Working in a digital agency, we're exposed daily to new ideas and ways of doing things. My mantra has always been to avoid randomly throwing technology at human problems. I'm a fan of trying new things, but also realise that nothing is perfect. Any new solution might solve some of your existing troubles but will, in all likelihood, introduce new challenges.

With this in mind, I want to put the spotlight on the software that has proven to be invaluable over the past year for myself and my coworkers here at Tangent One. The programs are varied and solve a wide variety of challenges we face daily.

Axure – Rapid Prototyping software

If you work in an agency that needs develop ideas for websites, mobile apps and the like, you should be prototyping your work. We now begin all our new builds and pitch work with a functional prototype.

The beauty of a prototype build within software such as Axure is that it allows you to identify and solve many functional challenges prior to commencing time-consuming design work. It also forces members of the team to think about the functionality of a piece of work throughout the entire project.

The best reason for using a prototype is getting buy in from clients. All projects take the client on a journey from ideas all the way through to delivery. If you skip a part of the journey, you'll have much greater difficulty delivering what the customer wants.

Dropbox – All your documents in the cloud

I've bored everyone I know talking about how much I love Dropbox, but really, now the business accounts give you 2 TB of data as standard, it's even better.

Essentially, I now have no worries about my documents. If I want to share a file with a client, I simply send them a dropbox link: no more emailing attachments. It has so many benefits including the most straightforward one: we can access our documents anywhere.

Virtual Box – Virtualising dev environments

One of our biggest challenges for front-end-developers is making sure the websites they build work across many different browsers and operating systems. Previously, all the FEDs would have something such as VM Fusion setup on their Macs with licenses and installations of Windows, etc.. Each machine would then need to run the VM to test in browsers with the performance impacts.

Step in our $600 beast of a machine from eBay: we got a desktop AMD 64 processor and 16gig of ram among other things. We then installed Virtual Box on this machine within Ubuntu with the help of a great script found on github.

That one script give us a complete setup of the free Microsoft virtual machines with IE7, 8 and 9. With a bit of tweaking, the FEDs (or anyone else) can then connect to any of the virtual machines and straight onto IE7 easily.

Omniplan

Running and planning projects is a standard task that takes up a lot of my day. Previously I have used tools as varied as Excel to Microsoft Project to track and plan projects, all with varying levels of success.

In the past year I have started to use Omniplan to get an overview of any project. It helps to view all of the required tasks and dependencies in a format that clients can understand. The fact you can also export a plan as HTML and host it somewhere is great: I simply send the client a link to the outputted file which they can view in their browser at their leisure.

Yammer – An enterprise social network

Getting people to talk to each other in any organisation I have worked for has always been a challenge. Even in a small team of 10 people like ours, communication can start to fail if we don't pay attention. This is not good for people who need to work collaboratively.

Yammer provides us with a free platform for staff to communicate in a similar way to how people communicate with friends on Facebook, which is great as people instantly know how to use it and feel comfortable.

Yammer also solved a challenge of where staff can put up great ideas they've had, links to interesting websites, or new techniques they have learnt. We now have a constant stream of people sharing things of interest with each other in a central, non-distracting environment.

Tweetdeck

Keeping tabs on what is going on around the world in real time is made much easier via Twitter. I have only ever used Tweetdeck as a client on my Mac and find it just works. There were issues with memory use but since upgrading my Mac to 8Gb of ram I don’t notice any more.

Editor's note: I prefer a simpler, more streamlined Twitter client. I've tried Tweetdeck, and for me it's too busy and distracting. Echofon for Mac ticks all my boxes, and also allows me to easily run my personal account and the Tangent One account simultaneously. Each to their own!

Tune In Radio (On Boxee)

Having a silent office was never going to work in my book. We started with an iPod dock in the office and people would play music from their devices. This was a good idea at first, but became a bit repetitive after a while.

To solve this, we purchased a Boxee, which is similar to an Apple TV but open source so Moose (Jon Moss) is happy. There are a bunch of great apps on the Boxee, but the most used by far here is Tune In Radio, which allows us to stream music from radio stations all around the world directly into the office.

We now have almost unlimited access to different types of music, and play genres from Country Music to Movie soundtracks and everything in-between.

Coconut Battery – Mac battery monitor

Finally, as a Macbook Pro user I find it very annoying that I cannot change the battery in my laptop. Coconut Battery helps with this, being a simple, easy way to keep a check on the health of the battery and make sure I cycle the power monthly.