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Jolt Awards: The Best Programming Utilities

The Jolt Judges, July 29, 2013 The top utilities that solve annoying development problems.
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Jolt Awards 2013: Utilities

Software development has always been filled with small, annoying tasks that must be performed but chew up valuable time. While the burden of these chores was bearable in the past, today's projects involve so much set up and such extensive preparation that it is almost a project in itself to set up a new project.

Thank goodness for the large number of utilities that can take on some of this work and relieve us from the tedium of manually solving a wide variety of housekeeping tasks. We looked at approximately 30 utilities — small standalone programs that address a single pain point — and selected the top six, which are presented here.

These products were extensively tested before being chosen and ranked: There are three finalists, two winners of the Jolt Productivity Award, and one winner of the Jolt Award for top utility of the year — which covers the last 12 months. We expect that several of these products will find immediate use in your environment.

The Jolt Judges for this category were: Andrew Binstock, Robert del Rossi, Gary Evans, Mike Riley, and Gigi Sayfan.

We thank the sponsors of the Jolt Awards: Rackspace and Safari Books Online. Now on to this year's best utilities…


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