Adding Value - Well Designed Tools That We Like

Other people make some great stuff, not just us.

Tools to improve productivity & quality of life are useful - for all sizes of business and all types of people not just us.

We think about simplifying through design all day every day so we thought we would save you time by connecting you with the things we use and/or like because they are great value, well designed or have some other key benefit for our life. We are often asked about the tools we use so here we give credit where it is due.

Within legal and commercial constraints (see below) we are happy to tell the world we really like these services so here goes -

• Animoto.com is a great little animated video generator, just load up photos of anything, select a sound track and hit go, in minutes you get a custom video for your website of you latest event, product, pretty much anything.
• CampaignMonitor.com is the home of a great SaaS for email marketing with hundreds of thousands of users, their parent firm Freshview also makes a nice newsletter editing service
• GetPaint.Net is the home of paint.net a great piece of freeware software for image editing
• Joost.com is a new internet TV offering that is kinda cool
• iMac 24inch from Apple is the standard machine we give all our developers, they LOVE it
• Leopard from Apple the new version of Mac OS X really is the best one yet
• Linkedin.com is the original and best business networking site in our opinion, facebook might be fun but this is serious and huge
• MbUnit.com is open source unit testing
• Macromates.com textmate is a simple but powerful text editor
• Paymate.com is a niche based internet payments service operating mainly in Australasia and South East Asia.
• Paypal.com is the world leader in Internet payments with over 150 million registered users.
• Philips Skype Cordless - is a range of dual purpose (old style and internet) phones that are good value, improve accessibility and save you money with Skype.
• Salesforce.com is a powerful CRM (customer relationship management) system approaching the million users mark (they do free developer trials & an entry price team subscription)
• Seadragon/Photosynth is world changing technology for visualisation and collaboration that is not widely available yet.
• Silk Icons by Mark James (UK based FamFamFam.com) are pretty sweet, keep up the great work Mark.
• Skype.com is the world leader in internet telephony with millions of users and includes free net-to-net service, it also highlights you phone numbers in Saasu and makes them clickable so you can call any number on the system without needing to key it again in just one click.
• Subversion great source revision control system
• Tinyurl.com is self explanatory, if it isn’t then you should just look at it and work it out for yourself.
• Toad By Quest is a very nice entity relationship digram tool and a heck of a lot more, we are playing with Toad Development Suite - it allows the Saasu Labs team to collaborate, increase code quality and speed! It has an SQL optimizer, code tester and a thing called benchmark factory.
• Trac by Edgewall is a nice change request and development management tool.
• Vostro by Dell with Vista is a good windows workstation for those that don’t demand Mac power. At least it has the Mac like Alt-Windows keystroke
• Wordpress.com is a funky blogging and content management technology with a great network effect around it.

Tell us if you have any nominations for this list, our guys in the labs make the final decision on who gets on the cool list though… This page is updated every few months.

Legal & Commercial Stuff

• For legal reasons we can’t go as far as saying we actually endorse these services - we don’t endorse any of these services - this list is a collection of informal office discussions by the team on stuff some of our educated and experienced team members thinks is cool. Nothing more, nothing less.
• Some things we are are not prepared to comment on (such as our data centre partner and some parts of our technology stack) for security and competitive reasons.