Our favourite (desktop) apps

We've spent quite a long time building Peer, and over the course of that time, we've come across some absolutely brilliant software which has shaped how we've developed Peer. I thought that it would be good to say a little about the best, so that you can see where we've got some of our inspiration from:

So, in no particular order:

Tweetdeck

If you use Twitter, you really should try Tweetdeck. It's a cross platform, Adobe AIR twitter client, which allows you to arrange the people you follow into columns. This means that you can prioritise people and make sure that you catch all of their tweets, whilst being able to scan the rest of your twitter stream.



What we've learnt: groups are now very much necessary to handle the amount of information on the web. And that black looks good.

Digsby

Digsby is a social network and instant messaging aggregator for Windows. We've used it to keep up to date with LinkedIn, Twitter (before Tweetdeck), as well as email - it's definitely the best GMail notifier I've ever used.



What we've learnt: Digsby is written in Python - the same programming language as Peer. It gave us a great idea of how stable a desktop application written in Python can be.

Dropbox

Dropbox is an excellent syncronisation system - you simply install it onto the computers you use, and it appears as a regular file system folder. However, all of the files are syncronised across the different computers, and also available on the internet.



What we've learnt: Another great app written in Python, in my opinion the best thing about Dropbox is the seamless integration with the operating system - there is no fancy AIR uploader - you just paste the files you want to sync into the Dropbox folder.

Skype

We've been lucky enough to work with some of the team at Skype, and they've been really helpful. Skype itself has allowed us to keep in touch when we've been at different places around the globe, and until Peer was up and running was a great way to share links around a small team.



What we've learnt: Amazingly good branding of the product and the app. Skype 4.0 for Windows also evolved hugely between Beta and the final release, showing the need to be flexible to the feedback the community was giving.

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We've come across some other great apps, both on the desktop and on the web, and hopefully I'll follow up with some more in another post.