I thought I’d take the oppurtunity to shill mention several pieces of software that I use on a regular basis that I’ve found invaluable for a number of purposes. These range from general-purpose utilities, to editors, to development tools for rather specific purposes. They are in no particular order, except that order that I could remember them.

EditPad

I purchased 6 a while ago, and even upgraded to Editpad 7 when it was released. It is one of the best General-Purpose Text Editors I have ever used. They also have a free, “Lite” Version.

mIRC

mIRC is a IRC client. It has good automation and scripting capabilities, and is one of the best IRC clients you can get for Windows. XChat is another.

PowerArchiver

PowerArchiver is just one of a large number of Archive utilities you can get today. Windows XP and later have built-in ZIP file support, so one might wonder why you even need a Archive utility. For my purposes, I’ve found many PowerArchiver features invaluable. It’s Shell Integration is top-notch, I like it’s User-Interface, It’s fast, and it supports a wide number of formats. It also supports scheduled backups through backup scripts, which ties in well to it’s multi-format support, which allows you to select the smallest, most compressed format even if it happens to take more time to compress. It supports multi-core decompression and I’ve found it better than any other archiving tool I’ve used (WinRAR, 7-zip, etc). I had some issues requiring those two to work around, such as trying to mod Java .jar files not working with powerarchiver for some reason, but more recent updates seem to have fixed that. The one feature I do not like is it’s updating service. My license is for “2012 Toolbox”, but the update service wants to update me to 2013; if I do so, however, It becomes a trial version because I don’t have a license. This should definitely be mentioned in the update notes.

WinAmp

Winamp is a tried and tested Music Player and manager that I’ve been using for as long as I can remember. Many attribute Winamp as a “windows 98 Era” Music player, but it’s still quite capable. My favourite features are it’s wealth of available plugins for things such as Effects, Input, and other purposes. For example, I have multiple entire Game Music libraries for various systems contained in small native formats. Every single music track from Chrono Trigger on around 300 Kilobytes, for example. This is because I have a plugin that provides SNES Music playback though a “reduced” SPC Emulator. I have similar plugins for other Game Formats such as NSF, Gamecube, and USF (N64). Nowadays most people seem to use iTunes, I stick with the basics. WinAmp can sit in the background and be ready to play music if I get the whim to do so at any point.

Visual Studio 2012

Not much to say about Visual Studio. Perhaps one of the best Development Environments I’ve ever used. Paired with tools such as ReSharper, however, it’s like it’s become some sort of semi-sentient software device designed to help you build software. With some other IDEs I feel like I have to fight against them to create software. With Visual Studio I find the barriers reduced. There still are a few usability concerns I have though mostly stemming from usability improvements I’ve noticed in other IDE software, such as…

Eclipse

Eclipse is a free IDE designed primarily for Java software development. It is itself written in Java as well. It has it’s own limitations and advantages; one disadvantage is the lack of a Visual Designer for Java Frames- Considering most other Windows-based languages have IDEs with designers (including Java with software such as NetBeans and IntelliJ) this is a rather large omission. One feature I found particularly useful after becoming familiar with it is the ability to have access to numerous projects through the concept of a workspace; that is, rather than opening and closing various projects, you can open as many projects as you want simultaneously. This is a huge benefit to productivity because it means you can easily refer to other projects by simply opening the appropriate files. If you have a project that refers to another project, for example, you can go to the definition. In contrast, with Visual Studio you would either need to have that project as part of your solution (and refer to it at a “project” level) or refer to ut through a library and examine the source manually when needed by closing your current project and opening the other, opening it in a new Visual Studio Instance, or simply opening the source code you want to check directly in a text editor.

Photoshop CS5.1

Photoshop is the ubiquitous Graphics Tool and IMO it has this ranking because it is simply the best available. There are a number of so-called competitors (Gimp comes to mind) but the fact is that No other Graphics tool even compares to Photoshop, and the only people that attempt to assert such things have evidently never used photoshop, or aren’t very versed at Photoshop.

VMWare

Virtualized Environments and Emulation is a very powerful feature and is becoming more and more prominent when dealing with Virtualized Server environments, where a single physical server with a bajillion cores and gobs of memory is “partitioned” into several virtual servers with different virtualized environments and those Virtual Private Servers are rented out to interested parties for purposes such as Web Servers.

TortoiseGit, TortoiseSVN, and TortoiseHg

These are a set of tools that add Shell Extensions to Windows Explorer to make it easier for you to interoperate with remote or local Git, SVN, or Mercurial/HG Repositories. Most popular IDE software provides plugins that can interoperate with these tools to provide good support within the IDE for various Source Code Control operations remotely.

Even so, in some cases (particularly Git and Eclipse) I’ve personally found it lacking (most likely the plugin, not Tortoise). As such you should still learn at least the basics of using the svn, git, and hg commands if you are working with source code control systems that use the three. Other tools such as VisualSVN provide similar functionality more tightly integrated with your IDE (in the case of VisualSVN, Visual Studio). But none match the price of the Tortoise Tools, which are free, and Open Source.