Monday, July 27, 2009

Late 2009 Software List (Windows)

Inspired by Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developers and Power Users Tool List for Windows (the latest version I could find was 2007), I'ved decided to create my own. FYI, I'm running Windows 7 (64-bit) on a Mac Pro.

Update: You can find my Mac list here

Development and Design

Browsers

  • Internet Explorer 8: Built into Windows or available as an upgrade; be sure to upgrade to version 8 if you haven't already!
  • Google Chrome: Google's browser; fast and small, but lacking in extensibility; I'm also subscribed to the Dev Channel, giving me frequent auto-updates
  • Mozilla FireFox: Fully featured and extensible browser; very popular for its features and standards support; you'll probably want to install FireBug, a web development plugin for FireFox
  • Safari: Apple's browser; allows for Mac and iPhone compatility testing, since all of Apple's version are based on WebKit; version 4 plays much nicer with Windows

Web

  • uTorrent: The best and fastest torrent client out there
  • 7-zip: Open source zip file utility; integrates nicely into the shell
  • Adobe Flash Player: Only on the list for youtube and the occasional game trailer
  • Foxit Reader: The free and best PDF viewer out there; dump your Adobe Acrobat garbage immediately if you haven't already

Media

  • QuickTime: Yes it's slow and doesn't play nice on Windows, but the video quality is good, and there are a lot of movie trailers on Apple's website
  • iTunes: Only installed to get MP3s on my iPod
  • PowerISO: Great utility for creating and extracting .iso files; supports CD/DVD burning too
  • VLC media player: Plays every file I've ever thrown at it, with a minialistic interface

Communications

  • Windows Live Messenger: While others are available, supports what I need without much fuss after some tweaking
  • Skype: Free voice-over-IP (VOIP) client; you can upgrade your account to make phone calls too
  • SharedView: Screen sharing application from Microsoft; very handy for remote folks

Utilities

  • WinSplit Revolution: Great utility for moving/resizing windows; includes quite a few defaults and can be customized

Office Suite

  • Office 2007: Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and others, depending on the version; if you can't afford Office, don't want to pay for Office, or don't care for the ribbon interface, give OpenOffice a try

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