Barrier, Forest, and more tools that can help you get things done during remote working.
Photo by Izabelle Acheson on Unsplash
Well, the COVID-19 crisis is only getting worse in the US and most parts of the world with the number of affected people going up with each passing day. Most businesses that require the physical presence of employees have been shut down or are running on reduced shifts.
However, a majority of the workforce who were working on a computer at the workplace have taken work into their own homes and continue to support their clients and run businesses remotely.
For many companies, relaxed work-from-home policies were already in place, or only in emergency cases for some, and some people were not allowed to work from home at all.
Considering the need of the hour, everyone has quickly adapted to the crisis and is finding new ways to continue working while staying inside the comfort of their homes.
While there are many popular mainstream tools like Slack, Zoom, Teams, etc. to help in this situation, there are a bunch of tools that don’t often get the mentions that they are worth online.
So, here’s a list of some “not-too-popular” tools that can be extremely helpful while we get through this pandemic.
1. Barrier
One of the things that we miss while working from home is those cool workstation setups we have at the office. Without all those monitors, wireless keyboards, and mouses that we took for granted, sometimes it becomes hard to keep up with the pace of work you had at the office.
Especially if you have different systems like a Mac and a Windows laptop and you want to connect your one keyboard or mouse across devices.
Barrier is a fork of the popular licensed tool, Synergy, that lets you do just this, use one keyboard and one mouse with all of the computers that you have. It’s open-source and free to use. Here’s the installation guide.
Barrier on GitHub
2.Codeanywhere
Well, this is the most important need of the hour. People working from a thousand different locations means people should be able to code literally from anywhere on any device.
It can be on a laptop in your bedroom, on your iPad in the living room, or even on your mobile while you are in-line for groceries.
Used by a growing community of over 1,500,000 developers, codeanywhere allows developers to open their IDE anywhere and edit their code with ease. It’s a cloud-based tool and can come in really handy when you don’t have a device powerful enough to run your usual IDE.
It has all the required features for a code editor with a sleek UI. You can also sync your code through all the popular Git platforms like GitHub, Bitbucket, or a custom Git server and other options like an FTP server, S3, DigitalOcean, etc.
It also has an inbuilt terminal console that lets you do everything just like a normal offline editor.
Codeanywhere ide with connection options
3. Loom
Now, this is a tool that allows you to “Say it with video” and I have come up with a fancy abbreviation for it after realizing one of the things it helps to avoid — lots of overrated meetings.
Loom tries to make use of one of the most fundamental principles of sharing information, we remember 95% of something we watched vs. only 10% of what we read.
Using Loom, you can capture your screen, voice, and face, and instantly share your video in less time than it would take to type an email.
You can use Loom in almost all departments at work like code reviews, product demos, documentation, recruitment outreach, onboarding, and many other areas.
Loom features
4. Appcenter
If your team is working on some mobile apps, signing a release build and deploying to respective stores is something that you would have to do with each release. And often only a selected few people have access to the developer console or ability to sign the builds using release certificates (especially if it’s a client certificate). What happens if that person is on a coffee break or falls sick. Well now you will be thinking, this could’ve happened before the crisis and could happen after the crisis too. Yeah it can, So it’s high time you automate this process.
Well, this is where appcenter, a tool from Microsoft can help you. It provides an end to end solution for building, testing and directly releasing your apps to the stores with just a push to your code repo. It is one of the easiest and cheapest CI/CD platforms for mobile apps with pricing starting from just 40$ for unlimited build hours and free of cost if your total build time is less than 240hours. The best part about the tool is that it requires zero DevOps knowledge to set up and any mobile developer can do it in just 10minutes. It provides support for native apps as well as React-native, Xamarin, Unity and even Flutter with a little tweak.
Configuring build on appcenter
5.Miro
Miro is an online whiteboard that can work magic in your remote meetings. It offers almost everything that you can do with a physical whiteboard like sticky notes, multiple people working on the same board at the same time, adding comments and responding to others’ comments.
It also has other interesting features like templates, mind-mapping, and integrations with all popular tools like G Suite, Jira, Slack, and Sketch. The free plan lets you use Miro for free for up to three editable boards and unlimited team members and paid plans start from $8 per user per month.
Mirro App
6. Forest
How about planting a tree, watching it grow as a reward for staying focused? Forest is an app that helps you stay focused on your task at hand using this unique concept. According to their website, the idea is simple:
“Whenever you want to stay focused, plant a tree. Your tree will grow while you focus on your work. Leaving the app halfway will cause your tree to die.”
Continue to stay focused during the day and watch the land grow into a beautiful forest. And if you thought all this is just virtual and there are no real trees involved, they are unique there too.
The Forest app partners with a real-tree-planting organization, Trees for the Future, to plant real trees on Earth. Who knows, saving the planet may be the incentive that we’ve all been waiting for to stay focused at work.
Forest app
7. Pomodoneapp
Have you heard of the Pomodoro technique? If not, it’s high time you check out this time management method developed by [Francesco Cirillo](en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Francesc.. "Francesco Cirillo (page does not exist)") in the late 1980s.
According to Wikipedia, “the technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks where each interval is known as a Pomodoro.”
There are five steps in the technique:
Source: Flickr
The Pomodoneapp is a simple tool that can help you track your workflow using the Pomodoro technique.
You can create tasks directly in the app and keep track of them using features like custom session lengths, switch to breaks from focus period automatically, and also see the timer in your menu bar while it’s in the background if you’re using the Mac app.
It also provides integrations with all the popular task management tools like Trello, Jira, Todoist, etc. to import your existing tasks and update them.
Well, there’s one more on the list, it’s not a tool but rather a very relevant and useful music publication that you can subscribe to.
Flowstate
Let’s admit it, one of the hardest things to when we are working from home (where there are 100 possible ways to get distracted) is focusing on your work.
Most of us consider ourselves multi-tasking experts, but we all need that alone time for which we could book those single-person isolation rooms in the office.
Flowstate is a publication on Substack that sends out two hours of music that’s perfect for working. You can listen to these on every major streaming platform directly including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Google Play, and Tidal.
You can subscribe to the service for free to get their public posts or pay just $5 a month or $30 a year for some good quality premium content every day.
Flowstate daily listening tracks
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.
Stay home and stay safe, everyone.