I swore I'd finish this tonight. But I have work to do.
To Be Continued...
Jumping off from Matt and Eric‘s posts on desktop productivity, and in light of my lack thereof with OSX, I started making a list of stuff that makes my W2K environment a much more pleasant one to work in. This has become a monstrous post, which I’ve been adding on to for the past week or so. Like my Mozilla post it’s one of those massive things that really should go in a separate section. This one’s a doozy.
General System
Sure W2K is boring, but it works (note: this statement does not apply to W9x; s/works/mostly works/ for NT/XP), everyone knows the keyboard shortcuts, and you’re ready to get started almost from the install. After you’re done with all the service packs and those pesky critical updates, there are some general system utilities that are very nice.
Microsoft’s own NT PowerToys are a good start. They’re all pretty useful.
The next step is to cURL and wget for Windows, two completely indispensible tools. Personally, I like installing Cygwin, with BASH, the GNU textutils, and OpenSSH being some of the most useful stuff. Now, understandably, some people prefer to use Windows specific builds vs the Cygwin stuff when possible. I’m sort of in the “don’t care, whatever’s clever” camp on that.
Putting the various cmdline tools in your path is a good idea. Cygwin will do that for it’s own stuff. If you just have a few tools, you can place it your Windows system folder, but I have a BELFRY folder that I keep in my path. Old-school DOS people will get remember about that. In anycase, while I’ve been using Winzip for years (UltimateZip is a freeware tool that has some very neat stuff. I’ve just never had a need to use it), but of course I my lha, pkzip, arj, rar, ace, and expand executables in my path (and the GNU ones of course). Never know when you’ll need ’em but they’re good to have (if now harder to find – try finding lha, it’s a real bitch).
Hmm, as far as other stuff. I registered Chameleon Clock about 4 years ago (back around when it first came out), and it has been an indispensible tool for me. No updates for quite a while, but that’s OK because it’s pretty much perfect for what it does. HyperSnap and HyperCam are two cool tools. HyperSnap-DX v3 is available for free. Qarbon’s Viewlet Builder is also free, and very cool for doing demos and such. (there are quite a lot of free screen capture tools it seems)
Eric mentioned Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar. I haven’t used it, but it looks cool. One of my friend’s is really into LiteStep, which I’m sure is very cool and no doubt much stabler than the last time I touched it several years ago. I’d pick it up and try it again, but I think I’m much to lazy to actually tweak with it enough to get it to my liking.
MetaPad is a great lightweight tool that I’ve been using as a notepad replacement since my friend has told me about it. Although I still primarily use ultraedit, it’s nice to have something slightly smaller to replace notepad.exe with.
Production
For me, production means webstuff. For the graphics part, there’s really no getting around it, you’re going to need Photoshop and Illustrator. The coding stuff is a bit more interesting. There are the old standbys, vim and emacs, although for the past few years, I’ve mostly been using UltraEdit. For most production work, I was using HomeSite, but while it smokes, say BBEdit, it honestly hasn’t been going anywhere for the past few versions. Luckily, I was introduced to HTML-Kit (w/ built in HTML Tidy integration), an editor that pretty much blows everything else out of the water. It’s that good. As I was saying on wd-l: Best. Web Editor. Ever. And it’s free. Not Free (with a capital F) as in libré, but free beer ain’t bad. I’ll be releasing a little plugin of my own for it soon. For CSS work, TopStyle is really great. I’ve yet to try Style Master (available for Mac Classic as well).
One last tool that is Free, but not really under active development is Syntap’s Time Stamp. It’s the best work timer I’ve found so far, and gives me a good excuse to put off writing my own web-based one even though it’s really something I should do (it’s on my list, really).
Internet
Mozilla has it’s own post already of course. For IE, there’s the Google bar, and Microsoft’s Web Accessories (the WA, Power Tweaks, and Developer WA are all useful). Also, I still use the WDG WiDGets sometimes.
For file transfers, I was a longtime CuteFTP user, but it got way too expensive. I switched to LeechFTP until development was stopped, and was considering BitBeamer but instead went with CuteFTP Pro. While it worked pretty well, it was 1.0 software and it showed. I’m sure it’s better now, but I’ve been using SmartFTP, which is does most of what I need and is free. The only thing that’s really missing is SFTP (it has SSL). Synchronization would be nice but I’ll live.
Tools for remote connections: PuTTY is a free SSH/Telnet client. There are also (immature) SCP and SFTP implementations. SSH has it’s SSH/SFTP client available for free for education/non-commercial use. Some people like to use the VanDyke tools (SecureCRT, AbsoluteFTP, SecureFX), but I’m pretty much covered already.
Other stuff: TightVNC is a version of VNC with compression. Trillian of course is the best instant message ever. Well so far that is. Looking forward to (hopefully): Jabber support, XML message archiving / archive viewer, scripting. Oh, The Proxomitron is a great proxy/filter, and of course, if you’re online with Windows, you really should be running Zone Alarm.
Media
Can’t code without music right? I’ve found EAC, LAME (settings) and WinAMP to work really well. Two other indispensibles: MP3ext and dbPowerAmp Music Converter.
For video, Sasami2K is awesome. DivX of course (even with that whol OpenDivX fiasco. (Say, does anyone have any hope for MPEG4?) If you must install Real Player, be sure to fix your mime types. Here’s a little reg file I wrote to fix that problem. Oh, and don’t forget to get your Streambox VCR, heheh.
Lastly, for image viewing, I’ve been using ACDSee for years, although it’s grown chunky. A lot of people seem to like Irfanview, which is small, fast, free and even has JPEG2000 support. Pretty cool. I’ve tried Thumbs Plus, Extensis Portfolio, and a few other image management tools, but never stuck with one of them.
Actually, speaking of organization, I’ve tried quite a few of them. I got burnt on Helium (they never finished the original and moved right on to selling Helium2, the bastards)… Hmm, one program I can really recommend is WhereIsIt. I’ve bought it a few years ago (it used to be cheaper then it is now) and have been using it on and off for years. It does quite a bit of stuff and is well worth trying out.
Wrapping Up
So, there’s my collection of indispensible software. I’m sure everyone has their own list. The funny thing about all this is how so much shareware and commercial software has been superceded by freeware. I haven’t really gone looking around much recently since I have almost everything I need (more than enough to distract me from getting work done), but NONAGS has been the best resource for me when I need to find something.
