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] [1] – 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] [2] – 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] [3] – 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] [4] – 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] [5] – web browser (free)
- tabbed browsing
- effective popup blocking
- built-in stylesheet switcher
- effective [toolbars for web development] [7]
- [googlebar] [6]
- [sage RSS reader] [8]
- [colorzilla] [9]
- [tab browser extensions] [14]
### [Picasa] [10] – picture manager (free)
- iPhotos but done better
- reasonable photo editing tools built in but could be slightly better
### [Movable Type 3.11] [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] [12] is better than ever at anti-comment spam
### [AVG Anti-Virus] [13] (free)
- free anti-virus!
- regular updates, stable
[1]: http://www.trillian.cc “Trillian IM Client”
[2]: http://www.skype.com “Skype”
[3]: http://www.moodlogic.net “MoodLogic”
[5]: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ “Get FireFox!”
[4]: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ “SpamBayes: Bayesian anti-spam”
[9]: http://www.iosart.com/firefox/colorzilla/ “ColorZilla”
[10]: http://www.picasa.com “Picasa”
[6]: http://googlebar.mozdev.org/ “GoogleBar”
[7]: http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/ “Web Developer Toolbar”
[8]: http://sage.mozdev.org/ “Sage RSS Reader”
[14]: http://googlebar.mozdev.org/ “TabBrowser Extensions”
[13]: http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php “AVG Anti-virus”
[12]: http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/ “MT-Blacklist Clearinghouse”
[11]: http://www.movabletype.org “Movable Type”
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