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I would die without these applications

June 5, 2003 • computers • 986 words • about a 4 minute read

I was reading over at #misguided a list of applications that the poster simply couldn’t live without.

Since I’m abnormally preoccupied with software I thought I’d comment on an app that the poster at #misguided turned me on to and some of the apps I love to use on a daily basis! Read on for my list.

The first app I’ll list is the newest, Synergy!

He listed a number of cool apps I hadn’t ever head about, namely Synergy which is flippin awesome! This is the exact app I had been looking for with newest setup (I have two PC’s here with two independant monitors (RDC is for the weak!))

I’ll just paste what he had to say about it:

Synergy has to be one of my favourite apps of all time. It’s a little system tray application you run on multiple machines (preferably with monitors next to one another) which allows you to use the mouse and keyboard on one machine to control any of the other connected machines without any additional hardware. Obviously because signals are sent over the network it isn’t suitable for games but for any desktop operations (that arent chewing the cpu constantly) its perfectly fine.

I’ve been using it since I read about it a few minutes ago between a Windows XP Pro and Windows 2003 Server box and its AWESOME. Its like dual monitors, but not. The response time is awesome and I dont have to have two sets of keyboards or mice. Its quite literally a network K+M switch!

Now on with the rest of my list:

  • HTMLkit is my text editor of choice. Its LARGE on options but its probably the most complete text editor I’ve found. A FTP browsers that just works alongside syntactical highlighting and a plugin system that seals the deal! Add that to its amazing ability to customize EVERYTHING makes it the killer editor. I use it at home and at work and I couldn’t do what I do without it :)
  • Winamp is my media player of choice (Audio AND Visual). I use version 2.91 which is a vast improvement on both Winamp v2.8 (what most people are currently using) and Winamp v3.0. Version three was a major flop but it did have its strong points such as solid Nullsoft Video support and Directshow video playing along with its super cool media library. These features were backported into the existing 2.8 codebase along with a lot of cool bugfixes and imprvements to make 2.9 the most AWESOME media player out there. Think of it as all the cool stuff you get with 2.8 (plugins, visualizers, tight integration with the system) plus all the advanced features of 3.0 without all the UI and file bloat (the lite download is only ~600kB!)
  • SharpReader is my RSS aggregator of choice. I current assimilate and digest the information and ideas of over fifty (probably closer to 70) people who post at least daily or multiple times throughout the day. The majority of those people are smart, witty, and have a focus on either technology or the web. I’ve found SharpReader the best tool to compile all of this information in a manner than makes reading through ~100 posts a day manageable. Its filtering and data linking technology are top notch and really make my life easier :)
  • Mozilla Firebird is the only browser I can use on a daily basis without stabbing myself repeatedly. Firebird is built around the Mozilla rendering engine but sports a custom gui toolkit that makes theming and building extensions super easy and super portable. Currently there are builds of firebird for Solaris, Linux, BeOS, Mac OS X, Windows, you name it! If you need some reasons (besides IE butchering websites) check out this link or this one or this one or maybe this one
  • Mozilla Thunderbird is my mail client. Mozilla thunderbird is to Mozilla Mail as Mozilla Firebird is to Mozilla Browser. Thunderbird is a standalone application built on the Mozilla Mail engine. It has all the cool features of mozilla mail such as exceptional IMAP support, Bayesian spam filtering (it learns about what you consider spam), as well as being built around the near Firebird toolkit which means down the road you may be able to attach Mozilla Calendar as a Thunderbird extension and theme it with standard firebird themes. I’ve used all the mail clients there are to use and Mozilla Thunderbird slaughters them all.
  • Tasks is a PHP application that manages a heirarchical tree of tasks and subtasks. I haven’t been giving it much use during the past few weeks because I’ve been out of school, but once classes start up again, I can guaruntee it gets used a lot.
  • Filezilla is an awesome open-source that, despite its name, is in no way related to Mozilla. It supports all the normal features you’d suspect such as queue’ing but also supports both normal FTP, SFTP, and various flavors of FTP over SSL. Another cool feature of Filezilla is its speed limiting features which will cap your ftp download/upload speeds for you.
  • PuTTY is a free SSH/Telnet client that is extremely minimal and I use quite often. In addition to offering putty, the developers offer several related tools such as plink (a command line interface to PuTTY, Pagent is a SSH agent that resides in your system tray and can auto-athenticate your SSH sessions using public/private key exchange, as well as PSCP and PSFTP (command line SCP and SFTP clients based on putty). Why aren’t YOU using SSH??
  • QuickPuTTY is an accessory app for putty which creates a small floating window with a list of your stored SSH profiles. When you double click on one, a PuTTY SSH session is started. This means one-click access to all my SSH sites :D