Thread: What are your essential (non-cartographic) software picks?

I'm always pleased to learn about some new USEFUL software - thanks folks!

A few things that I use semi-regularly in addition to the usual MS/Adobe stuff:

Audio:
Songbird & MusicBrainz Picard (I'm still waiting for a seamless integration of the two)
Audacity
WinAmp (the old free version)

Video:
Media Player Classic + K-Lite Codec Pack or XP Codec Pack (pretty much ensures I can play anything out there video-wise)
Extreme Movie Manager (the only program I've found that organizes and outputs as I'd like, although it has some frustrating parts)

Graphics:
Stereo Photo Maker
GMapImageCutter (as of late)
Stereoscopic 3d Viewer
flickrLeech

Utilities:
Daemon Tools Light
WinDirStat
Recuva
7-zip
Spybot Search & Destroy


E-books Etc:
cDisplay
ABC Amber's converters
FileZilla FTP Client
WinRar
QuickPar
Rename-It!

Games:
Sea3d (a settlers of Catan game)
Carcasonne Deluxe

I'll chip in with my set if you like...

DevStudio's IDE for editing text, code & html & Wordpad when I cant be bothered to load the full studio.
GnuMake for building stuff. WinMerge for file diffs.

Perl, ImageMagick & PerlMagick. XCopy for backup. 7 Zip on occasion but I use XP's built in zip most of the time.

Firefox with no script and adblock. Thunderbird. FileZilla, My own calendar.

OpenOffice doc editor. I dont use any of the others. FoxIt PDF viewer.

SysInternals Process Viewer which is an honest to god life saver.

IrfanView for pics, VLC for movies, CamStudio for capture, MediaCoder for conversion.

PSP for raster editing, My own spatial filter for image editing in the spatial domain, Light wave and blender for 3D modeling, GeoTerSys for terrain, my own programmable texturer, ViewingDale for map and big image viewing.

Thats mostly it. A lot of command line stuff and some more obscure things too but thats the big app list I think. I find it hard when I do a day job and have to sit at a desk without a lot of these tools and command line apps.

Graphics
--------
Photoshop
3D Studio Max
InDesign
PDFCreator
Spyder2 Express

Development
------------
VMWare Workstation
Linux (various flavors)
Scite (text editor)
UltraCompare Pro (a fancy diff tool)
Wireshark (formerly Ethereal)
Perl
Visual Studio
Gcc

Sound
-----
Sound Forge
Sonar
Native Instruments Komplete
Kirk Hunter Orchestra
Acid Pro
AudioGrabber
Total Recorder Pro
Band in a Box
Various East/West libraries
Rhapsody

Misc
----
WinZip
WinRar
Firefox w/ AdBlock+
WinSCP
PuTTY
Quicken
VLC Media Player
uTorrent
Alcohol 120%
DnD Character Builder (DDI)
Ventrilo
Extensis Suitcase
Word/Excel
OpenOffice

When I looked up some of that stuff, I fell over this:

http://notebook.wjduquette.com

Looks like one of those free Wiki things, and it might be very useful.

Have any other users of Winmerge found scrolling problems? I found when I was scrolling down a page it would duplicate a line of text all the way down, and then the two documents would get out of synch and...

Originally Posted by Midgardsormr

That's just weird; I don't think I've ever read a license quite like that one. At least it's written in clear English instead of legalese, though!

edit: Hmmm… page break again. This is a strange and wonderful talent that I have.

Yeah, pretty weird. I'm skeptical that they really think their app is significant enough to put a dent in global warming by having such a restriction. I find it useful (I like not having to use a dead-tree dictionary when I'm in the throes of writing, and I like being able to stay offline while writing as well), but it's not going to change the world. But yeah, except for the global warming tangent, it's a pretty straight-forward license.

A few duplicates that I won't repeat, but unmentioned ones in order of major use are:

Launchy- a windows alternative to quicksilver, I almost can't use a machine without it
Notepad++ a super coder's editor.
Faststone image viewer, browser, batch converter, annotation tool, and much more.
SMplayer for all my multimedia watching needs.
AVISynth a swiss army knife for video editing.
Windirstat for managing drive usage (I really like the pretty treemap it generates)

And lastly, not software, per say, but my 4GB Ironkey personal USB stick. I have traveled around the world using this baby in any number of internet cafe's, etc. Loaded up with a bunch of portable apps (openoffice, gimp portable, winscp, putty) I am good to go, with all my bookmarks and passwords securely encrypted. Using the on board firefox and the optional TOR anonymous router, I never worry about leaving cookies and passwords on other people's machines Plus I can read the encrypted files under linux, not just windows.

-Rob A>

Oh yes, reading above comments I should have mentioned that I run TinyWeb the http server and also the perl based usemod wiki. I have that set as my home page so I just add links to stuff in as a wiki. Theyre both free and not too difficult to set up either. Cant live without these two now either. Got so used to having them I forgot to even mention them.

Sometimes I use TrueCrypt when the need arises but thats not all that often.

Gosh. I'm sure happy with the turn out! This is great.

Originally Posted by Karro

• As mentioned here: ConnectedText ($30) is a personal wiki-type-thing for keeping track of notes and ideas, etc. I use it as a project notebook where I can keep track of all my ideas and thoughts on a particular subject....
  If free is more your price, I used Wikidpad before I discovered ConnectedText. Wikidpad has the same core "personal wiki" functionality, but ConnectedText has some great features that Wikidpad lacks, and has a much better looking, more polished, and easier-to-use UI.

Have you tried out TidleyWiki? Its a personal, local, wiki designed to be stored on a flash drive so you can carry it around. I've been playing around with it, but don't know what use it would be. There was a script for exporting Yojimbo to it, but my Yojimbo DB is over 2 gigs, so it crashes Firefox when I try to load the wiki.

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

Daemon Tools Light [...]
WinDirStat [...]
Rename-It! [...]
Carcasonne Deluxe

Daemon tools is a great suite. I always used PSTools though, cause they were free and my company was poor.

WinDirStat is one of those essential programs any techy with a MS machine needs.

CARCASONNE IS A VIDEO GAME? OMG! I love the tile placing game. I need to investigate this. I've been to the ACTUAL Carcasonne. I almost got hit by a truck there. Here's a funny pic I found on the net one day.

Originally Posted by Redrobes

I'll chip in with my set if you like...

That's kinda the idea of the thread...

Originally Posted by loydb

Scite (text editor) [...]
UltraCompare Pro (a fancy diff tool) [...]
Perl [...]
Visual Studio [...]

I've never hear of Scite. When I was a PC I used Crimson Editor, now I use TextWrangler.

UltraCompare Pro. I will look into this.

I spent many an hour of my productive life re-installing various versions of Visual Studio for our programmers who seemed to delete important files as a joke. Visual Studio always seemed to me (an admin, not a programmer) like a great set of tools, and well layed out.

Originally Posted by RobA

A few duplicates that I won't repeat, but unmentioned ones in order of major use are [...]

Launchy- a windows alternative to quicksilver, I almost can't use a machine without it
Notepad++ a super coder's editor.
Faststone image viewer, browser, batch converter, annotation tool, and much more.
[...]
Windirstat for managing drive usage (I really like the pretty treemap it generates)

And lastly, not software, per say, but my 4GB Ironkey personal USB stick.

Please, repeat! Me not so good at reading... miss things. Repetition is good.

What was I doing again?

I never knew there was a windows version of quicksilver. Then again, I didn't know there was a quicksilver until about two months ago.

Notepad++ is great. I don't remember why, but I started using Crimson Editor instead. I think my spyware program kept having a problem with one of its benign components or something.

Fastone sounds really useful.

Ironkey Personal sounds like a great tool. I may have to check it out.

Someone had mentioned a renaming utility, and I think I accidentally removed it from the quotes... Anyway, I used ... crap. I can't find it. It had a really generic name like "Batch Filename Utility" or something, which makes it impossible to search for. Its interface was fantastic. All the different actions were layed out at the bottom of the screen and you turned them on or off with check boxes. Sigh. I loved that program. I use NameMangler, which is free and sub-par compared to the one I used with a PC.

I created at standardized set of tools for the IT guys at work. I wish I could remember what they were.

Lots of stuff in these lists that I already use but here are a few that I didn't see;

Abiword for Text editing/Web-page (quick formatting features for both CSS and mark-up) editing. Freeware with downloadable spelling dictionaries in various languages

Nerosystems for Audio Rip and Burn

Dover Design Manager - Not really free, but a great plus from Barnes and Noble as far as finding little accents for graphics/maps based on various themes.

ASFTools for video editing (used rarely but a nice freeware application that is much easier to use than Moviemaker)

And then, of course, as mentioned in my profile software list, a number of Javascripts for developing quick details when it comes to astronomy and/or astrology.

Other than that, I really don't use a huge number of software apps or packages. But that's my two and a half cents worth.

GW