Six Useful Programs

There’s plenty of crap software out there (Sturgeon’s Law in action) so it’s refreshing to use well designed applications or simply programs that perform a single task exceptionally well. Here’s a quick list of 6 programs that I’ve been using and are definitely worth your time to try out:

6. Billy Music Player

No, it won’t burn your CD’s, browse the internet or make you coffee—but it will play your music, and does a damn good job of it too. Uh huh, I’m one of those people who’ve used Winamp 2.9 since creatures crawled from the primordial swamp, and shy away from the bloated iTunes. Well Billy is even smaller and faster!

5. Nifty Windows

All those little Windows manipulations we do a hundred times a day—dragging, resizing, selecting—they can be made much more efficient. This little tool gives you added functionality to basic Windows interactions. For example to drag-and-resize, just hold down and move the right mouse button from anywhere in the window. Or cycle through the open programs using the scroll wheel. Seemingly simple, but very handy. (If you like this, have a look at other AutoHotKey scripts too. Or even compile your own like I have).

4. OperaTor Browser

With paranoia over government ISP filtering it’s good to know there’s still plenty of ways to remain totally anonymous on the internet, if you want. This is a portable version of the Opera browser with the TOR anonymous network inbuilt. With TOR, your traffic and originating IP are masked by hopping through Onion routers. So browsing HTTP and SSL with Opera is untraceable. May come in handy as we wake to a vision of nineteen eighty-four.

3. Foxit PDF Reader

Ditch that sluggish Acrobat reader and go download Foxit. One tenth the size, much more responsive, tabbed, unintrusive and overall much nicer to view PDF documents with.

2. Paint.NET

Why doesn’t Windows ship with this? A powerful, highly polished image editor, a slimmed down Paint Shop Pro-esque affair, in a 1.6MB package. Oh, did I mention it was free?

1. Notepad++ Editor

While my housemate sings the virtues of Vim, I find Notepad++ to be an excellent, powerful code editor with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, diffs etc. Lightweight yet plenty of features.

Anyone else got a neat application you can’t be without?