your life's goals.  If you've been ignoring one part of your life, that area's tasks will bubble up higher in your task list.  Entering tasks in their outline entry format actually helps *define* what tasks need to be accomplished to get the goals done.... it doesn't just leave you to entering to-do's into a flat listing, arranged only by priority. 

If you're at the post office, but it's after closing time, you won't be reminded to mail out that important package, because it knows you can't possibly accomplish that task.

There's really so much to this app that it's hard to give it proper coverage in the short amount of space I intended for this page.  Read the Advice Book for specifics.

What?  Volumes have been writtine about Macromedia's excellent web development app.  I'm not sure what else I can say about it -- it's the tool of choice for so many people for a reason.  With Dreamweaver MX, you get a WYSIWYG HTML editor, a web-based script IDE, and an HTML site management package... all in the same box.

Why?  I like that it both generates some code for me, and that it respects my changes to it's generally sound code.  I like being able to press a single keystroke to have all of my changes saved, and then uploaded to my web server, taking all of the dependant images, style sheets and rich web content with it.  I like that when I drag & drop an image from one directory to another, Dreamweaver will go through every file that references that image, and modify the HTML that loads it, reflecting the new location of the file.  I like that when I sit down at one of my other machines, I can tell it to synchronize my files so that I get the latest ones onto my HD to work with.... and when I'm done, I just synch my workstation back to the server, and I don't have to worry whether or not the latest images/files/code are on the server.

Sure.... these things can be done manually, but why would I want to where there's a tool that does all of this, and does it WELL?

Macromedia recently updated the MX line to MX 2004, and they were HORRIBLE until the 7.01 update.  I'm using 7.01 now, so if you've been using 7.0, update to 7.01, which came out in March 2004.  The difference is night & day.

What?  Macromedia's image-manipulation software..... you can modify pixels, apply filters, convert between formats and, most importantly, add web interactivity to your images.

Why?  Wait?  Didn't you just descripe Adobe Photoshop/Imageready?  Yep.... I sure did.  Why would I be talking about Fireworks, then?  I prefer Fireworks to do my final web preps because it's MUCH better at creating clean HTML, and the way it handles interactive images/mouseovers/image swapping is MUCH cleaner than ImageReady.  The code that comes out of ImageReady is, IMHO, sloppy.  Toss in Dreamweaver integration, and I think you'll understand why I love Fireworks so much.