Tools I Use, 2004 Edition
I have a lot of little applications that run on my machine. I thought I’d share what I felt are the best ones so you can try them. I’ve included key features that make me stick with them.
Trillian Pro 2.0/3.0 - Instant Messsenger ($25/yr for pro)
- aggregates all of MSN, Y!, AIM and ICQ
- lets me treat Joe on MSN and Joe on AIM as the same person through “meta-contacts”
- lets me treat Joe ICQ@Work and JoeICQ@Home as the same person
- puts all of “Joe”’s history in one place (3.0)
- has nifty plugins for weather, time, spellchecking and even translations on the fly
- Apple’s Rendezvous support (3.0)
- can organize people into groups and more importantly, sub-groups
- type ahead search to find a contact out of my 417 (3.0)
- voice/video chat for the clients that support it
- tabbed chat so all your windows are contained
Skype - internet phone (mostly free)
- free calls to other skype users anywhere in the world
- means i can call anywhere I find a hotspot for free
- can call real phone numbers for a small price per minute
- seamless duplex and no noticeable lag
Moodlogic - music manager (mostly free)
- identifies music in your library just by looking at the signal instead of the ID3 tags
- pulls in data about the song’s tempo, mood, etc
- lets you create playlists just by saying “songs that feel like this song”
- really cool profiling engine
SpamBayes - OutLook spam detection (free)
- no false positives
- has a spam suspects folder for unsure items
- kills 150 spams a day for me
- slow =(
Mozilla FireFox 1.0 - web browser (free)
- tabbed browsing
- effective popup blocking
- built-in stylesheet switcher
- effective toolbars for web development
- googlebar
- sage RSS reader
- colorzilla
- tab browser extensions
Picasa - picture manager (free)
- iPhotos but done better
- reasonable photo editing tools built in but could be slightly better
Movable Type 3.11 - blog software (sort of free)
- free for single author up to 3 blogs
- easy to customize template (ugly default templates, though)
- very flexible in setup
- new blacklist is better than ever at anti-comment spam
AVG Anti-Virus (free)
- free anti-virus!
- regular updates, stable
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