Windows Software
Although I'm now a happy switcher, I've been a Windows user for years and have some well-established software preferences. I've also found a lot of those cool tools that I love so much.
Internet & Communication
- Firefox (Free)
- Now that I'm cross-platform, I like my applications to be that way too. Especially the one's that are critical to my daily operations.
- Trillian (Free)
- A multi-protocol chat client for Windows. I understand the next version will work natively on Mac and Windows, so I may have to take a hard look at using it both places. I bought the professional version because I like it so much.
- Thunderbird ? (Free)
- Again, I no longer have much need for a local mail client, but I used Thunderbird for a pretty long time before switching to GMail and it wasn't bad. It wasn't great, either.
- SecureCRT ($99.00)
- Hands down the best terminal emulation client I've ever used. And with 5.x it supports tabbed sessions. It's practically perfect. I wish there was a Mac version of this one. It's expensive for a tool like this, I think, but worth it.
Virtualization
- VMWare Server (Free)
- As far as I know, VMWare invented - or at least perfected - the virtualization category. A terrific application that is on its way to being cross-platform. VMWare Fusion for Mac is in beta. And, to sweeten the pot, VMWare offers a number of "appliance" solutions that can be downloaded free of charge.
Development
- Eclipse (Free)
- As I said before, I'm cross-platform. I like my applications to be cross-platform. The reason I moved to Eclipse in the first place was because it was cross-platform. I started using it before I ever went cross-platform myself and have been very happy.
- Cygwin (Free)
- A Unix-esque environment for Windows. A huge number of great Unix tools at your fingertips. No more command prompt for this guy. I SSH into my own desktop instead (using SecureCRT, of course). As a developer, I find myself watching log files with tail -f on a daily basis. Having the Unix toolkit at my fingertips is a powerful thing.
- WinMerge (Free)
- Absolutely the best diff tool I've ever used. There's a pretty nice one built into Eclipse, but WinMerge does everything it can and more. It includes shell integration. I can select two files in Windows Explorer, right-click and select "Compare". It's just too easy.
Productivity
- OpenOffice.org (Free)
- To the small extent that I need productivity software, I've used both MS Office and OpenOffice.org (OOo). They're both just fine for what I need and OOo is, you know, free. That makes it the winner in my book.
- Microsoft Office (Prohibitively Expensive)
- More expensive than I think it should be, but I've spent some time with Office 2007 and I have to admit...it's nice. I don't know whether I'd like it more or less if I had to use it daily, but it looks like a big improvement over previous versions from where i sit.
- Foxit PDF Reader (Free)
- I got so tired of the absurdly long wait times while waiting for a PDF to load that I just moved away from Adobe all together. Foxit is so much faster.
Multimedia & Graphics
- Photoshop (Prohibitively Expensive)
- Yeah, it's obscenely expensive, but it's good. It's really, really good.
- PaintShop Pro ($79.99)
- I haven't used this for a number of years, but it's far less expensive and used to be quite good. A great Photoshop alternative.
- iTunes (Free)
- Two words: cross-platform. Enough said (and I've said them often enough).
Personal Finance
- Quicken ($69.99)
- I haven't found anything in the Mac or Windows world that's better. Even as a Mac user, I do my banking in a Windows virtual machine just so I can use Quicken.
System Tools & Utilities
- TaskSwitchXP (Free)
- As its name indicates, TaskSwitchXP is a replacement for the built-in Windows Alt+Tab switcher. It looks great, it's extremely configurable and it has one nice extra: it allows you to (optionally) minimize almost any application to the system tray by right-clicking on the window's minimize button. This application simply makes my Windows experience better.
- Launchy (free)
- A power user's dream. Launchy is a keyboard-based application launcher. No more Start Menu, no more Quick Launch toolbar.
- Unlocker (Free)
- I hate getting those messages that I can't perform an action on a file because it's locked by another process. With this handy utility, I can see what has the lock and unlock it if I choose. Another must-have for me.
- Sizer
- A really handy utility for resizing windows to specific, user-configurable sizes or to visualize the current window size while dragging from the bottom right corner. If you spend a lot of time, say, making sure your web application looks good at various resolutions, then it's worth kicking the wheels of this little app.
- rjhExtensions (Free)
- Although I generally use Cygwin, I still find an occasional need to launch a command prompt. This utility is a nice shell extension that gives me the ability to launch a command prompt in a particular directly and more. I can also copy the path of a file to the clipboard from the context menu, "shred" files, encrypt files, etc.
- KeePass Password Safe (Free)
- Another cross-platform application. In this case the Windows version is much, much more powerful. The best password vault I've ever found.
- WinZip ($29.95)
- The quintessential compression utility for Windows.
- ZipGenius (Free)
- A nice, free alternative to WinZip.
- TweakUI (Free)
- A great utility that allows you to customize your windows experience pretty extensively.
