Google TV/Sony – This year my wife and I finally succumbed to purchasing a new TV. Rebecca had been researching for months and kept me updated on all of the latest trends in TV’s. One evening we were at Target and I saw the most beautiful LED flatscreen I’ve ever seen. The Sony NSX-46GT1 46″ is now hung above our fireplace and I’m constantly impressed with its beauty, especially watching sports. It has Google TV embedded which comes with some standard apps (Netflix, Twitter, HBOGO) and some standard OS goodies (Chrome, Gmail, etc). I’m excited to see what the future brings as more apps get written for it.

Instagram – Another fantastic iPhone app that has shaped my life. I love photography and am always on the hunt for capturing something beautiful. The community tie in with Twitter and Facebook makes it even more fun. Also worth noting is a web-based version of the app called Extragram. Follow me (as if): patatomic.

Dropbox – Possibly the best breakthrough in digital sharing since the flash drive. I use this just about every day in a variety of ways. It’s great to leave the office with all of my current files waiting for me at home to work on later.

Gotham Narrow – I’ve been using this typeface for a few years now, but have been using this more and more over the year. It’s a workhorse that is in the process of making my other “go-to’s” obsolete. It looks fantastic for headlines as well as body copy. Letter-spaced, all caps, bold…whatever. It holds up with however/whatever I do.

The Whole Love – This has been an amazing year for music. Tom Waits’ Bad As Me, Low’s C’mon, Radiohead’s The King of Limbs and PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake have all added to the audiosplosion that keeps an audiologist worried. According to iTunes, my most played album of this year is Wilco’s The Whole Love. It’s great to hear bands continue to create such great albums so far into their existence.

Catapulty – This Chrome plugin is fantastic to test websites on multiple browsers. Simply add the bookmarklets and kiss copying and pasting goodbye. It even works across platforms. I can “throw” a site from Opera and it’ll “hit” in Explorer. A simple concept, but makes my work-life that much better.

Lost Type Co-op – As an Art Director I’m constantly on the lookout for headline typefaces and these guys have delivered on more than one occasion (as witnessed by my latest design output). Their friendly donate-if/when-you-can makes for a great community model and I hope that it sticks as I’d like to see them around for a long time.

Gas Cubby App – A fantastic way to log miles and auto maintenance. It comes in a handy web version that syncs with your iPhone app. Very slick. Very useful.

Dribbble.com – Daily inspiration for my visual self. Sooooo much good work going on here. I just wish I was good enough (in my mind) to contribute.

Prezi.com – At work I was tasked with finding our sales team a better tool than PowerPoint, one that would make our company look tech-forward and offer a flexible means of presenting content. After a couple of days of searching I came across Prezi and haven’t looked back. While it isn’t there just yet, it’s easy to see that it’s well on its way. Web-based, iPhone & iPad app friendly with a fantastic user interface. Hopefully this next year will bring a couple of break-throughs that will cement it’s place in our corporate culture.

SSD – When I ordered my new workstation for my new job I was insistent on having a Solid State Drive. Never in my working life did I ever think anything other than a tower would be powerful enough to drive what I need to drive, but with an SSD I now use an iMac that has more power than any tower I’ve ever interacted with. Photoshop opens in about 3 seconds. Rebooting takes about 10. After Effects doesn’t chug. I can run Parallels/Windows without any kind of lag whatsoever. I’ve found my bliss. I’ll never own a computer without a Solid State Drive (until the next best thing comes along, of course).