Author Topic: Software Suggestions  (Read 2881 times)

Sqthreer!

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Software Suggestions
« on: October 30, 2008, 05:55:12 PM »
If you have encountered any interesting or useful tools during your journey through the internet post them here along with brief descriptions, if it's freeware, open-source, portable, Windows/Mac only, etc. so we can all share the joy.

Here are a few things I use that I have found incredibly useful (by the way, everything I list is freeware):

TeraCopy - This is a small program that intercepts copy/move/paste commands in Explorer and does something (I don't know the technical shit) to speed up the process. It uses a nice, tacky-skin free interface with progress bars and a more detailed description of what happens if there's an error, and a bunch of neat stuff.

AppRocket - Some people find this program pointless, but that all depends on how you use your computer. It's great if you like to avoid using the mouse. It's just a highly configurable program launcher that runs in the background and comes up when you press the hotkey (which you can customize) It will search your start menu or any folder you specify, as well as your browser bookmarks and some other stuff so you can just pop it open and have easy access to all your stuff. You can also navigate with it like a tiny file explorer and go back and forth through folders.

Defraggler - A nifty defrag program by the people who created CCleaner that's faster and easier to use.

Notepad++ (open-source) - A kickass Notepad replacement, but sooo much more.

UltraExplorer - This is a rediscovered find for me. It's a file explorer, like Windows Explorer, but way more intuitive and customizable. It has a tabbed and dual-pane interface, a column view option (kinda like what Finder has for Macs) a favorites toolbar and/or pane, customizable keyboard shortcuts, command prompt pane, folder tree pane, quick filter, breadcrumb browsing, folder grouping (which is awesome if you have all your music in one folder so you can separate each letter), image/text/video preview pane and a thumbnail size slider. There's a shitload of other stuff, but these are some things I like. I've been using xplorer2 for a while, but it's not free for the good version, and it doesn't compare to UltraExplorer in many ways. One gripe someone might have is that it kinda uses more memory than usual. But not anything noticable for me, anywho. I've never seen it at more than 25k, and that doesn't really do anything.

I find new stuff all the time so I'll probably be coming here more, later.

Let's see what y'alls got.
« Last Edit: October 30, 2008, 05:58:47 PM by Sqthreer! »
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Spectere

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Re: Software Suggestions
« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2008, 06:55:27 PM »
Microsoft Visual Studio Express - The perfect suite for the aspiring developer.  It contains Microsoft's intuitive Visual Studio development environment, the most recent versions of all of their main supported languages, the MSDN library, the Windows SDK (for Visual C++), and even a free version of their SQL server.  Originally, Microsoft planned to charge $40 for the whole set, which still would have been a steal.  Ultimately, they decided to keep the whole set for free, even going so far as to provide a downloadable DVD-sized ISO image on their site for people who want a hard copy.

In addition to releasing the development tools for free, Microsoft also released a considerable amount of documentation and other resources (such as XNA) to facilitate specific types of development tasks.  It's definitely hard to beat.
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