• Math – Just enter your formula (ex. 120*16) hit enter and get the magic result. Note to students: do not try entering things like “A train leaving Boston at 5:30am and  another in New York leaving at 6:59 pass each other outside of Piscataway at 7:38. How many words per minute was each train conductor texting on average during the trip?”
• Definitions – Need to check the definition of a word before you embarrass yourself in a blog post? Just type define: the word or phrase. Google spits out a full page of definition results immediately. (ex. define: video production)
• Weather – You’re about to head out to make that big proposal, and you want to know if you really need to take along a heavy rain coat, because your girlfriend kindly told you last week how dorky you looked in it, and you’d rather not make that kind of impression on the company who stands to make your year, if things go well. Google to the rescue. Just type weather proceeded by the location you want to inquire about, and you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting the answer on the first line, complete with pretty little graphic aids. (ex: weather Nashville) Note: despite Google’s legendary algorithms, it is no better at making accurate weather predictions than that guy on channel 5. Remember, Google only shows you what it thinks you WANT to see…
• Shipment tracking – I just tried this one out by accident, only to find out it’s a real feature! Half-slain by sleep deprivation, but still eager to find out where TigerDirect was in the process of getting me some new toy I’d ordered, I copied and pasted a “onezie” (all UPS ground tracking numbers start with a 1Z) into the google search bar. Two clicks later, I was looking at my package online!  Try it!
• Area Code Lookup - Couldn’t be simpler. Just type the 3-digit area code into the search bar, and you’ll immediately know what part of the country it belongs to. Now you can know where that mysterious number is calling you from before you even send it to voicemail!
  
• Time – I frequently need to talk to people overseas (India, Sweden, France, Spain, Uzbekistan, to name a few) and trying to remember the time differences at any given point in the year is an embarrassing nightmare. Good client relations are not served well by accidental 3am calls. No problem, just enter time followed by the location in question, and you’ll have your answer, including the date, in case the time zone is over the International date line. (ex. time sweden)

So there’s six quick ones, and I have not even touched on the search modifiers like site: or link:, which are incredibly useful as well.  Let me know what other ones you regularly use!

Over the years, we have locked in on a “go-to” set of old faithfuls. Almost without fail, these plugins are installed before the first pixel is altered or the first word penned.  So without further delay, here’s our list of 10 WordPress plugins we cannot live without (feel free to ad your links to other indispensables in the comments below):

1. All-In-One SEO Pack Does what is says…says what it does. Finer-tuned adjustments of keywords and page titles.
2. Ad Rotator Widget A highly flexible little bit of code, perfect for callouts and, well, ads, of course.
3. FormBuilder Essential for sites that need multiple, different, customized forms, and a simple interface for managing and assigning them to pages. Go ahead…get carried away!
4. PodPress The quintessential plugin for managing a podcast on WordPress. It’s the little extras that have always wowed us with this one, and the incredible work put into it by Dan Kuykendall!
5. Google XML Sitemaps Some say it helps, others say don’t bother. But every time we install it on an established blog, we see positive jumps. That’s reason enough for us!
6. Maintenance Mode Making changes under the hood? Switch over to a maintenance page with the click of a button. Stylable, customizable, clean, simple functionality. Surprised this one hasn’t been baked into the core code already. Just remember to turn it off when you are done.
7. Subscribe2 Yes, it’s admittedly pretty Web 1.0, but we still have people who prefer to sign up for email notices. Who are we to stand in the way of those standing in the way of progress, right?
8. WP Email Also old-school, but clients always ask for this functionality, and the potential for abuse has never materialized for us. Anyone disagree?
9. WP Print The super-fast and easy way to get a stylesheet up and running for print-versions of your posts.
10. Akismet (of course!) If you don’t know what this one does, it’s because you’ve been so buried in spam email for YEARS that you haven’t been able to come up for air. Pity.
11. BONUS: ThinkDesign Blog’s Test Post Pack A no mess, no fuss way to make sure yo are styling all your elements correctly, without forgetting anything. Sure beats the manual method of creating a bunch of posts, ages and comments with various kinds of content!

These fine coders are all worthy of your accolades and donations. Because of them, web sites actually DO things.

(TIP for designers: I created a directory on my computer that contains all of these plugins, so copying them up to a new WP instalation is super-quick. They are all outdated versions, of course, but with WP v2.7, I can click and upgrade them all very quickly before activating them.)

1) An immediately accessible line on my Today Page, where I could text my Tweet and get it live with no hassle, just like Twit Today (bravo on this, Dale Lane!)

2) A compact yet beautiful stream browser with avatars, an easy way to @ someone’s specific Tweet, and even integrate with TwitPic, like ceTwit, although the UI on that one needs a sprucing, imho.

3) The familiar “Older” button from the Twitter site, for going back in the stream a ways. Of all the apps I tested, NONE had this, and I cannot imagine that it would be that hard to do.

For mobile use, this is about all I really want. Account management, follow/unfollow, etc. is not all that important to me.

Thanks in advance!

(Update: I just found pocketwit and it has pretty much THE BEST interface design of all of them I found. Avatars, twitpic support with access to camera and image browser, GPS updating. And a Sa-weeet kinetic interface! Kudos and thanks!)

Perhaps the most genteel new feature is the simplest one: the ability to preview mp3 compression settings before rendering a whole file. How considerate of Adobe! And what a time-saver, especially in the typical web production workflow we employ around here.

Other, more revolutionary features of note:

• Multitrack!
• Batch track volume matching
• Beat Detection technology (pretty accurate, too!)
• Improved volume and pan drawing controls in the waveform mode
• Audio extraction from imported video files (works with an impressive slew of codecs)
• Audio “Snapshots” in the history state, similar to Photoshop

While a good number of these features aren’t truly inventive (programs like Cakewalk’s SONAR have been doing some of these things for years), their addition to Soundbooth raises the level of usefulness of this particular production workhorse a good deal. With the multitrack functionality, I might be inclined to reach for this app over Audition for a lot of projects.

Go Adobe!