I went over a number of tools (in the technology section) of my presentation at Userconf. Here’s some link love to some of those utilities (as well as a quick rundown on how I made some of it work):
- Zendesk: and probably (for the sake of this presentation), the Zendesk API
- Adium: IM client for Mac. In my case, I’ve got a trigger set up in Zendesk that calls a URL which fires an script I’ve got running on a server that talks to Google Talk. It’s a bit technical to set up, but there are simpler alternatives, like using Zapier.
- GeekTool: (Mac Store link) Lets you display stats/script output right on your desktop. In the case of ticket stats and response times, those numbers come out of the stats we’ve crunched based on the data from the Zendesk API.
- blink(1): USB light Kickstarter project. The blink will let you set the color of the light a number of different ways – you can do it manually, they have a tie in with IFTTT, or you can set it to request a URL and use the color returned (RGB value) as the color for the light. I’ve got a Zendesk trigger that updates the value in a text file on my server when new tickets come in – new tickets, light is red. No tickets, light is green.
- LIFX light bulbs: I don’t have this in hand yet, so I can’t say much about implementation. Check out the Kickstarter video though and shake you head at just how silly I am.
- Alfred: (Mac app store link) run web searches with a couple of keystrokes. You can search our help documents just like Google by putting a ?q=SEARCH_TERMS on to the end of the URL.