It’s that time of year where I start looking back on how Silverpine has done, and one of the things I do every year is document and catalog the tools that we used in the past year. You can find previous years here: 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020

Silverpine is a mobile-first software design and development agency and as such our tools generally fall into three general buckets:

  • Communication
  • Development and Design
  • Operations

This year, I’m also going to add a new category. (You can probably even guess what it is before I even mention it.) I’m breaking out AI into its own tools category. The past year has been one of incredible pace in regards to AI and the workplace, and we have opted to embrace and explore what capabilities we can use to make us better and faster.

Every time I do this, I try to be as exhaustive as I can in my list, but I always seem to forget something. If you don’t see a tool that you would expect to see, please reach out. Also, if you have suggestions for alternative or better tools, I’d love to hear about them! We are constantly trying to refine our toolset. Kaizen baby!!!

Communication

Slack - Leading up this category again is the trusty, old Slack. We are a fully remote organization and that can only be pulled off with a tool like Slack. We regularly use the Huddles, Notes and Canvas features in addition to the core messaging. And with over 10 years of searchable chat history, Slack is an absolutely indispensable part of our day-to-day operation.

Zoom - My approval rating for Zoom this year has fallen quite a bit. As a tool, it seems to have stagnated and honestly, they launched a UI/UX refresh at some point during the year that, to be blunt, is a huge miss. I have many complaints about it, but chief among them is that it's now incredibly hard to find the "schedule meeting" link. This should be the simplest of things for a conferencing application! Anyway, we still use Zoom for now because the core audio and video tools are still the best, but I'm not locked into it at all. There are lots of options for video-conferencing software - from Teams to Google Meet to WebEx. As I've said before, we have used the vast majority of them and still nothing has dethroned Zoom. One caveat that I mentioned last year is that for internal meetings, we exclusively use Slack's Huddles. For external meetings though, we still (for now) use Zoom.

Google Workspace - We regularly use Docs, Sheets, Drive and Gmail. They are fine. There's nothing particularly special about them, although I do find that Drive doesn't work nearly as seamlessly as Dropbox.

Dropbox - We barely use Dropbox, but we have enough legacy documents that we have a couple old accounts still hanging around. If Dropbox had better pricing for small teams, we would probably use it over Google Drive, but Dropbox is pricey enough that we can live with the deficiencies of Drive for our team sharing.

Keynote - We continue to use Apple's Keynote to design and present for clients. Compared to PowerPoint, it's just night and day easier in terms of usability.

Operations

Harvest - Many people use Harvest for time-tracking and while it's a great tool for that function, we use it for invoicing clients. It has a pretty great search and history function. My only wish is that it had better visual reporting capabilities.

Gusto - We have been using Gusto for payroll for years. In general, we still are big proponents of it. However, one annoying "feature" is that they keep rolling out new support tiers and for any business of any significant sophistication, you need to keep upgrading. It's annoying, but I do feel like we get solid value out of it. We use it for payroll, benefits and sub-contractor management.

Quickbooks - We use Quickbooks, and since the CPA propped-up monopoly shows no signs of cracking, you probably should use it too. This paragraph is unchanged from last year, just like Quickbooks.

Adobe Acrobat Pro - Adobe's spyware is annoying. And they take (rightfully so) a lot of heat for some of their licensing decisions, but using Acrobat Pro to handle our document digitization hasn't been a difficult choice. Whenever we need to add signatures to paper documents and create digital versions of them, Acrobat just works.

Excel - As much as I want to fully embrace the paradigm of the Google Workspace the one tool I can't ditch is Excel. Google Sheets is just no match for it, and I very often find I need to work on spreadsheets while in an offline mode. Excel while old, is really just great.

Development and design

Xcode - If you write iOS or Mac software (as we do) using Xcode is really the only option. I know that some people have hybrid setups with alternative text editors, and while I won't judge those people, I really do think it's just easier to use Xcode. However, I do wish Apple would focus a bit on stability and performance instead of adding features.

Android Studio - I don't personally do Android development, but I know that our Android engineers use Android Studio. It's free so I don't mind, and it sounds like there's not really a better alternative.

VS Code - It is remarkable how good VS Code is given that it's free and offered by Microsoft. Our engineers use either this or Nova for any non-native projects.

Nova - I've used Nova a few times and it's fairly intuitive and has a large, well supported plug-in architecture to a diverse set of development environments. It's a very viable alternative to VS Code, and while it isn't free like VS Code, it does have some advantages. Panic makes great products.

Tower - We don't mandate a Git client at all, but we do provide a "default" for the team. Tower is always improving and the fact that it's cross platform really seals the deal for us.

GitHub - Every now and then I am forced to use Bitbucket, and it makes me appreciate GitHub. We've been slowly moving more of our CI infrastructure into GitHub Actions as well.

Figma - The current reigning champion of wire framing and design is Figma. I was quite relieved when the Adobe acquisition fell through because it would have recreated a monolithic design beast and totally squashed meaningful competition. As it stands now, Figma and Adobe keep pushing each other to add more tools, better functionality, and overall end-user value.

Adobe Creative Cloud - While Figma wears the crown for more expansive UI and UX work, nothing beats Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects for nitty gritty design work. I'm definitely not a fan of what they've done, trying to incorporate "AI" into the tools, but for the good old tried and true image manipulation, it's still the best.

BBEdit - I don't personally use BBEdit, but a sizeable number of our team does. Primarily, they use it for large file manipulation and inspection as well as just a general quick "scratchpad" for writing and note taking. It's tremendous how long BBEdit has been around and that it's still a daily driver for so many people.

AI Tools

Before jumping into the list, I want to clarify that Silverpine doesn’t mandate an AI toolchain. We actually encourage our team to try a lot of different tools and experiment to try to find the solution that fits best for them and the tasks they have. The pace of change is AI development is staggering and our best strategy is to both embrace it and explore it as fully as we can. We regularly check-in with each other and try to share best practices, the result being that we have a fairly large number of tools in play despite being a small company.

ChatGPT - I'd say about 1/2 of our team uses ChatGPT on a daily basis. We use both the core platform as well as Codex which integrates with GitHub and performs automated code reviews. OpenAI continues to push AI forward at a blistering pace, which isn't any surprise that so much of our team uses it.

Cursor - I only recently started using Cursor, but if you write code, it is an absolute game changer. You can select which LLM you want to use so you aren't locked into any one specific platform, but right out of the box, it will make you a faster, better developer.

Claude - Looking at our team's usage of AI, I'd say that Claude is the Pepsi to ChatGPT's Coke. The folks that use Claude swear by it, and the Sonnet and Opus models seem comparable to the later GPT models. One small addition I would add here though, is that the Claude Code tool is a pretty interesting command line tool that is a good alternative to Cursor.

Gemini - We only have a few people that use Gemini and most of them don't use it for coding tasks. They generally use it more for general research. You would think that Google would be further along with LLM tooling, but if my team is any indication, they are clearly running at the back of the pack in terms of developer adoption.

GitHub Copilot - Personally, I don't like Copilot. I don't think it's very good and I don't think it creates very good code. We do have a handful of people that will use it from time to time, but I think that's mostly because it's integrated directly into GitHub which is a critical tool in our pipeline. I definitely don't recommend it, but your mileage may vary.