These are the web apps I use on a daily basis to manage my web design projects and further my design knowledge.

Instapaper

Instapaper is listed first because I do a lot of reading, and much of it isn’t from books. Keeping up to date with web standards requires almost constant reading and Instapaper makes that much easier to manage. Whenever I visit an article I want to read, I click the “Read later” bookmarklet and it goes to my Instapaper account. I’ll read the articles from there in bursts every couple days. Recently, I’ve been reading the articles (and saving notes on them) on my Kindle and Marco’s new Kindle formatting is a life saver. If I had to choose one web app to take with me to a deserted island, it would be Instapaper.

Gmail

I’ve actually gone so far as to completely replace my desktop application with Gmail. When I used Mail, I found myself checking my email too often. Moving to a web app has helped this because typing in “gmail.com” in a new browser tab is enough of a barrier to stop me from checking it obsessively. Three years I’ve been using Gmail and I’ve never once had an “emergency email” (despite the numerous emails with that in the subject). It took that simple step to make me realize that.

Notable

Notable is an app for getting feedback from my clients on designs I do. Instead of using email to try to describe what needs changed, the client can make corrections and leave feedback right on the design. To see it in action, check out ZURB’s CNN redesign.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks handles all my billing and invoicing. I don’t particularly enjoy that part of my business and FreshBooks makes it super easy to put out of my mind. It does its job well and doesn’t take up too much of my brain’s CPU power. Also FreshBooks has the best customer service I’ve ever seen. They gave their blog readers a chance to get a copy of Entrepreneur magazine when they were the cover story. Inside was a Post It note as a thank you handwritten by the CEO of the company. That simple gesture still amazes me to this day.

Those are the four I use every single day. Notoriously absent from this list is Basecamp because I’ve never had a need for it before, despite following what 37signals does for the past five years. Recently, I’ve been using it for bigger projects with more group work. I expect to start using it on personal and client projects soon.

“Amazon doesn’t reliably deliver my messages to customers’ Kindles. For some people, it works great. For others, I trigger some filter after a while and Amazon randomly blocks Instapaper emails from hitting their accounts unless they call Amazon’s customer service and have them remove the block.”

That’s a shame because Instapaper would be that much more useful with consistent support from Amazon’s PDF conversion service.

I am constantly reading books, but they are mostly technical ones that I like to highlight and markup the margins. Amazon’s Kindle wouldn’t do me much good there. I read tons of blog articles, usually 20 at a time. This is where the combination of Instapaper and Kindle can become a game changer.

There is one thing that will immediately get me to shell out $259 for the Kindle: Instapaper automatically syncing with the Kindle. Instapaper has become a part of my daily routine. I check my feeds throughout the day, open any articles I want to read and save them to my Instapaper account. After I’m done work for the day, I sit on my couch and read the articles from Instapaper on my MacBook. Reading on a backlit screen isn’t ideal because it strains my eyes (and I’m a pretty young lad). I’ve tried reading on my iPhone too, but that didn’t help much either.

Possible User Experience for InstaKindle¹

Not much would change about the way I save my articles. What would change is how I read them. Every night, my unread articles on Instapaper would be quietly converted to a single PDF document and emailed to my special Kindle address.² It would arrive at my virtual doorstep at 6am and be ready for consumption during my morning tea. It would imitate the experience of a morning newspaper at a much lower cost. It would be targeted to exactly the articles I want to read because I’m the one that picked them. It would be comparably easy to read because of the Kindle’s E Ink.

Having Instapaper and the Kindle collaborate to bring me my ultra-targeted newspaper subscription in the morning would be the ideal experience for me.

1. I just made that name up. Feel free to use it, although Amazon might not like that.
2. Marco Arment already has a great start to this functionality.