Recommended Software

[kingabubakr]

hey guys,

im just interested in getting some useful software/Programs,

do you guys reccomend anything?

just software which you guys found very useful.

absolutely anything.

i found this alarm clock sofware very useful,

Citrus Alarm Clock: Alarm Clock Software

its a free trial actually but its great.

Thanks in advance.

[Marth]

hmm some good 30 day trials you might want to google for creativities sake: camtasia (video making), flash CS3 (game, design), Maya or Max (model design)

[jpmcgrew]

Hopefully it's not too early for a shameless plug.

But, my company has a note-taking program called NoteScribe, which yes, we did create, but I use it every day for keeping all of my sales and marketing together. It's really convenient if you need something to help keep your school, business, or home notes organized. A lot of our friends are using it in undergrad and grad school, and a lot of business folks have bought it in the last few months. Anyways, give it a try and see what you think.

Again, sorry for the shameless plug so early into my tenure hear!

[Minsc]

Software I use on a regular basis(mostly freeware):
-Firefox 1.5 + HTML Validator/Search Status/Web Developer -- Probably the best browser for web development and good for general use also. They keep changing the UI in the other versions so I'm staying with 1.5.
-Proxomitron -- Web filter which can block ads, etc. Will work on any browser that can use a proxy.
-Winamp -- My music player of choice due to its small size(seriously, why would I want a media player that takes up the entire screen?) and vertical design. Probably has the best format/output support of any media player.
-ATI Tray Tools & Omega Driver -- Alternative driver for many ATI cards.
-FileZilla Client -- My favorite FTP client.
-DosBox -- DOS emulator for playing old DOS games.
-Paint Shop Pro 9 -- Cheapish image editor with lots of functionality.
-Dev-Cpp & MinGW -- C++ IDE and compiler. I use Dev-Cpp for other things too because I like the interface. Remember to download a new copy of MinGW since Dev-Cpp is kind of a dead project.
-Media Player Classic -- My video player of choice. Like Winamp it's simple and easy to use. Has problems with file association though.

System admin tools(freeware):
-Process Explorer -- 10x better than Windows's crappy task manager.
-Regmon & Filemon -- Monitor registry/file access.
-Startup Tool -- Removes extra startup entries.
-TweakUI -- Basically changes around parts of the Windows UI.
-SelfImage -- Backs up hard disks or partitions and can restore them.
-Resource Hacker -- Changes the images/text used in Windows GUI applications.
-7Zip -- My favorite archiver.
-XVI32 -- My hex editor of choice.

Also, it's not really software but I load all of my startup programs from a batch file with a 200-500ms delay between programs to make startup quick(a few seconds in total). I use a custom program to actually make the delay...

[kingabubakr]

thanks for all the info!!


im not much of a knowledgable person in computers, want to become one hopefully, but this is cool stuff..


thanks again, keep it coming....

[Dan.Linehan]

irfanview

ccleaner

winrar

vlc media player

spybot

boxer text editor

notepad2

gimp

google docs office suite

[kingabubakr]

guys please keep the software tips / recommendatinos coming!!??


thanks again to all...

[nvictor]

Kinga,

you can google them and get thousands of thousands of results...
freewarehome.com is a good start

[Apollia]

My absolute favorite text editor is the free NoteTab Light. I use it constantly, probably more than any other program. It has tabs like Firefox, and a wonderful feature called the Clipbook, which can be used for such simple purposes as pasting in a piece of text you type in frequently, or, you can actually program it to do much more complex tasks using the Clip programming language.

ShortKeys Lite is a handy little program for making shortcut keystrokes for strings of text you type frequently, or the current date/time, etc.


My favorite web browser is Opera, even though I also use Firefox and even Internet Explorer 6 at times.

BrowserTraySwitch allows you to quickly and easily switch between your default web browsers. This is useful for such things as quickly and easily making it so that when you double-click on an HTML file, it will open in the default web browser you selected.

UrlHistory - "Watches the clipboard for web addresses and saves them with a comment." Makes it easy to save URLs. There are plenty of other useful little programs on the same page, but I use UrlHistory most often.


For what little audio editing and audio recording I need to do, I use Audacity.

WinJammer Shareware is the only MIDI software I've found for Windows that I can stand to use.

PKVolume is a little hovering volume bar with which you can easily change the audio volume whenever you want.

Skype is an internet phone service. It's free to call other Skype users. Hopefully it won't crash your computer - I tried to upgrade to the new version but it crashes my computer, and I didn't keep any installers for the old versions, so now I don't have Skype anymore. Fortunately, I never used Skype that much, so, I don't miss it.


Paint.NET is a paint program which I haven't used very much (just haven't had any reason to), but I tried it a while back and remember liking it.

A really fun paint program is Art Rage 2. It's probably even more fun if, unlike me, you can actually paint well...

POV-Ray - short for "Persistence of Vision Raytracer". I haven't used this very much, since I'm not really into making graphical stuff, but, with this, you can type in some textual source code describing what kind of objects you want displayed and where they should be located, what kind of light source you want and where it should be, etc., and end up with very neat-looking 3D scenes based precisely on what you input.


Celestia - "The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions".

Google Earth, a program where you can zoom around the Earth looking at actual satellite imagery of various places.

Astrolog 5.40 - my favorite free astrology software, at least which is for Windows.


Second Life is a massive multiplayer online virtual world. Basic user accounts are free. It has 3D graphics, nice, intuitive 3D building tools, and its own programming language, LSL (Linden Scripting Language).

Second Life also has its own "virtual" economy, a currency called the Linden $ (L$), which can actually be exchanged for real money. I think Second Life actually has the best instant online payment system currently in existence - better than both PayPal and credit cards, due to the lack of fees on any transaction within Second Life, and the fact that you don't have to worry about chargebacks or a transaction being disputed or anything like that, since all transactions are final (unless I'm mistaken).

Entropia Universe is another massive multiplayer online virtual world, with much nicer graphics than Second Life, but it's not as customizeable (for instance, you can't change your avatar's appearance on a whim), and it's more like a standard roleplaying game. It too has a "virtual" economy. But, sadly, there are big fees if you want to cash out your money, and it's a lot harder to make any money. The most fun thing about EU for me is just walking around taking pictures - the graphics are so great it's not hard to take some really desktop wallpaper-worthy pictures.

Fraps - screenshot software you can use with Second Life and Entropia Universe, and other programs.


Perl, a really useful programming language. The Perl distribution for Windows is called ActivePerl, and it's available as a free download. Even short scripts written in it can do remarkably useful things.

Inform, "a design system for interactive fiction". Another programming language. It's intended for creating text adventure games, but can be used for other purposes.

xampp - "an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl". Web server software/offline development environment which is useful if you want to develop PHP/MySQL stuff on your own computer without having to upload stuff to your web server to test it. I assume it's probably a good idea to take security precautions when running it whilst connected to the internet, unless you actually want to serve web pages from your computer to the internet.


I also like some things others have mentioned already - Gimp, Winamp, WinRAR, and Spybot.

Haven't tried or used most of the other programs mentioned but they sound interesting. Thanks, everyone.

[kingabubakr]

thanks guys... interesting stuff...


by the way,


anyone know a goood VIDEO converting software? which converts videos into most formats..???? and is free? unless there is a free trial.

also, any good reccomended audio converting software.? free, most formats supported etc...

any nice anti viruses?...

also, any good downloading programmes like bearshare, or kazaa, but SAFE?

hm...

thanks in advance.

[moriez]

Originally Posted by kingabubakr

anyone know a goood VIDEO converting software? which converts videos into most formats..???? and is free? unless there is a free trial.

also, any good reccomended audio converting software.? free, most formats supported etc...

Unfortunately cant help ya there but

any nice anti viruses?...

Yes, Avast is nice. Bit heavy on resources maybe.

also, any good downloading programmes like bearshare, or kazaa, but SAFE?

Soulseek, whole albums in particular!

More useful and free stuff:

Abiword, alternative to MS Word
CCleaner, clean crap on your HD
DiskeeperLite, faster defrag tool for your HD
EphPod, please replace iTunes
IEmaximizer, maximizes new IE windows automatically
IZarc, archiving tool
MP3Tag, easy to use MP3 tag tool
PixSizer, resize your photos
SyncBack, backup tool
VLC player, alternative to mediaplayer
WinAmp, unbeatable champ

Enjoy

Edit: in the antispyware camp there is: spywareblaster, spybot s&d and ad-aware.

[SomebodySomewhere]

There are a few that you guys missed that I find invaluable:
Visual Studio 2008 Express editions, invaluable for software development, whether you're doing .NET or C++ work.

VMWare Player, you can run many different types of preconfigured virtual machines and use it to test out any of your software development without affecting your host OS.

Tortoise SVN, lets you track each and every revision you make to any file you tell it to. Great for when you make a change and later on you want to revert/undo that change because you think you messed up somewhere and want to go back to a good version.

Filezilla, quickly and painlessly upload all your files to your webhost so you can get your website up and running faster.

[MrNotebook]

AAA Logo - very fun logo-making software....very user-friendly. I highly recommend.

MagicISO - make ISO images of your DVDs/CDs.

Magic Disk - mount virtual DVD drives (allows you to simulate DVD drive)....its like having multiple DVD drives on your system. Then you can mount ISO images.

VMware - allows you to run an Operating System inside an Operating System virtually.

Norton Ghost - allows you to image your hard drive...great for backups!

Acronis True Image - allows you to image your hard drive...great for backups!

[kingabubakr]

Any really good


PROGRAMS you have??


related to personal development, productivity etc...


thanks again..

[Minsc]

Originally Posted by kingabubakr

anyone know a goood VIDEO converting software? which converts videos into most formats..???? and is free? unless there is a free trial.

also, any good reccomended audio converting software.? free, most formats supported etc...

any nice anti viruses?...

also, any good downloading programmes like bearshare, or kazaa, but SAFE?

VirtualDub can convert video. (it can reencode AVIs but I'm not sure what else it can do)

Winamp can read almost any format and also has a crappy converting interface that works. Foobar2000 can do batch conversions better than Winamp.

Spybot and Ad-Aware are the two recommended for antiviruses but I would just not bother with an antivirus. Get a hardware firewall/router and learn to not be stupid.

I use uTorrent... Many torrent sites have an active community with comments, etc, and are pretty safe from viruses if that's what you meant(if not then uTorrent is safe and can be configured to be more safe if you're paranoid).