Increasingly I am trading in complicated tools for simpler ones to manage my digital life. Most of them share common traits of being built for a single purpose, having an elegant UI with minimal use of color, feature powerful and readily available search functions, are widely available across multiple devices, and importantly are not written in Java.

(In this context, I mean simplified as in User Experience, in some of these cases the underlying software is more complicated than the one it replaced.)

Browsing

What I used to use: Firefox

What I now use: Chrome

Why: Although Firefox 4.0 looks promising, currently Chrome just feels sleeker, more elegant, more stable and more manageable. Chrome just works better.

Task Management

What I used to use: ThinkingRock 

What I now use: RememberTheMilk

The reason why I ditched RTM in the first place is ironically the same reason I came back to it. RTM has never supported "subtasks", which in my opinion is a good thing. Most of the stuff that I have to get done can be defined with a single task, and RTM works brilliantly for managing that. Project management is better handled with dedicated tools.

Writing

What I used to use: OpenOffice.Org

What I now use: Q10

Why: I still use OO.O for writing formatted documents of course, but in the chaos of NaNoWriMo, I found using a full blown wordprocessor was both cumbersome and hard on the eyes. Q10 gave me a relaxed, distraction free working enviroment with just me and my novel.

Note taking

What I used to use: Evernote

What I now use: Simplenote

Why: Evernote is very much the heavyweight elephant of it's logo. Do you really a full formatting palette to compose notes? Is it really superior to DropBox, Live Mesh et al for storing files? Simplenote is the web based tool I am using to draft this blog post right now. You have a big plaintext writing area on the right side of the screen, and an easily searchable list of your notes on the left hand side. Simple as that.

Email

What I used to use: Outlook, Thunderbird

What I now use: Gmail

Why: It's elegant, clean and available everywhere. The stars, tags and search functions make finding and managing emails far easier than any desktop client ever has for me.

Social Networking

What I used to use: FaceBook

What I now use: Twitter

Why: I'm finding my FaceBook "friend" (mostly acquaintance) feed increasingly litered with dumb, hateful rants and messages from applications I don't care about. With Twitter I can easily control who I'm following without the stigma attached to "Unfriending".

Also, I find that the perceived weaknesses of Twitter are actually it's strengths. The short messages don't dumb down the content, but make it more concise and to the point. The wide openness of most accounts means that most messages are carefully considered before they're posted out in the open. 

Brainstorming

What I used to use: Freemind

What I now use: A physical notebook

Why: Not exactly a digital tool, but for rapidly capturing interrelated ideas in a chaotic fashion, I haven't found anything that beats the feel and function of the humble pen and paper.