Spend our money by suggesting software!

February 25, 2009 4:34 PM

We're a web dev shop with $700 that needs to be spent on software by the end of fiscal. What should we get?

We're a small team of three developers, all running OSX with Windows running on Parallels/VMWare for Outlook purposes. We're running Adobe CS3 with a mix of TextMate and BBEdit for the rest. Back end is .net stuff running on ms sql.

What we are looking for are tools that could make us more productive, communicate with each other better, track work or just have fun. $700 max, can't go over.

posted by furtive to computers & internet (12 comments total)

OmniPlan and OmniFocus
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:41 PM on February 25

OmniGraffle (and its big brother, OmniGraffle Pro) have come in handy a few times in my web development work. (mostly for communication with clients, but I've used it a few times to work out link hierarchies)
posted by mebibyte at 4:41 PM on February 25

You could always build out a cheap new test server. $700 would get you a nice box.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 5:09 PM on February 25

SnagIt ($50/user, not sure about site license.) It's my most favoritest screen-shot-taker and saves me an enormous amount of time taking apart screenshots for various purposes, some nefarious.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 5:30 PM on February 25

If you could spend it on new hardware, I'd go with a second monitor for as many people as possible. Personally, it adds at least 25% to my productivity; I save a ferocious amount of time when I don't have to context switch.
posted by talldean at 5:30 PM on February 25

I'd go with either new chairs or a new copier. Also, look into seeing if the boss gets a bonus if the money isn't spent.
posted by incessant at 5:57 PM on February 25 [2 favorites]

Well, there's always CS4...
posted by adverb at 6:28 PM on February 25

If you use any XML I'd recommend some Oxygen licences.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:38 PM on February 25

D'oh! Proper link here: Link.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:39 PM on February 25

Hardware is out of the question, we've all got double 20+inch monitors, so no real worries there. I'm a big fan of OmniFocus, and OmniPlan would be great for getting out of the "fly by the seat of our pants" mentality that is keeping us behind the curve. Other useful OSX utilities would be appreciated.
posted by furtive at 9:01 PM on February 25

$700 donation to The Free Software Foundation? The Apache Foundation? Or The Mozilla Foundation?

Perhaps they have products you can buy to support them if you can't just make an outright donation.
posted by Reverend John at 9:40 AM on February 26 [1 favorite]

Charles

It's your standard debugging proxy. But it has a lot of features that make it downright perfect your webdev. Excellent support for picking apart XML, SOAP, JSON, Flash Remoting messages. It's written in Java so you can run it on multiple platforms.

I have not found a better proxy anywhere.
posted by Riemann at 12:41 PM on February 26