This Justyn

When a company can claim the following, I will bet on their stock hitting $500

• Hottest phone on the planet
• Hottest laptops on the planet
• Hottest tablet computer on the planet
• Slickest consumer OS available
• People lined up for blocks rather than waiting for the UPS truck
• Stranglehold on digital music
• The most visionary product team our industry has seen

Apple has become a juggernaut we’ve never seen the likes of before. Their dominance is different than MSFT dominance 10 years ago - because it was put at the top of the pedestal by users, not necessity.

Over the past few years we’ve constantly been looking for tools to help us be faster and more efficient. It takes a while sometimes to determine if a tool will really fit into our processes, these ones have all made the cut.

In no particular order, I consider these my must-have tools;

xMind: All of my ideas and product development processes start in xMind. It’s a simple, powerful and free mind-mapping tool for Mac & PC. I’m sure most people are wired differently, but this is by far the most efficient way to organize my thoughts and ideas.

Balsamiq Mockups: I resisted Balsamiq for mock-up work for a long time. I couldn’t find anything that worked the way I wanted it to, so I tried Balsamiq again. After forcing myself to do a few projects with it, I can’t imagine using anything else. We do our actual mock-ups in Adobe CS, but before I have off ideas to my UI/UX guy, most of the layout and usability work is done in Balsamiq.

DropBox: Holy crap - I don’t know why it took me so long to discover DropBox. We use this to share files and synch between desktop/laptop so I can work anywhere with my latest files. When we start the design process, Gil can look at my mind-map’s from xMind and my mock-ups and know exactly what I was thinking when he starts putting it to real pixels.

Pivotal Tracker: It takes a while to get a good rhythm with Pivotal Tracker, but this is the tool everyone on the team works from. All of our current iteration items live here, our feature backlog, bugs, tweaks, etc. It’s another free tool that makes managing a software development much easier.

Highrise: Light contact management from 37Signals for those who don’t need something as cumbersome as salesforce, but can’t stand managing contacts in Outlook/Gmail. It’s a simple elegant product and this is where I keep track of all of my important contacts. I don’t use it to it’s full ability yet, but I’ll get there.

Adobe Creative Suite: As I mentioned, all of our heavy design work happens in Photoshop/Illustrator. I can’t use them for shit, but as a team we’ve found it much more efficient to design here than in the web layer. Many people prefer to design in HTML/CSS. We find it more efficient to be pixel-perfect before we get to that stage, and then let the software engineers bring it to life.

Google Analytics: This one is obvious. Either Chris Dixon or Dave McClure (I can’t remember which) said a founders job is to figure out which metrics are important, and improve them. Google Analytics has all the data we need to develop our growth and engagement strategies.

KISSInsights: Extremely useful in-app survey tool. User feedback is critical, and this tool makes it super simple to get it.

Survey.io: Also from the KISSMetrics crew, Survey.IO is a simple, elegant way to get more detailed feedback from your users. It’s not a new concept, SurveyMonkey and others have been around forever - but you’ll appreciate the simplicity and execution of this product.

What are your favorite tools? Am I missing any that I should check out?

Note: These are direct links to product pages, I do not have any business relationships with these companies.