My work machine was in desperate need of a wipe a few weeks ago. It has had scads of transient freelancers on it, and it started out as a Flash developer’s box, and has never in all this time been brought back to the metal. So in preparation for the reinstall, I jotted down a list of the apps I had and needed. Since it was little bother to annotate, I thought I’d post this to my site; maybe you’ll find a hidden gem that will make you more productive.

Web development

Macromedia Homesite, HTML editor

I’m actually using Allaire Homesite 4.5. I had to take a step back when I rebuilt my machine since the 5.5 disks had disappeared. When I moved from a Mac to a PC, I really doubted that some Delphi application could take the place of BBEdit. I was wrong; I’ve really come to love Homesite. With the CTRL-, and CTRL-. shortcuts and tag insight set to no-delay, I’m very, very fast at hand coding. I haven’t yet found an alternative I like as much. HTML-Kit lacks polish, and Dreamweaver is too … much.

Adobe Photoshop, Graphics editor

The GIMP doesn’t hack it. I use CS at work, but if I had my druthers I’d stick with PS7. I think that was the best mix of features with the least amount of cruft. But the designers like CS, so I get dragged along with them.

TortoiseCVS, TortoiseSVN, Source control clients

The Tortoise clients are the non-geek’s clients. Explorer integration is phenomenal, and most of the actions you need to take on a repository are only a right-click away.

Style Master 4.0, The only CSS editor worth talking about

I haven’t used this program to anywhere near it’s full capacity. This is the hands-down best tool for editing CSS. We bought a couple of licenses at work when we had to very quickly skin phpBB to match a client’s site. It did everything we wanted it to, very simply.

Notepad++, Notepad replacement with advanced features

I keep an awful lot of information around on my computer in Mardown format. We also do localisation at work using big key files. I edit all of this in Notepad++. In fact, if it isn’t HTML, PHP or CSS, I edit it in Notepad++. This is also the only editor I’ve used that does a good job of handling .NFO and .DIZ files. Its also one of very few GUI-based text editors that lets you view two separate buffers at once, a real boon for doing that aforementioned localisation.

Web browsers

Mozilla Firefox

If you don’t know about Firefox, you … probably aren’t the sort of person who would read my postings. On day two of her new job, my wife downloaded and installed Firefox. My father gave me a hard time for not showing it to him earlier; the type-ahead find is a life saver for his job. The plugin support is phenomenal, and some really smart people have put in a lot of hours extending this thing until its a platform, not just a web browser. If you are a web developer, the JS console, DOM browser, Web Dev toolbar are absolute must-haves.

Opera

Its free, now, and the EU really seems to love this browser. Its not my #1 choice — that’s Firefox — but I can certainly see the appeal.

IE

I use it for testing. I hate it. I wish people would wise up and switch to any other browser so I could stop testing for this inconsistent technical Typhoid Mary.

Productivity

Microsoft Outlook, Mail client and scheduling

I use it at work because I have too, and at home because I have a Pocket PC. I must say that its one of MS’ best products. With some work, you can really tweak it to work the way you want, and the plain text support keeps on getting better and better. If you use Outlook, I suggest you get QuoteFix. It makes Outlook quote the way every other mail client in the world quotes.

OpenOffice, Open source productivity suite

My company is moving to OpenOffice for everyone who doesn’t exchange documents with clients regularly. I’m good with this. I find OOo to be every bit as good as MS Office, and really like the cross platform behaviour.

AbiWord, Clean, task-focused word processor

If all you use an office suite for is the word processor, do yourself a favour and get AbiWord. It does what you need it too, and no more. It’s RTF and TXT smart. Best feature is the full screen mode which gets out of your way like nothing since WP5.1 for DOS. The GUI is also built in such a way that you find yourself using proper document formatting like headers, subheaders, etc, more than you may be used to. As an additional bonus for Pocket PC users, the application comes with filters to turn ABW and ZABW documents into Pocket Word-compatible formats automagically.

PDF Creator, PDF virtual printer

An open source alternative to the basic version of Adobe Acrobat. If all you need to do is save a document to a PDF, put that $70 back in your pocket, and install this.

Media players and viewers

iTunes, MP3 player and library

I like the new look, I love the browsing, and I dig the pod cast support. I wish Outlook integration was better. I hate the fact that it always wants to wipe my iPod, and that iTMS is always pimping free tracks not available to Canucks.

VideoLAN Client, Video and audio player

The last thing you want to do is crap-up your work machine with a tonne of codecs. So instead you get VLC, which supports nearly everything out of the box. Great for previewing audio clips since it doesn’t try to add everything to a library like many audio players out there.

IrfanView, Image previewer

Descriptive file names are not the forte of our design team here. IrfanView saves me from having to open every PSD in Photoshop to see if I have the right one. IrfanView also does a great job of guessing at file formats, has an adequate slideshow view, and some great batch conversion tools.

mp3ext, Explorer extension

This application changes your MP3 icons to reflect their bit rate, adds a page to properties that lets you edit ID3 tags, and provides ID3 tag info in the icon tool tips. Great if you’re of the drag-and-drop-folders variety of MP3 listener.

Acrobat Reader, PDF viewer

I try to love FoxIt Reader, but I just can’t. For nice, clean, readable type on screen, you need Acrobat Reader.

YamiPod, iPod manager

Its really frustrating that Apple has crippled iTunes so that you can’t share music libraries on an iPod amongst two computers. I was using PodPlayer and WinAmp with the iPod plug in for the longest time to play audio right off my iPod, but have switched to YamiPod more recently. It starts faster, and seems to be more stable. It doesn’t change the fact that I shouldn’t need this thing, anyway.

Various net-apps

Google Talk, Custom Jabber client

“Who would use this? It doesn’t have winks, or emoticons, or custom icons, and I can’t transfer files, and it won’t bring me breakfast in bed, and it doesn’t tell me I’m beautiful when I really feel like a fat blimp, and …” Its a simple, small, well-written instant messenger application that messages instantly. If you’re holding out in MSN land, I’m very annoyed with you.

MSN Messenger, The Great Distractor

This used to be MS’s greatest application. At around about the 4.5 days it looked a lot like Google Talk does now. Its easy to get caught up in all the customisation and the goofy multimedia stuff, but all that is just extra traffic across the network.

FileZilla, Two-pane FTP client

The server is good, and the client is amazing. This is the best open source application I’ve ever used, and the best ftp client ever. I particularly like the fact that you can use scp to transfer files, and it looks just like an ftp session.

PuTTY, Terminal emulator with SSH

Since I’m not one of the guys who regularly mucks about with the live servers, I don’t rate a copy of SecureCRT. Fine by me; I’ll take PuTTY any day. One of the nicest things about PuTTY is that most SSH-on-Windows tutorials use PuTTY as the example SSH client.

wget, HTTP downloader

wget is a command-line tool for downloading over http. You can use it to mirror sites. I mostly use it to snag embedded movies.

System and file

7-Zip, Archiving and compression

7-zip is an open source zip application that handles pretty much any archive I’ve come across in my day-to-day work. The GZip/TAR support is a nice touch if you deal with a lot of Mac and Linux folks. Explorer integration is great.

TaskSwitchXP, Alternate task list with a great UI

TaskSwitchXP captures ALT-TAB Microsoft’s ALT-TAB PowerToy for XP is pretty nice, but TaskSwitchXP goes the extra mile in configurability. Its nice to look at, and is a life saver for folks who like to keep their hands off the mouse.

freeCommander2005, Modern NC-work alike file manager

Its the two-pane set up that’s been rocking your file system since Norton donned a pink shirt. I use freeCommander for the great UNC path support, and for its faithfulness to the nc/mc shortcuts I sort-of remember from my dumb-terminal days at university. DOS command line support is great, too, since I use wget quite a bit.

DM2, Explorer window-management enhancement

DM2 is a great little-does everything application that adds features to your windows interface. I really only use two features, but they’re worth the cost of admission alone. DM2 gives me a shortcuts menu in save dialogues that’s pretty easily configured. Great for the days when I’m working on scads of clients at once. The other is the ability to roll windows up into their title bar, as in the old Mac OS. I use opacity and the ability to drop a window to the bottom of the stack from time-to-time as well.

antiword, Word document converter

I was happy to find a version of Antiword that doesn’t require cygwin, or all kinds of libraries to run. Antiword takes almost any kind of Word document and creates clean ASCII text. Its a command-line tool, so not everyone’s bag, but I like to use it to clean up junky copy decks to add to web pages. Run the text through Markdown, and half your job is done for you already.

Firefox extensions

I loaded my browser up with extensions at one point. It became really unstable. These are the few I still use.

• downThemall! is perfect for MP3 blogs. Using this tool, you can directly download any link that goes to a specific media type through one dialogue
• IE View adds “View this page in IE” to the right-click menu. You can also set rules to always open certain pages in IE
• LiveLines allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds in sites and tools other than Firefox’s built-in RSS reader
• MeasureIt lets you drag a box over an area to get the height and width
• Web Developer adds a toolbar to Firefox with options to make on-the-fly changes to CSS, the size of your browser window, as well as the ability to disable and clear parts of the page. Many other features I don’t use that often. The most powerful tool you can get for debugging rendered web pages
• Nightly Tester Tools seems to do a whole bunch of things. I just use it to override compatibility checks when installing themes and extensions

Sites I use

GMail

I’m still having a tough time with Google’s GMail. Specifically, since they’re so down on trashing, I find I have nearly 1K “conversations”. After some serious purging in the past week or two, I scrapped some 400 conversations, but am still a bit overwhelmed. However, I don’t think any other email service is any better. I find GMail very responsive, even working with hundreds of conversations in a found set. The threading is the best out there, and comes in very handy when you back-and-forth over a subject, trying to reach some kind of conclusion … which, after all, is kind of the point of communication, isn’t it?

Thinkfree Office Online

I like Writely’s interface better, since it leaves out a lot of the extraneous junk word processors have that no one uses. That said, Thinkfree provides nearly everything offices users use on a daily basis online in a Java app. I can hear Gosling crying tears of joy from here.

del.icio.us

Tagging is the “it” technology right now (tag? it? get it?), and del.icio.us is the site that made it that way. For my money, del.icio.us is the best online bookmark manager out there now that a few issues have been ironed out with availability. I wish I could tag everything I use.

Bloglines

It seemed a bit strange to me to use an RSS reader only on one computer. What if I’m at work? What if I want to grab my laptop, and head to a cafe or sit on the balcony and read my news? This is one service I couldn’t imagine using from my desktop. Bloglines is my favourite services, since all it really wants to let you do is read and save news. It doesn’t want to look like a newspaper, or make you tag all your stories (okay, so there are things I don’t want to tag), it just wants to let you subscribe to feeds.

Last.fm

All my audio players are feeding this service, which in turn feeds me a list of artists I might like. There are profiles and message boards, and last.fm radio which just never seemed to work all that well for me. I’m sure other people make use of this stuff, but I’m just interested in hearing what’s out there.

Backpack

Finally. A wiki-type thing that I get. I mostly use this for launch pages and collecting random bits of stuff that I used to email to myself. I have a page called “Inbox” that I mail things too, a page for my browser at home, and a homepage for work. I can quickly add notes to any page in email, or on the site using Textile markup.

flickr

Dear family and friends: I will not help you get your photos onto any site other than this one. Why? When you upload photos to Ophoto or Shutterfly or whatever, they own the dinky little previews they store. Then they require everyone who wants to look at those photos go and sign up for their own account. Then they blackmail you, and threaten to delete your photos if you don’t send them money. Pretty user-hostile way of doing business. Flickr lets you keep your photos, license them however you want, store them at titanic sizes, download them, whatever; all for free. You only have to pay if you want to be able to upload more photos a month.