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

[Kingbreaker]

Open Office
ABC MUS --> reads text-based music files and plays them back in MIDI. Very helpful for learning music by ear.

Itunes. . .

That's about it really.

[torstan]

Interesting thread, and some interesting software on that list. I guess our choices say a lot about us....

For me, using windows XP Media Edition:
maptool (obviously)
stickies - great way to keep notes and you can pin them to folders or apps. I get an initiative sticky whenever I open up maptoolfor example.
Open office - great for quickly pdfing documents
dropbox - a good free 2GB of filesharing and online backups that synchs with your computer
Picasa - much nicer previewer than windows, though really doesn't handle cmyk files.
emacs - well, not for everyone I'm sure, but it does help with coding
posterazor for cutting up large images into pdfs
Core ftp lite - good little ftp program
pdftk builder - great for collating pdfs into one document, or breaking up pdfs into separate documents

Other useful bits and pieces - xming and putty for working remotely, imagemagick for command line image processing.

[Karro]

For me:
For Writing:

• 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. It's core functionality is the ability to enter links in the page you are working on to pages that don't exist yet by enclosing the name of the page you want to link to in double-square-brackets. This allows me to say "Yada yada yada about subject A relates to [[Subject B]]" without having to detail everything about Subject B right now. It also has some other cool functionality that I found to be well worth the price. It just works the way my brain works.
  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.
  ConnectedText has a free one-month limited-function trial, and this is what sold me (even the limited-functionality was so much better, to me, than wikidpad that I was ready right away to slap my money down).
• Wordweb is a downloadable dictionary app that allows me to look up definitions, even when I'm not connected to the internet. Just let it run in the background and ctrl-right-click on some text to get a definition of a word. As a writer, I've often tried to stay disconnected from the temptations of the Web while writing, leaving my only alternative to dictionary.com or wiktionary.com to be the analog, manual-word-lookup (in a dead-tree edition dictionary) when I needed to make sure I had the right word (which often broke my rhythm) - until I discovered Wordweb. It's got a bizarre "free" license (it's free as long as you don't take too many flights during the year, or something like that; I don't travel much right now, so even if they could track me down, I'm still under their limit).

[Midgardsormr]

It's got a bizarre "free" license (it's free as long as you don't take too many flights during the year, or something like that; I don't travel much right now, so even if they could track me down, I'm still under their limit).

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.

[Karro]

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.

[Ascension]

Photoshop. That's all I need and use that I can't replace. If I were stuck on a desert island that had electricity to run my pc I'd have to have Civ 4 and the Fall From Heaven mod for Civ 4. Everything else I can work around as it's not so wonderful that I can't find something else to replace it.