We use a lot of tools in the course of a project. From collaboration software to billing suites, an opensource jabber server for chat to an internally-developed release management system, our infrastructure is of very high value to every team member and client.
There are some tools, though, that are relevant to the Mobile practice that kind of blow the rest of our applications out of the water.
LiveView for iPhone & iPad
http://www.zambetti.com/projects/liveview/
It is inconceivable that this is a free app, but it won't be for long I don't think. According to project creator Nicholas Zambetti, "LiveView is a specialized remote screen viewing application intended as a tool to help designers create graphics for mobile applications, it has also proven to be useful for creating quick and dirty simulations, demos, and experience prototypes." Rapid prototyping is a key to success in the mobile space, and this tool helps you nail it faster.
The 1140px CSS Grid System/Framework
http://cssgrid.net/
I was always a big fan of http://960.gs (ninesixty theme in Drupal terms), as well as the zen960 and other derivatives. Often the requirement to make a wider site breaks 960 and you wind up bastardizing the original framework to suit a need. Worse yet, you then need to address theming for mobile, which gets harder as you scale out. The 1140px system meets that need in a very unique way: It scales all the way down to the smallest mobile screen size. According to the project page, "The 1140 grid fits perfectly into a 1280 monitor. On smaller monitors it becomes fluid and adapts to the width of the browser." It's pretty hot.
Phantom Limb
https://github.com/brian-c/phantom-limb
This project is hosted on github and makes touch events -- the most elusive of things to demo without various devices -- something that you can deploy in a browser. Your client isn't in town? No worries. Deliver a prototype -- not a simulated recording -- over the Internet. That improves feedback response time by a lot and even gets feedback from sources you wouldn't have had by doing device-based prototypes. (Emails get forwarded!)
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