Recommended Software
I am really hard to please when it comes to software. I
expect
it to do exactly what I want it to do and not really get in my way,
thus I am not easily impressed. Unfortunately, sometimes it can be
really hard to find good software because there's so much garbage out
there You never know when you download a new program if it's going to
replace your desktop with an ad for dick pills and redirect every URL
you type to hotsexyfuntimeladies.cn
Anyway, all of these programs have been vetted
thoroughly by
me. I've been using some of these for years and I personally guarantee
that each one of these is completely free of adware and spyware. I hope
you enjoy them as much as I do.
Windows
I've been using this since the early 90's and I'm pretty
sure
I'm going to be using it until I'm dead. It has more features and a
more intuitive user interface than Photoshop, and it costs less for the
Corel Draw/Corel Photo Paint bundle than Photoshop by itself. All of
the graphics and artwork on this site were done in Corel Draw.
Corel Media Studio Pro (Commercial, no longer supported)
Excellent video editing suite from the same people who
brought
you Corel Draw. It comes with pro-grade video capture, audio capture,
and tracker-style video editor for way less than what you would pay for
Adobe Premier. I do a lot of video editing on the professional level
and this is the only software I use.
This is absolutely the best image viewer ever. It runs
on a
wide variety of platforms, displays every image format ever, has tons
of options so you can set everything to display exactly the way you
want it, and my favorite
This is one of the oldest email packages still in
current
production. It's been going since 1990. I've been using it since the
mid-90's. It features more customizable features than any other email
program I've used, excellent spam filtering, and it uses very little
system resources.
Opera (Freeware)
This is the best browser ever, hands down. Its faster
than any
of the competition and can render pretty much every website properly. I
have never been able to make it crash. Also, it runs on everything -
Windows, Mac, UNIX, tablet, Nintendos... It uses the Web Kit engine. I
do have to admit that I liked the older versions (up to around version
11 or so) better than the current version, which did away with the menu
bar in favor of an all-encompassing menu button. Incidentally, I think
people who use Chrome are just the worst, since Google is essentially
the new evil empire aspiring to world domination in ways Microsoft
never even dreamed of.
This is a really great browser put out by a Japanese
company,
and you know Japan always makes great software for some reason. You can
select between three different rendering engine, Trident from IE, Gecko
from Mozilla, or Web Kit from Opera and Safari, which means you'll
never run into a website it can't render. The UI is excellent, and the
themes are very pretty.
WinRAR (Commercial)
The best archiver. Supports creating self-extracting
archives, multi-part archives, handles pretty much all archive formats
including zip, gzip, bzip, 7zip, z, tar, and can even extract the data
from ISO images.
Lightweight and feature filled word processor. It makes
for an
excellent free/open source substitute for Word or Word Pad.
Nero (Commercial)
I can't live without Nero. I have the Nero 10 suite
installed
on every computer I own. There are better media players out there, but
every other CD/DVD authoring software falls flat on its face compared
to Nero. Newer versions even include an automatic backup and hard disc
imaging utility.
A free text editor for Windows. It features
contextual highlighting for a wide variety of programming languages, as
well as HTML and CSS. It can even read UNIX format text files. When you
install it you have the option of replacing MS notepad with ConTEXT.
The best bit torrent client. It's fast, reliable, stable
and
secure. The user interface is excellent.
GraphCalc
(Free/Open Source)
Free full-featured graphing calculator. Makes an
excellent
replacement for and expensive stand alone graphing calculator
Media player that plays everything. I started using this
because it plays the MPEG 4 .ts files output by my satellite receiver.
I haven't found a video format that it can't play.
Eclipse (Free/Open
Source)
An IDE for Java developers. The other major one is Net
Beans,
which is also good, but I like Eclipse a little better. The contextual
highlighting is better, and I like the way it presents a menu as you
type - it saves me a lot of time not type long variable and method
names. It even does imports for you automatically. All of my Java
programs were done in Eclipse.
Works like a printer driver under Windows to let you
create a
PDF from any program
PDF reader that is a less resource intensive alternative
to Adobe's Acrobat
reader.
Security suite. It's pricey, but this is literally the
only security
software I trust. Thanks to Trend Micro, none of my computers has ever
had a virus.
ICQ (Freeware)
Simple chat program. Although you probably already have
this, since
pretty much everyone does, I think.
It didn't cost that much, and it came with a free USB
GPS device for
your notebook. I have one of those things that holds
your notebook while you're in your car. All I have to do is put in my
destination and it gives me all the possible routes and even calculates
the fuel prices. It gives turn by turn direction in your choice of
voices, and you don't have to be online to use it. It's got the most
accurate maps of any GPS or map website I've ever used. I use it in
place of those small windshield-mount GPS. It's a lot easier to see my
notebook screen, so I don't have to take my eyes off the road, and the
voice directions are much more audible.
Unix/Linux
Out of necessity, all of these are pretty lightweight
applications that are easy on resources. Most of the machines that I've
had to run Unix systems on are ones that are too slow to handle the
current version of Windows, and in general I think a lightweight
program is more elegant.
FreeBSD (Free/Open
Source)
Free, open source operating system. I use this on all of
my
file servers/web servers/routers, etc... and any desktops or notebooks
I have that are too slow to run the current version of Windows. It's
rock solid and very easy to use for a Unix. They even have a user
friendly version meant for end users. I'm gonna get hatemail for saying
this, but it's better than Linux.
Free lightweight window manager for X. Whenever I have
an older computer that can't keep up with the current version of
Windows, I install FreeBSD and IceWM. This window manager is so
lightweight that it runs well on computers as old as a 100 MHz Pentium
1 from 1994. Unlike a lot of other lightweight window managers, it's
highly customizable, a large library of third party themes is available
online.
Simple an lightweight PDF viewer for X.
Full featured video and music player. This is the only
Unix video player that I've found works well with many GPU's hardware
video acceleration.
Simple jukebox program for X, similar to WinAmp.
Fast and friendly text editor. The user interface is
similar to notepad in Windows, but with the addition of some more
advanced features useful for programming.
Lightweight and feature filled word processor. It makes
for an excellent free/open source substitute for Word or Word
Pad, and runs on Windows as well.
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