Top 10 Applications, 2009

Another Pointless Web Meme

What's the top 10 applications that you use?

This is a screen grab of my application speedbar, which represents most of what I need to do most of the time for work; my needs for "personal" computing are a little different.. It's twelve applications, sure, but some of them don't really count. They are, across the top:

• Internet Explorer 7 which I use for 95% of all my work-related browsing. This is because windows-based web apps, and many/most web interfaces for switches and routers and things, work "best" with IE. In that with Firefox or Chrome they sometimes don't work at all, or worse, look like they might be working but actually don't. Since these are the types of devices I have to interface with, IE is mandatory.
• Firefox, currently version 3. This is there for the edge cases that are not caught through IE or through Chrome. Firefox has some nice ideas that don't seem to be present in other browsers; the one I like the most is that when you right-click on an image-link, you can either copy the image location, OR you can copy the location that the link points to. When you are setting up your own link-images, this can be an invaluable set of options. But for day-to-day, the next time I find an app I'd rather have on the app bar, Firefox is probably going to be removed.
• Chrome currently version 1.0 something. I really like this browser and use it for 95% of my non-work related browsing. Having a totally different browser makes it easy to segregate work and non-work windows at a glance. It doesn't work for some of the web management interfaces I need, which is why I have to keep IE around. But really the only thing Firefox is used for is the image/link function described above and managing my Gallery2 installation because Chrome keeps trying to plug a password in where it doesn't belong.
• PuTTY which I don't actually use directly any more. I use the pAgent running in my systray to launch pre-defined PuTTY sessions. But this is how I do most of my work, through PuTTY sessions to linux or sun computers.
• MS Remote Desktop Connection for connecting to Windows servers. Pretty much how I do the rest of my job.
• Outlook 2007 which I need because our company uses Exchange, and non-Outlook clients suck when used against Exchange.
• Snipping Tool which is Vista's built-in way to get screen grabs. I use the Gadwin PrintScreen utility instead. I should really get rid of this one.
• X-Chat, which is my instant messenger client of choice. Thanks to dircproxy and bitlbee installed on a friendly server on the internet, anyways.
• Poker Stars which I don't play much anymore these days because I don't have the time.
• TeraTerm which is used to do serial connections with switches and routers and things. I never liked Hyperterm (which is academic because it doesn't come with Vista) and TeraTerm does telnet too (which also doesn't come with Vista). Seriously, removing telnet from an OS on the grounds that it is insecure does NOTHING to help me connect to old devices that only speak telnet.
• WinSCP to transfer files with SSH servers
• VMware Workstation 6.5, which is a big-old cheat because I run a bunch of XP VMs in it so that customer-specific processes are well-isolated from the host OS (and, if necessary, each other).

So if you throw out Firefox, the Snipping Tool, and Poker Stars, that brings you down to nine --although you can replace the Snipping Tool with Gadwin PrintScreen bringing us up to 10.

If you throw out applications on the grounds that they come with the OS, that removes IE and the Remote Desktop Connection, so we're back down to eight. So to pad it back to 10, I'd add:

• VLC Media Player which, as advertised, plays damn near everything; and
• activePDF which is a free PDF printer; I print almost all my document to PDF and mail that so that people are less likely to "accidentally" modify their copy of a document and then try to hold me to their change (yes, this has happened).

That's my top-10 list.