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Koa and I are fiends for a good coffee shop. Not just the coffee, either – we want nice chairs, a fat wifi pipe, good tunes, and the great energy that you find in a room full of people doing work they love. So, today, Coffee apps.

Finding Coffee ($.99)

• Nonstandard map/zoom controls – these are super clunky! The developer would have been much better off using ZoomButtonsController.
• Only finds big-brand stops – not independent coffeeshops (The ‘bucks is a solid, reliable choice, but it will never be surprisingly good, which is what we’re holding out for…)

Compare with: Find a Starbucks ($1.49)

• The exact same problems as the above app…
• BUT! Here we get a list view, filter by features, including ‘currently open’ or ‘has drive-through’. I can get behind that – those are dealbreakers for some cases.

Perfect Coffee (Free)

• Clean, snappy, easy to use. Does what it says it’ll do, which is always good.
• The workflow is clever, because it follows the user’s problem-solving thought process: start with the amount of coffee you want, and work backwards. Knows that you might only have a teaspoon and a metric flask available. (Everything else is probably in the dishwasher)

Compare with: Coffee Measures (Free)

• Does what it says, and with a little bit more mathiness to it. You can choose to make a stronger brew or adjust for your machine. Not bad!
• Buuuut… the UI design just isn’t as hot as Perfect Coffee – It’s a little too mathy. I need to put in my scoop size in tbsp and my cup size in ounces per cup.

These are all interesting apps, and they all do one niche useful thing that we only spend a couple seconds a day doing – that’s a one interesting ‘category’ of app. In order to win in that category, you have to be fast, full featured, and user-aware. Tough competition out there in the coffee space.

Recently, we switched from our Trac/Pivotal/Subversion stack to Fogbugz and Kiln. We haven’t looked back and we couldn’t be happier with it! There are some really, really good reasons to switch:

1. Distributed Version Source Control is to centralized source control as source control is to not having source control. It solves the problem of potential moments of panic caused by the potential loss of code or the painful merging of two sets – now your changes won’t get mismerged or overwritten, and there’s even less chance of losing code. Kiln is built on mercurial, but provides a really excellent visualization of branching.
2. FogBugz has all the intelligence of Trac and then some, while still maintaining the ease of use, responsiveness, and simple shared todo-list feel of Pivotal.
3. The two systems know about each other, so no more trying to reconcile the todo list and the tickets.
4. We’ve barely used it. I know that sounds crazy, but we just get everything done so much faster, we’ve barely had to use it. Log in, create a ticket, see progress, choose a task, all take just a couple minutes. Something about it flows in a way that our previous setup didn’t.
5. Setup was incredibly easy – no asshole Trac plugins to mess with, just install Mercurial and leave the web browser open. No worrying about SSH forwarding or setting up users three times, no ma’am.

The last few projects have just gone solidly forward without misstep, and we are loving it. If you haven’t tried it yet, try FogBugz and Kiln for free on your next project – we don’t think you’ll look back, either.

Call Your Folks! is a featured app in the Android Market. Lucky us!

Call Your Folks! lets you set reminders to call your friends and relatives when you haven’t talked to them for a certain amount of time, so that you don’t fall out of touch. Give it a try and let us know how you like it.