Slack is a great tool for communicating between remote teams of people. Simple to use, you can drag and drop images to share them with people within a certain group, share Dropbox and Google Drive files with ease and even video chat.
TeuxDeux
TeuxDeux is a really simple cloud based to do app (for web and iPhone) that continually syncs as long as you are online. This is for individuals rather than a company or group of people.
There are lots of tools out there that cater for group working. I love a list and we find that keeping it simple like this is such a time saver. So basically you can add, cross off and shunt to a different day or list. You can also add live links so it’s easy to go straight to the relevant website. It is a paid app but very reasonable - $2 or $3 per month. Works in a browser for desktop and you can download from the app store for devices.
Unibox
(Mac Only)
Unibox simplifies your Inbox, grouping interactions into conversations and making the whole process of checking through emails a lot less muddled. The interface also makes it really simple when dealing with draft emails.
You can add all your gmail, icloud, hotmail accounts and set up your email signatures for each one.
Zoom H2n Handy Recorder
This is a great little mobile recording device that we use out and about ‘in the field’ collecting various sound effects for use in our animations. It can record both stereo and surround sound. We also use it to record for our You Tube channel.
Reaper 64
Reaper is a fantastic multi track audio editing tool. We use it to mix sound fx and music allowing us to adjust pitch and blend tracks together. There is an unlimited evaluation period but it is also very reasonably priced for it’s feature set.
Pond 5
Pond 5 is a royalty-free stock library for image, video and sound. We use it for sound snippets (that we haven’t managed to record ourselves) and also we have found some fantastic music pieces from Pond 5.
Affinity Suite
The Affinity suite of tools is for those who find Adobe’s subscription model is not for them. We’ve found it has struck a great balance between usability and the sophistication of the tool set. Three pieces of software make up the suite and they are sold separately so you can decide which is right for your needs.
Affinity Photo is most like Photoshop, Affinity Designer most like Illustrator and Affinity Publisher is nipping at the heals of InDesign.
Handbrake & ImageOptim
We love software that just does the job and does it well and simply. Both these little gems qualify.
Handbrake compresses video files. you can happily use their presets or drill down into as much control as you want. The results are great and you save file space!
ImageOptim compresses image files rather than video and even simpler to use than Handbrake. Just drag and drop your jpegs, pngs or gifs into it’s list and it compresses the files and re-saves them based on the presets (which you can adjust).
Both are free.
