On the Floor

Readability

If you're anything like me, you're easily distracted while reading on the web. I try to stay informed by reading a number of design blogs, cycling publications, music reviews and general news stories. However, I have a very hard time reading anything longer than about 140 characters without being distracted by a flashing ad, a compelling photograph, or another headline altogether (if you've made it this far, you're already more focused than I am). Then I stumbled upon a life-changing browser add-on (bookmarklet) called Readability which strips out everything but the text of the main content and re-styles it into a much more readable format. There are a number of preset styles to mimic the layout of a newspaper, a novel or an ebook, and you can adjust things like margin size and text size to suit your reading preferences. Once you've done this, simply drag the Readability badge to your browsers bookmark bar, load up any site, click the bookmark and voila! You're cluttered news article has been transformed into a refreshing page of text.

Dropbox

I've tried many internet-based storage solutions over the years, but none has impressed me as much as Dropbox. Dropbox is different than so many others because it's also a filesharing and file sync app. Once installed, you're allowed up to 2GB of storage space which is easily accessible via a special folder on your computer. You can drop files or folders into it and it will instantly sync between any computers you've installed the app on, or access the folder via your own Dropbox URL. Perhaps the best feature of all is the ability to right-click on a file in your Dropbox folder to copy the public URL. You can now share this file or folder with anyone you like even when your computer is turned off. Best of all, each time you refer somebody to Dropbox and they sign up for an account, you receive another 250MB of storage space.

Fave4

This one is relatively new to me, but after only a week of using it, I don't see myself getting rid of it anytime soon. Instead of my browser opening up to a default Firefox/Google search page (I've never ever bothered to change this), it now opens to a simple screen showing four large buttons of my favourite web applications. Make sure you have cookies enabled, head to fav4.org, pick your favourite four websites or services and make it your browser's home page. Simple, clever and beautiful.

Digital Color Meter

Even though this app's title is spelled incorrectly (here in Canada, we use the Queen's English!), it's an invaluable tool for web designers and developers alike. Instead of opening up an image in Photoshop and then using the eyedropper tool to discover a particular colour value, I find it best to leave this application open at all times, and then Apple+tab to it when you need it. Once running, you simply hover your cursor over the colour in question and you get instant values in Hex, Lab, or a number of other colour formats... accurate down to the pixel. Best of all, it's already installed on every Mac (sorry Windows faithful).

Adium

Call me whatever you want, but I refuse to use Facebook. While I've come to accept the fact that the majority of communications among my friends happens through Facebook's instant messenger and email, I feel as though my life is better off without it. I do however still rely heavily upon instant messenger for both work-related and casual conversation, and over the years I've acquired many different chat accounts. Adium is a simple (Mac) application which brings all of those chat accounts under one application.