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

[cancerlad]

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

• 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

[Greason Wolfe]

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

[Wordman]

I maintain a list of Mac software recommendations on another server. Might need to update that fairly soon.

[guyanonymous]

CARCASONNE IS A VIDEO GAME? OMG! I love the tile placing game. I need to investigate this.

I'll have to break it to you.

I managed to snag it and Carcassonne 2 from a German company years ago for $5 each on a clearance.

MS had bought the rights to electronic versions of the games for use on their online setup (Wii I think).

These versions work wonderfully and make the game even more fun to play. To find them now, though, you'll have to either get lucky on Ebay or search the underworld of the internet. There is Carcassonne 2 (Hunters & Gatherers), Carcassonne (regular, no addons) and Carcasonne Deluxe (which has 3-4 expansions built in). Well worth doing. I actually contacted the company directly (Koch Media) and they regretfully had no solutions for me other than finding someone on Ebay selling one.

It's worth it though.

[Karro]

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



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.

I hadn't heard specifically of TiddlyWiki, but I'd tried several personal in-browser wikis and didn't really like them at the time. Even before I got ConnectedText, I preferred wikidpad to the in-browser personal wikis. What I particularly liked about ConnectedText is the graphical "Navigator" web that shows all the links between pages and the ability to customize my view and which navigational windows I had open, as well as all the other wiki-like features (categories, revision history, etc.)