Useful Software Thread

Seconding Foxit.

So much faster.

• Firefox
• Winrar
• Bittorrent
• Rarzilla
• Ccleaner
• Spybot
• Avira
• Test my hardware
• Power Iso
• Deamon Tools
• Ventrillo
• Defraggler

edited 30th Jan '11 3:10:52 PM by CommandoDude

If you've ever gotta image a disk, I recommend Macrium Reflect.

Hay! Easy Modo.

• Opera Web Browser. Amidst the "powerhouse browsers", it is the leanest, fastest and stablest. Heavily customizable and with features that essentially turn it into an Internet Suite, such as the Opera Link and Unite (synchronization and client-side services). Runs well on low-end systems, unlike the other heavyweights. If I could, +100 votes from me.
• N-thing Foxit. Why would you ever get to need another PDF viewer?
• Notepad++. An incredibly versatile text editor for users and programmers alike. The few times I use Windows, this is the text editor I use for any and all text editor tasks.
• OpenOffice.org. The office suite (in the future Libre Office) that covers pretty much all the normal uses people could give to their word processor or spreadsheet application, without the need to give over your control (Office) or data (Google Docs) to the big corporations. Among the nicest features it has there is the binder or "Master Document" handler which can organize everything you write/draw/whatever into a logically interrelated package. Plus it generates PD Fs on the fly.
• 7-Zip. What would I need to say about this? Supports zip, its own format 7-zip which seems to be pretty good, and all standard package formats (tarballs compressed with gzip or bzip, ISO images, etc). The program interface needs a lot of work, but that's what context menus are for.
• Pidgin. A good instant-messaging client that supports things like Facebook (what for?), MSN, Google Talk and even the good, old IRC.
• For the Linux users, XFCE Desktop Environment. it is like G Nome but done well, pretty lightweigth, responsive, and easy to customize.

That would be for the first shot.

I never liked Open Office, it was always three times as slow to open on my computer compared to Microsoft Office, plus, my college professors demand documents be in .doc or .docx format.

I've had college professors demand Open Office formats.

Anyway, Open Office can save in the .doc format, although there's a chance that some formatting will be messed up in the process. Usually, I save everything to a pdf when I need to give it to someone else, since that's the safest and most common format.

edited 30th Jan '11 4:48:13 PM by storyyeller

File Management:

• Effective File Search: searches for files by name, file type, date, size, etc., a lot better than Windows Vista.
• WinZip: saves lots of files into one, smaller, easy - to archive, password - protectable file.
• Renameman: allows you to change many filenames at once according to programmable patterns.
• Spaceman: search and destroy duplicate files, create pareto chart of how much space your folders take up.

File editing accessories:

• Freecorder save multimedia off the web for free.
• Irfanview: view almost any image format, convert images to jepg, gif, etc., basic image editing for free, convert animated gif into separate image files, etc.
• PDF995 suite adds a virtual printer to your printers; when you choose the PDF 995 print device, instead of printing, it saves the file as a PDF! However, the "save to PDF" option in Microsoft Word is better, so it's really for use with software that doesn't have a native save to PDF option.
• ClipPad995: allows Windows clip pad to remember more than one "clip" at a time.
• Textpad: like notepad, plus it color codes your text for you.

Personal Database:

• MyBase: stores notes like Microsoft Outlook, plus you can store links, files, and with the optional add - ons it lets you capture web pages with all files.

edited 30th Jan '11 4:48:36 PM by FrodoGoofballCoTV

You do know that password protecting a zip is completely useless, right?

^It's useful against idiots, but it's not exactly professional grade encryption. I never password - protect mine anyway, just use them for transportation and archival size - reduction.

I prefer 7z files, unless for some reason the recipient doesn't have 7zip.

↑The good thing of free and open formats is that you can send them to people along with a recommendation to get good software. I do that with O Oo and some vector graphics tools.

Heh, I already put up im my curriculum a clause that hiring me as teacher is accepting as default that I'll require all tasks in Open Office (technically Open Document), PDF-A1 or Web Archive formats, depending on the case.

I prefer 7z too for most tasks where a zip would suffice otherwise because of the extra compression strength, but still default to gzip for single-file archives (with the advantage that I don't need to extract the archive to disk in order to check its contents). Still, 7zip does all of them well... it even does ye goode olde Arj. The only thing that the 7zip format is lacking is a good streaming handler, or otherwise good documentation to write one, which makes it impossible for now to use it as a package for FUSE. Because of that detail, I still bring around my portable apps and profiles in ye faithful Zip format.

If only the 7zip people would dedicate one entire week to the UI, seriously...

And speaking of software again, I can't stop recommending both Scilab and Mathematica (from Wolfram, I think) for any and all stuff that is mathematics and science. Scilab is a pretty nice math programming engine, and Mathematica is that plus an encyclopedia of math and special plotting and data gather utilities. Those little things, plus Maple, saved my ass back at college.

edited 31st Jan '11 6:51:51 PM by SilentReverence

It's a pain trying to remember which exe you're supposed to point windows toward when your installing 7zip.

7zip gets another vote from me.

Has anyone said VLC media player yet? It can play pretty much any media file in existence.

Seconding VLC player.

No mention of Backtrack yet?

I have some friends that are Certified Ethical Hackers, but I have no idea except what they've said.

Thirding VLC Player.

edited 31st Jan '11 11:34:58 PM by pvtnum11

Boxee is a good alternative to Apple TV.

For version control, Fossil is frequently overlooked, but very pleasant for me.

Decentralized like any modern system, but by default autosyncs to the server you cloned from so you don't have to worry about pushing and pulling.

Built-in webserver for hosting syncing and a simple project site, including a bug tracker and wiki.

Completely self-contained in one binary, and each repository is kept in a single SQLite database file.

Opera
VLC
Pidgin/aMSN/etc.... Anything is better than the original MSN app.
Blender 3 D

edited 1st Feb '11 1:55:23 AM by del_diablo

One thing I forgot: Gnu PG. (I actually prefer PGP itself, but it isn't free anymore. Software so badass that it was once classified as munition.)

I actually use VLC for any sort of MKV or DVD because Media Player is buggy right now and doesn't want to display captions. So I'll recommend it as well. My machine is such a horrifying Frankenstein creation.

Oohhh... n-thing VLC then. I use it for most reproduction— I mean, playback. It plays almost everything that I throw at it including the videos recorded with my cellphone's cam. When I want to convert stuff, I support VLC with mplayer (actually the mencoder component). Which reminds me vote for 'em too.

Also, yeah, a cool vote on GPG, PGP and their ilk. Imagine if xkcd was right.

One vote to Stellarium, an astronimical software so good that it has helped bring (back) astronomy studies to the classroom in countries such as France. Open Source, of course.

And finally a recommend for SystemRescueCD, a bootable Linux environment that will help recovering files and partitions as well as doing disk maintenance on a system. The only reason I don't use it anymore is that I grew bored of working with hardware, but it was nice to have that time we had to set up a cluster for a BOINC demo from Friday night to Saturday morning. We celebrated with pizza.

Haven't heard of Stellarium before. How's it compare to Celestia? (Which I'm putting in a vote for.)

I had Stellarium for a bit. Nice program for viewing stuff from your lat/long, time and date. Celestia is harder to use in that regard, I found, hence why I used Stellarium for star-viewing - managed to find the primary moons of Ju[iter using that and a pair of binoculars...

Both are quite useful.

To my knowledge, the main difference between Stellarium and Celestia is that Stellarium focuses on realistic astronomy observation. It can even show you how was the sky in a certain location on Earth 400 years ago, and it can be used with great precision to determine if you will be able to see some eclipses or meteor showers up to 20 Minutes into the Future. Celestia, on the other hand, focuses on planetary simulation, and it is possible to load up custom planets, stars and constellations and add also custom spaceships and platforms for observation and as added watchpoints. There was once a nice video detailing a Death Star model stationed on Earth orbit, as it would have been "reallistically" seen from the Lagrange points.

So they are actually aimed at different things. My vote goes on Stellarium mostly because of the ease of use (integrating it with a Wiimote in Fedora for a workshop was more than a pleasing experience) and the pedagocical value.

Then there's Orbiter, but that's more along the lines of a simulation, but I think that falls outside the scope of the OP. Unless you're writing a somewhat realistic sci-fi story, that is...