One of my colleague was forced to reinstall his system due to a hard drive failure. Poor guy. However, he was kind enough to keep a list of the software he installed. While most of this is either freeware or open-source, there are a couple of pieces of proprietary software that we installed. I consider this post as a natural follow-up to my previous “Help me rebuild my computer” post a while ago. You may take this list as a “How To… choose all the right software for your computer”!
First of all, let me give some background. This machine is his work computer, at the lab where we work. It uses Windows XP Pro and comes with some pre-installed software for which our lab has licenses. He uses mostly his computer for programming and standard office job. Without further delay, let’s dive into his list…
Pre-installed software
The machine came pre-installed with Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, which is a good thing. As the rest of the teachers use Word and not OpenOffice, it’s nice to have a copy of Office installed on the computer, for compatibility purposes. OpenOffice might be great, but it’s not yet up to par on complex documents. Furthermore, after using both, I feel that Word’s collaborative features (comments, notes and revision) are much better implemented that OpenOffice’s. Still, he uses LaTeX for most of his writings, which is a great thing, in my opinion.
Internet
- Firefox, with the following extensions
Firefox is also my browser of choice. Tabbed browsing, good security, no popups: Firefox has all options to make a web-surfer happy. There are some nice extensions in there too: adBlock is an absolute must for everyone who wants to clean the web from those obstrusive ads. Couple that with the Filter update and say bye bye to ads! Google Browser Synch is really nice too, if you have many firefox installs (i.e. at home and at work). It will synchronise the bookmarks so if you see something important at home, you can bookmark it and easily access it elsewhere. Quite handy!
- Thunderbird, with the following extensions:
Thunderbird is to email what Firefox is to web-browsing. It’s meant as a replacement for Outlook Express, as right now it lacks the advanced calendar options of Outlook. You can add this via an extension, but I’ve found it ok at best. However, if you want a good stable email client, then go for Thunderbird. There is plenty of other ways out there to do your calendaring!
I installed Google Talk, so it does the job of notifying me of new messages in my Gmail account. However, GNotify does the exact same thing, without the messaging aspect.
Accessories
You have read well. Photoshop and Illustrator are actually listed in Accessories. In fact, it’s because it’s not of primary importance for the kind of work. but at the lab where we work, we’ve got a license for this software. Still, both can find their use and are really fun to have on a computer, especially if you have some things to do involving graphics (vectorial for Illustrator and raster-based for Photoshop).
Let’s face it: Windows’ original Notepad is pretty much useless. The only use that has been found for Notepad is for quick & dirty editing of text files, because it loads fast and is really easy to use. But there is much better in the form of Notepad++. Comparable to the relative lightness of notepad, N++ also brings syntaxial coloring for a wide range of languages, making it really attractive to programmers of all kinds.
Both of these programs are not really as essential as those listed before, but they are quite nice nonetheless. Rainlendar is a little calendar application that sits on your desktop, complete with a ToDo list and an upcoming events. Rainlendar currently is in the public beta of its v2.0, so you might want to go take a look at that.
RocketDock is an application dock similar to what is found in Mac OSX. It sits on your desktop and allows you to launch quickly your favourite programs withtout having to dig into the start menu. It also helps to clean the desktop of those millions of shortcuts.
Filezilla is one of the best FTP Clients out there: powerful, yet pretty simple. VLC and 7-zip are roughly the same kind of software, but in two different categories: they will accept pretty much everything you throw at them: VLC for playing video and 7-zip for compression (.zip, .rar, etc).
Foxit Reader is like Adobe Reader on steroids. It will open in the blink of an eye, eat a lot less ressources and will allow you to view your pdf documents easily and efficiently.
Latex
LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.
To use LaTeX, you need the typesetting itself (MiKTeX in this case). Then you may choose to use an environment dedicated to this, such as TeXnic Center (now with auto-completion in the last version!). Finally, JabRef is a bibliography manager compatible with LaTeX (it produces BiBteX files and is very friendly to use).
Programming
Since my colleague is a programmer, he has installed a couple of IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) to help him in his task. His previous computer didn’t have Visual Studio, so he’s been using Eclipse and Code::Blocks for his development. Both are quite powerful and free, so that’s great.
TortoiseSVN is a Subversion client, allowing version control. This is of great use, especially when coding. It allows to save changes and rollback if anything goes wrong. It also handles the fusino of versions of files, in case the file is modified by two different persons. If you program, this is a must!
That’s pretty much it. Feel free to add your own contribution in the comments, as this list, while long, is really not extensive!
EDIT: Welcome to visitors from Problogger.net and from digg. I hope you have many more suggestions to help all readers find useful software for their computer.
September 19th, 2006 | Computers, Technology
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