Useful Software Thread

Meritory bump is meritory, I hope.

Giving a thumbs up for Acronis Suite, a set of programs to handle, format, move, resize partitions as well as handling the system boot. Except for the lack of an actual IPL (ie.: self-contained) Boot Manager, it can do pretty much everything you need to have three or four O Ses sharing space in your system.

Switched over to Avast. Going to be converting every other machine over to it as well.

Have clipboard managers like Ditto (Win) (not related to the Pokémon) or Clipman (Lin) been recommended so far? Because they're useful in particular when you are typing a long post that is long. These little apps save a history of the pieces of texts that you have copy-pasted so you can switch around and re-copy or re-paste something. All in a nifty tray icon and, from what I can see, still fiting in a Magic Floppy Disk.

Avast! saved my computer and it has a pirate language pack. Get it.

Avast! is probably your best bet for a free antivirus. As long as your computer is fast enough, it updates regularly and does a good job at scanning, without too much hassle. It's also autoblocked harmful sites several times.

Definitely VLC Media Player for playing video and audio. There's a reason it comes by default with Linux Mint. It's a solid media player and it lets you bypass entirely trying to install the right codecs for DV Ds and whatnot, which you need to do with using Windows Media Player. The only issue is I've heard that some soft-subtitled videos might not play the subtitles well, which I've experienced a few times.

µTorrent. If torrents are your only P 2 P, this program is very lightweight and does just what you need without complications. Simple and elegant. It also has a tetris easter egg.

I use SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) when I want to, say, convert mp4 into mp3. It's a multi-purpose encoder that can modify and change file types of multimedia files. It has a lot of features for configuring what you want your new converted file to be (the original file can be left alone). The results aren't always clean (converting a certain type to AVI got me poor quality, for example), but it generally gets the job done well. It's very handy when you want to turn a video into an audio equivalent. Download link here, since it's confusing to get to it.

I also use WinRAR. Despite its annoying "40-day trial" message every time, I never had my "trial" expire. I used 7zip a few times and it worked well, but I haven't verified if it can do everything Win RAR dos (including all of the file extensions). Does it? I might switch if it does.

Sothink Web Video Downloader for Firefox is an extension, good for downloading videos from web sites. With workarounds it was possible to download almost any video if I wanted to. It works with FLV and SWF formats, and it has a download manager that shows all the video-containing links you visited, which you can clear at discretion.

edited 8th Jun '11 11:52:50 PM by abstractematics

Third vote for VirtualBox. It's fast and has some good integration facilities for the guest OS. Also, (don't highlight if you're a US resident) it can run legally obtained copies of Mac OS X.

Gambit-C and Vala are a pair of really nice compilers for high-level languages that produce fast programs. Windows users will also want to get their hands on MinGW, a port of GCC (compilers for C and other mainstream languages). Necessary for any serious development outside of Visual Studio.

Speaking of Visual Studio, the Express Editions are really powerful compared to other IDEs, and I would strongly recommend them to anyone wanting to develop in C# or F# on Windows (technically there is no standalone Visual F# Express, but you can create one in about two steps).

Monkey is a cute little compiler that can compile the same, unmodified code for PC, Xbox, iPhone, Android, Flash and HTML5 (assuming you don't use non-portable modules). The compiler itself is free, but the main game-graphics module costs money.

Second vote for Eclipse, which can do just about anything. If you followed the Gambit-C link, you'll also want the SchemeWay plugin. Other good editors (rather than true IDEs) are Notepad++ (add a vote), and Geany (which works well with aforementioned Vala).

edited 9th Jun '11 6:54:13 AM by Jinren

GridOmatic is useful for printing gridded paper.

And as versatile as VLC is, I've found that it skips beginnings and ends.

edited 9th Jun '11 8:15:30 AM by YairJeger

Does anyone know of a conversion program that could make sense of the code depicted here? Doesn't look like HTML code to me.

edited 19th Sep '11 3:39:33 PM by MarqFJA

I'm fairly certain that that's just HTML, albeit with not-very-friendly formatting.

That is indeed just html; copied and saved as such, Firefox can interpret it just fine.

I also use Avast and I think it is a quality piece of software but I also use it in conjunction with Malwarebytes anti Malware to take out the really tough stuff that gets into my computer.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned but I have been using Flux for a few weeks and WOW.... just wow. I thought it was a gimmick at first but it has greatly reduced the strain on my eyes and taken away all my headaches (I use 5k during the day and 3.4k at night).

I also recommend Rainmetre for those that want desktops that follow Rule of Cool

edited 19th Sep '11 7:24:13 PM by Bwaaaa

I must be doing something wrong, because I copied it to MS Word, saved it in HTML format, and opened it with both IE and Firefox, but it's not working for me.

Try this

MS Word will ruin HTML formatting. Just use notepad but change the extension to htm.

Thanks, guys. It's working now.

I'd also like to recommend F.lux, I've only been using it for a few minutes but my eyes already feel a million times better.

Also, I'd like to recommend SRWare Iron. It's like Google Chrome, but without any of the privacy violations.

Okay, I just installed Advanced System Care 4. Ran a scan but forgot to check the default settings and lost my firefox session (fuck you default settings that include that, and my bad memory). Is there a firefox extension that will automagically bookmark all open tabs upon close and then reopen and delete the bookmarks on open?

Combined Community Codec Pack for your video needs, if you don't want to download player. Also known as CCCP

uTorrent has been said already...

Lightworks video editing software. It's in beta now and heavy as hell, but offers same level of service as commercial stuff.

Anim8or for those who want to learn basics of 3D modeling, but can't be arsed to learn jungle that is Blender. You should propably learn this first and then move to Blender wheny ou start cursing how program lacs abbility to do X. Or it crashed after 5 hours of working without saving :P

Free Download Manager which suprisingly works with pretty much any download service. One benefit is that you no longer need to keep browser running on back when waiting for download to finish, if you need to leave. It also can download torrents. Works with Firefox too as a plug-in.

edited 27th Sep '11 6:28:49 AM by Mandemo

Alright, kind of a big necro, but I need a recommendation.

I need a video making software to make a five minute video for a class. I submitted an advance on my work using only Windows Movie Maker but while my needs are simple enough for it to work... I still find it lacking in a few respects.

I need a software that allows me insert multiple audio at the same time in the video... one for a voice over and the other for the background music which Windows Movie Maker is not allowing me to do.

I'm incredibly amateurish in video making so a very robust but complicated software won't do for me. I need something that is like... a step above of Movie Maker or similar to it but which allows me to do what I described.

For video editing, I strongly recommend Sony Vegas. I've been using it on a few projects and it is awesome. You can add as many audio and video tracks as you like, make split-screen videos, add fade-in and fade-out... and it's all so intuitively simple.

I see... I shall go acquire it as soon as possible then.

Thank you Midnight Rambler! I can't say for sure until I finish my project but you're on the way to being a life saver.

edited 15th Apr '12 1:01:51 PM by daltar

Is it free?

Depends on whether or not you think Digital Piracy Is Evil.

And that's all I'm going to say about it.

edited 21st Apr '12 2:48:49 AM by MidnightRambler

What? No love for Inkscape yet? I'm shocked.

For when you want to interact with other software like FontForge or Blender, not to mention just to work with vectors... this is the puppy to go for. Especially if you can't afford Illustrator.

I can't recommend it enough. Oh, and as a bit of carrot: it comes with this cool tutorial. Learning Inkscape - An Order of the Stick Avatar Guide. Enjoy!

edited 21st Apr '12 10:56:38 AM by Euodiachloris

Any efficient alternatives to Adobe Reader for PDF viewing? It keeps lagging from 10 to 20 seconds when switching between or scrolling across pages of a multi-hundred-page-long PDF.

BTW, I tried PDF-X Change's free-version viewer, and it has issues with the color scheme (dark-gray boxes are inexplicably very-light gray, making the white text hard to read).