The new Dell laptop arrived today (very good, but bit too shiny for my liking - more of that another time). Once I had cleared off a few gig of useless crap that Dell had kindly installed, including 5 different AOL programs, I thought I’d load up some essential software before the holiday weekend.
Whilst I am sure that my list of essential software wouldn’t suit everyone, I found making the choices quite interesting. Here’s what I came up with and why:
Macromedia Suite (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash and Freehand)
My version of this is getting slightly long in the tooth now, but it’s still a suite of tools that I find it hard to be without. Yes, I can code without dreamweaver, but it does make all the common tasks that much faster to deal with. Fireworks is also almost permanently open in a window on my system and is another must have tool. Flash and Freehand I can live without, but it all installs in one go so they stayed on the list.
Filezilla
Quick, reliable and free FTP program to compensate for the fact that the one built in to Dreamweaver sucks like a cheerleader.
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
Context
A replacement for notepad that is useful for coders. Not the most full-featured editor around, but I’ve always liked it. It’s also free.
Interakt Tools
Various tools from Interakt that make Dreamweaver a far more useful application. To be honest I am getting a bit hacked off with these lately, as bug fixes seem only to come in paid upgrades, but I have not yet found a viable alternative.
http://www.interaktonline.com/
Picasa
Picasa is a great little photo organising / editing package from those nice chaps at Google. I’ve loved it since I first downloaded it and wouldn’t be without it on any system where I store photos.
Firefox
Great browser that would probably be my first choice if I did anything else for a living.
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
Internet Explorer
Technically this was on the system already, but it’s only fair to mention it if Firefox gets a mention. Why two browsers? Simply to test pages in the most common environments.
AVG Anti Virus
Free virus protection from Grisoft
That’s really the main kit for now. I have also got GoogleSketchup on there as I want to take a look at that over the weekend, but didn’t mention it as it probably won’t stay long.
In addition to the above I will probably also add Excel (IMHO the only useful part of MS Office), but that’ll probably be it for now. There won’t be email on this system, but if I did I would probably opt for Thunderbird, despite the fact that it is still seriously under-featured.
I thought it was interesting that most of this essential software toolkit is actually either free or open source. I hadn’t quite realised how much non-paid software was creeping into my daily usage.
