Essentials, Late 2008 Edition

Another draft I saw lying around. Here goes nothing…

An homage to Dive Into Mark’s Linux Essentials list (2006, 2008) and My WebDev Essentials (2007) here’s the update on cool software that I am using.

Note: All webapps/software on this list is FOG (Free or GTFO) and for Windows…which, ironically, is not FOG:

1. VLC – essential for playing video files
2. TweetDeck – it’s where I post to twitter
3. FoxIt Reader – my work life has be reading tons of PDFs – Adobe Reader is too large and slow, FoxIt is great and has Firefox integration — did I mention it does tabs? and doesn’t suck?
4. Firefox
5. GMail
6. Web Developer Toolbar – most of the time I have this hidden, but it comes in handy on random occaisions
7. delicious toolbar – my work life also has me bookmarking an unbelievable amount of material and having to keep it organized; across many machines… delicious and delicious toolbar are the way to go
8. Stack Overflow and Ask Metafilter are great question and answer sites for random geek and nongeek questions
9. Mint.com provides great personal financial data gathering from multiple sources (savings account, checking account, credit card) and aggregates them all, essential budgeting tool
10. Seahorse – Linux only, but great GPG/PGP key management software – couldn’t ever get WinGPG to work
11. Google Reader the obvious RSS reader choice
12. VMware Player
13. Pidgin – instant messaging
14. mIRC
15. mRemote – gracefully handles multiple remote administration sessions in tabs (SSH, RDP, VNC)
16. Winamp – classic mode only
17. Google Toolbar – I am a very serious Google searcher and the toolbar provides a lot of killer functionality while on result pages (find being the #1 with the “up a level” at #2)
18. Nagios – system notifications for our boxes here at work (Linux)
19. CNN and Reddit for nongeek and geek news.
20. KeePass – password vault
21. PuTTY oh PuTTY, where would I be without your quick SSH goodness?
22. Hulu – watch Family Guy, Arrested Development and Firefly online
23. Paint .NET – still without a doubt the best lightweight image cropping/low level editing app
24. Facebook – obvious
25. AdBlock Plus – ads are annoying

No longer using (absolutely refuse to run):

1. iTunes
2. Quicktime
3. Safari for Windows
4. Anything Apple
5. Myspace
6. Digg

The Apple apps running on Windows were awful. I am sure they are great on Mac OS and hardware, but their products on Windows are sluggish at best. I felt dumber after each visit to Digg or Myspace, so no more.

Gone, but not forgotten:

1. Last.FM – just stopped being practical, and stopped working in Winamp
2. Eclipse – no longer doing development…
3. OpenOffice – Use Google Docs for docs that I share, and Office 2007 for everything else. Office 2007 is too nice.
4. RescueTime – stopped caring about the fact I’m on the web most days writing email or in Excel
5. Greasemonkey – I either don’t visit the sites that I used Greasemonkey on anymore or the sites have changed
6. Filezilla – for the few times I’ve got to FTP