Kevin Chiu

Jack Po, an experienced entrepreneur and local friend of mine, just posted some tools startups might find useful. While I agree with most of what he has to say, some healthy horizon-broadening is in order.

I’m new to the startup scene, but I’ve always been a tech guy. Here are my tools:

Website Registration: 1and1 has free private registration that you can toggle on or off. $7 is the base fee for a .com.

Website Hosting: Engine Yard (for rails), SliceHost (for custom stuff), Media Temple (for shared hosting), Google App Engine (easily scalable, but has had hiccups…)

DNS Hosting: I stick with whoever hosts my site. I’ve never had any problems.

Email, Calendar, Wiki, Internal Messaging: Google Apps

Actual Website: Ruby, Java, or Plain old HTML/CSS/jQuery

Phone: Skype, Grand Central (but GC keeps deleting my old messages… boo!), iPhone

Conference Calls: Skype - easy and free.

Surveys, Spreadsheets and Documents: Google Docs - The coolest part of this suite is the real-time collaboration. Plus, there’s a form-filler mode for the spreadsheet app that you can use to conduct surveys.

Newsletters: Google Groups (for continuous conversations) or Gmail email aliases with BCC (for periodicals).

Project Management: Lighthouse, Github, Google Code, Sourceforge, or just plain old face-time. I’m actually itching to build a way more intuitive project management system. But for now, I can live with these. (I used to use Basecamp, but it can be abused too easily…)

Website statistics: Google Analytics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google Sitemaps

Code Tools: Linux Shell, TextMate, Eclipse

Computers: Apple Macs.

Presentations: Apple Keynote

Graphics: Adobe Photoshop CS3, Omnigraffle

You can retrieve your Gmail messages with a client or device that supports IMAP, like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail.To enable IMAP in your Gmail account:

1. Log in to your Gmail account.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
4. Select Enable IMAP.
5. Configure your IMAP client* and click Save Changes.

Via Google Help Page

I now have my iPhone and Apple Mail set up to use IMAP. This is awesome.

I’ve noticed an influx of people looking for my short paper on Procrastination. I would love to hear from you if you find it useful!

Installing LaTeX

  The TextMate website lists two ways to install LaTeX. If you have MacPorts installed, then you simply need to run sudo port install tetex. If you don’t have MacPorts installed, I would highly suggest installing it, since the alternative officially sanctioned way of getting LaTeX, through i-Installer, is no longer actively maintained. 

Installing TextMate

  TextMate is one of the most highly regarded editors on the Mac OS X platform. It was popularized by DHH of Ruby on Rails fame and has spawned several copy cats, such as E, a TextMate clone for Windows. You can pick up a copy of TextMate at Macromates. Once you have TextMate installed, enable Cutting-Edge updates by going to TextMate > Preferences > Software Update > Watch For: > Cutting-Edge.

Installing Skim

  Skim is the spiritual successor to PDFView. It has many noteworthy features, including, but not limited to note-taking and annotation features, highlighting, and TextMate / pdfsync integration. Once you have Skim installed, activate Skim > Preferences > Sync > Check for file changes. TextMate should already be entered as the default editor. 

Configuring the new LaTeX bundle

 To configure the new LaTeX bundle in TextMate, go to Bundles > LaTeX > Preferences … and set your viewer to Skim. Now you should be all set to write LaTeX documents in TextMate!