Software I use

An almost exhaustive list of the software I use for all kinds of different purposes on my computers. It also functions as a list of software that I should keep up to date and re-install in case of hard disk crash or something similarily horrible. Feel free to browse around and try out the software. The selection is a result of many years of extensive use so I will guarantee the quality of most of the programs.

Don’t ask how many of these programs are legal copies. You don’t want to know.

Operating System

Codecs

  • ffdshow: I’m not even sure what ffdshow exactly does, but it does it good enough for me to keep it. Needed for video decoding.
  • ac3filter: If you want some surround sound from the latest downloaded movies, this is it. If your videos don’t play sound, you might have to download ac3filter.

Image

  • Adobe Photoshop CS2: What can I say – the standard in image editing. A must have for any digital photographer, web designer, publisher or artist (and I use it for all of that!).
  • Adobe Illustrator CS2: I actually haven’t used this software much at all but I’ve seen magic been done with it.
  • Blender: A free 3D modeler and renderer with a somewhat awkvard user interface. Haven’t used it really, but I keep it as a reminder to start doing 3D graphics.
  • Picasa, an image organizer from Google. Looks good and is fast, but I seldom use it because it’s just not worth it. You can do image editing with it, but for some reason the edits won’t get saved – which means I could as well edit photos in Photoshop…

Audio

  • Winamp: The music player (and it does video too, but not good enough). It has a plethora of plugins and visualisations that are just drop dead cool. I have been loyal to Winamp since the beginning of version 2 and I will continue… at the moment I’m experimenting with the mlipod plugin to Winamp that handles my iPod Black 60 GB.
  • Windows Media Player: Why do I have this program, you ask? Well, because it’s freaking built into Windows, that’s why. It’s not a bad piece of software, but I very seldom use it. It’s just good to have when the other media players let you down for any reason.
  • iTunes: To put it plainly – this is a real piece of crap software. Horrible user interface, slow and it’s trying to do all this Digital Right Management which I hate. At the moment I’m just keeping it in case my Winamp iPod plugin won’t work. I’ll be glad to put iTunes in my Recycle bin ASAP.

Video

  • BSPlayer: A trustworthy video player. I can’t say it’s the best, I wouldn’t know, but it does its work as its supposed to.
  • (VLC): This is supposedly a really feature rich video player, so I’ll keep it in mind.
  • QuickTime Pro: Another DRM protecting, crappy Apple software but unfortunately it’s needed for movie trailers and panoramas you find on the net.
  • InterVideo WinDVD: Comes with my Thinkpad Z60, and works, but not much more.
  • Gspot: A must have for investigating video playing problems. It shows all the codecs needed for a movie file and also shows what codecs you got. Get this now!

Communication

  • Trillian: A couple of years ago this was a really good chat program, that could connect to all major IM networks. Now, it does the same thing, but it’s not as cool anymore. It does ICQ ok and IRC ok, but misses all the features of MSN. Promises more than it can keep, though it’s better than having ICQ itself. Is currently being phased out – I’m basically not using ICQ or IRC anymore, only MSN.
  • MSN Messenger: I originally hated this program, for no certain reason, but now I use it a lot. It has really cool and easy features like video chat, sketching, nice emoticons, etc. Small drawbacks in user interface and built-in ads, though.
  • Skype: Man, I wished I made this program! It’s nothing new – audiochat has been here for ages – but Skype connects it all and makes it simple. But in my own experience, the quality is still not good. Let’s wait and see.
  • Teamspeak: This is another audio chat program, used for online gaming. I used it when playing Eve Online. It’s easy and a must in certain types of online gaming.

Desktop

  • Yahoo! Widgets. Looks good, but I’m not really using them… hard to change old habits.

Scientific

  • Matlab: I both hate and love this program. It can do so much and so fast, but I always seem to get stuck for hours trying to figure out stupidly easy things like how to address in a matrix or write a function. If you do math when programming, Matlab is your friend.
  • Mathematica: This program is creepy. Strange user interface but it can solve any equation or simplify any nasty piece of formula. Not installed at the moment.

System Tools

Programming

Internet

  • Mozilla Firefox. A given choice, but I’m having more and more problems with this browser. It seems to get slower and slower, it consumes huge amount of memory and it sometimes eats up lots and lots of processor power. Buggy software is not cool. But the extensions make Firefox hard to live without:
    • Google Toolbar: I don’t particularly like toolbars, but this offered some interesting features. I have still to use it seriously, but it’s nice to see the page rank of web pages being visited.
    • Adblock: I have mixed thoughts about this. Nice to hide ads, of course, but in the same time, I suspect it of hiding flash-movies and images I actually want to see! Disabled for now.
    • Gmail Manager: A must have. Can handle several accounts.
    • DownThemAll! A cool download manager – can handle regular expressions to filter which links to download. Can’t handle dynamically linked files (i.e. a php-file that retrives the file) and it would be much better if it could fetch files recursively – not all pages link directly to a file, they sometimes link to a page that in turn links to the file.
    • BugMeNot: The best since sliced bread. Bored of having to log in at newspapers, download sites and elsewhere? Just right click on the loginfield and let BugMeNot retrieve a common user account. Good if you want to login more anonymously too.
    • Colorzilla: Gets you the color code of anything in the web page, as well as outlining the objects of a web page. Good for web design.
  • Internet Explorer
  • (Mozilla Thunderbird)
  • Microsoft Outlook 2003

Text & Publish

  • Microsoft Office 2003
  • Adobe Indesign CS2
  • Adobe Acrobat Reader

Games

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