Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

Taskbar Shuffle

Love this thing. I usually keep lots of tasks open and this lets me relocate the taskbar buttons next to each other to be able to flip back and forth efficiently.

Great little tool.

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

A few of my favorites have already been mentioned:

- Launchy - a friend recommended it and I ignored him. A few days later he pestered me to try it again. I installed it. I'm now in love. Once you get used to using this, it's SO nice to find a program or song. (alt-space, 'osca') pulls up all oscar peterson mp3's in 2 seconds.

- Excel - I live and die by this program. Pretty damn solid all around.

- FlashFXP - I haven't found a better FTP client yet

- TextPad - nice lightweight color-coded editor that instantly loads unlike other slow IDE's. I can't believe I used to code without color highlighting.

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

any cygwin fans in the house? there must be around here. Probably the one program that has improved my life the most. If you're a linux/unix guy trapped in a windows environment you really should be using it.

I'm also a huge vi fan. I wish someone would come up with a program to allow vi type editing in every program in windows (for example this text field in Firefox).

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

Process Explorer

Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have been opened or loaded.

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

TuboTax

I can do my taxes in about 30 minutes. It really shines if you use it year to year, because it saves you from having to enter repetitive data. And it will ask you, "Last year you had income from xyz, do you have that again this year?"

The beauty in it for me is that I don't have to spend hours scouring tax docs in fear that I missed something or filled out a form wrong. I simply answer every question it asks me, and my work is done. I usually have my refund in my bank account before most of my friends have even sent theirs in.

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

[ QUOTE ]
any cygwin fans in the house? there must be around here. Probably the one program that has improved my life the most. If you're a linux/unix guy trapped in a windows environment you really should be using it.

[/ QUOTE ]

If getting it set up wasn't so miserable, I might have listed it. Over a year later, I still sometimes have trouble getting X forwarding to work right.

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

Great thread topic! I seem to go through a billion software products trying to find quality free ones.

I'm going to start with a fantastic bookmarklet that everyone on 2+2 should use:

Form Text Resizer - Allows you to change the size of forms in webpages. GREAT for entering posts on 2+2.


Obvious / Repeated ones that I use:

Picassa Firefox AutoHotKey KeePass Paint.NET AllSnap PDFcreator MPC uTorrent Word XL PowerPoint


Major awesomeness that you might not have heard of:

MiniAIM - Incredible AIM program, microscopic (81K), standalone, all the important features, AIM only tho.

MWSnap - Great little tool for screen capture. Lets you select a section of the screen. Customizable, feature-laden, and relatively small

Driver Collector - Collects your currently installed drivers for easy reformatting of your computer. Lifesaver! Esp for pain in the ass Dell laptops with difficult to find drivers.

Back up email - Puts "Backup to email" in the right-click menu for windows. Quickly and painlessly sends the file to your gmail account. Will chop up files over a certain size so gmail will accept them.

DarkRoom - If you ever just wanted to write without distraction, this is for you. Completely Black screen with green text - just like the good old days [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Comodo - My new fave firewall software (better than ZoneAlarm IMO)

Tugzip - Support for all the various compression standards and disc images

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

If you're a vi fan, you should try vim (VI Improved) http://www.vim.org. It works like vi, but with many added features. You can split your window vertically or horizontally and have multiple files open. You have history and editing for colon commands and searches. This feature alone makes it a huge improvement over plain vi. No more retyping your entire complex regular expression substitution command because you got one character wrong. Just hit the up arrow and edit it and try again. The gui version has menus and graphical file open and save dialogs (or you can use the command line like regular vi--the best of both worlds). It also has syntax coloring for a variety of programming languages and config file formats, can be set up to process compiler/syntax checker errors and take you to the line with the error, and is available for Windows, Linux and most varieties of UNIX (you can build it from source if no binary is available), and can be run in either GUI or terminal mode.

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

AIM Ad-Hack: Removes those damn ads from AIM.
TurboNote: (the freeware version) Let's you make desktop notes. I think there's a Post-it program that's similar, but something about it used to bug me.
DefilerPak: A large codec pack.

Re: Software products that you think are really good
 

For most of my day-to-day computing I use OSX on Macbook Pro, so I definitely consider OSX to be one of the top programs that should be included in this.

Additionally, I'd add:

Ecto - Great tool for publishing to multiple blogs, if your'e into that sort of thing.

Textpad - Similar to, but better than, EditPlus for Windows. Great syntax highlighting built in and shortcuts for coding/writing in a number of languages ranging from Ruby to CSS.

Quicksilver - Tray app used to speed up productivity in OSX. Freeware. Good stuff.

AdiumX - Basically similar to Trillian, but better. Combines AIM+Gtalk+YahooM+other messenger clients for me. Definitely have a lot of [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] for this product.

Skype - I'm amazed at how many people aren't aware of how awesome Skype is. I use it for conference calls frequently.

Rob