Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

TextPad (www.textpad.com)
XaraX (www.xara.com)

Both these pieces of software are fast, reliable, and perform exactly as I expect in every situation. They are also very orthogonal, every feature is available on every item etc.

Winamp. Not for the player itself or the "skinning".

I really like the "snap to the edge" feature. When you drag it near the edge of the screen or near another window, it pause to adjust perfectly to this place.

Really cool feature.

Beyond Compare

Incredible time saver and the UI is very well designed. Also cheap to purchase.

I gotta have Photoshop. It is not perfect, in fact for its age it is quite unrefined. However I know it just so well I can accomplish anything graphical in it with very little effort.

Trillian (www.trillian.cc)

I love it because it's BOTH useful AND usable. I think lots of other IM clients out there are usable and some are even beautifully designed. But Trillian lets me talk to anyone on pretty much any chat medium, AND it's beautifully designed.

I think both utility and usability will only get you so far on their own. But when the two are both present and work together well, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Well, back in the DOS days, I LOVED the revolutionary Norton Commander. Today I use a NC clone (Windows Commander) (www.ghisler.com). Cannot live without it. Love also Cobian Backup. (http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm)

VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)

I LOVE VLC. It can play any of my video to and from, out of and into and over anything! Shame the GUI for Windows is so uninspiring. That's why I'm working on a WPF front end for it.

1. WinRAR
2. Far Manager
3. ReGet

GarageBand

I was going to say Xara X, but someone else beat me to it. However, I am somewhat biased, as I was on the original development team :-).

The reason I like it is because it's direct and (as mentioned above) orthoganol. It lets me do things quickly and simply.

My only gripe with it is that most of the stuff I tend to produce are diagrams for system designs, and it's not that well suited to this. On the other hand, I've tried Visio etc., and don't really like them. When I'm trying to make a diagram, I still go back to Xara most of the time, which is testament to its ease of use.

This is particularly frustrating to me as 10 years ago when we were working on the first version, I really wanted a good diagram editor for the system architecture, but could never find one. I tried Visio way back then too (it was new then!) but it sucked then as it sucks today. :-(

And whenever I get a new PC, one of the first things I do is run Xara, draw a big wiggly freehand shape, fill it with a bitmap, and drag the fill handles around in real time to see how fast it is. That never gets old :-)

Opera browser-

I've used it back in the first browser wars when I was a college student, and came back again in 2001 and I've been hooked since. Firefox and the new IE are nice tools, and they are just as nice, but Opera fits me like a glove- the mouse gestures are so intuitive. When I use Opera, I feel like those scenes in the movies where they show someone using a computer.. the UIs are NEVER realistic and the actors magically get the information they need with a few clicks... Opera actually does that for me! I love it.

When it comes to photo organizing, Picasa 2 rocks. It is very intuative, extremely functional, and is polished to a great degree. I really enjoy the subtle and smooth animations and graphical effects such as the animation of rotation and zooming.

Sonar. Calkwalk rocks! Great software made by a great company. A *LOT* has to with the fact that the program manager is on their newsgroups answering questions and solving problems.

Also, RSSBandit. Great features and is free. Plus, the software has matured over time, getting better with each release.

Far Manager
Colorer
RAR
PaintShop Pro

...and, of cource, I love all the GPLed software, because it is free. ;)

I love MindManager software, because of the idea, System thinking does a lot of good for us.
And one more is the PERSONAL BRAIN software, I love it too for it's great thinking

Copernic Desktop Search. It's blindingly fast (even though I'm indexing my company LAN as well as my local machine, and can produce results before that damn dog has even appeared), has a nice clean UI, respects multiple users, and lets me add my own filetypes (eg .cs). It also indexes a variety of email programs.

FME by Safe Corp. (www.safe.com) - Tons of stuff in it that would take years to write if I had to do it on my own. I could not do my job effeciantly without it. It has a few bugs that can be frustrating but other than that I love it. Plus it's extensible using C++ and it's scripting environment Tcl is extensible as well. All in all an absolute must have for anyone dealing with geo-spatial data.

University of Minnesota's Mapserver coupled with DM Solutions Php Mapscript (mapserver.gis.umn.edu | http://maptools.org/php_mapscript/index.phtml ) - This little combo has enabled me to be able to put together solutions that have amazed some the biggest players in the Telecom industry. It amazes me constantly what you can do with these libraries. I could not do what I do without these libraries. Literally hundreds of thousands of man hours of development time have gone into these libraries for manipulating and displaying spatial and geometric data.

MSFT Excel for Mac and Windows - I probably do not go a single day without using Excel at least once. For everything I have ever needed it to do it has always been able to do it and it's never been hard to figure out how to accomplish what I need to do when I use it. All the other Office products I could pretty much care less about because I never use them because there are better programs that do what the other products do. Excel however has no equal in my book.

Total Commander is a tool that I always carry with me on a USB stick, and is the first to get installed on a fresh Windows.

It's a fast and flexible filemanager with a source and destination pane, which makes it far more flexible for copying files. Its Search & Synchronize Directories are also much faster than the built-in Windows counterpart (does anyone actually use those?).

The design is somewhat dated, but the functionallity of it is unsurpassed. Been using it since 1996, and it's still being updated :)

Toast for Macintosh. All versions. Does everything related to its task (CD burning) perfectly, and nothing unrelated to its task. Quick, clean, easy. I've been a fan of Toast forever. (Roxio also makes Easy CD Creator for Windows which, strangely, completely sucks. Go figure.)

The best MUD client EVER was Rapscallion for Mac Classic. Unfortunately, nobody's ported it to OS X yet, but man. It had more features in 1998 than MushClient has now, *and* it's easier to use at the same time. Shame that there aren't any decent MUD clients for MacOS anymore. (Although even the lame MacOS clients are better than the best Windows ones... it's the year 2006, why doesn't MushClient make URLs clickable!?)

Personally, I think the RAZR's UI is awful (to many button pushes to get stuff done).

My favorite to would have to be my e-mail client, The Bat!. Admittedly, the UI could be better, but the power (safely) exposed to uses is tremendous.

Also, those little UNIX utilities (sed, grep, etc.) can be chained together to do all sorts of things. I hope MSH ends up being what is was promised to be...

Back when I started programming (BBC/Commodore BASIC), this involved using a line editor. So, a typical editing session would be something like this:

Me: "Show lines 10-200"
Computer: far too much for me to read
Me: "Ok, now just do lines 10-50"
Computer: shows relevant bit
Me: "Right, here's the new line 35, to go between 30 and 40. Now show me the new section."

When I started learning Pascal at school, this was the first time I'd ever used a text editor, and it really blew me away. "You mean, you can go up and down? And just type something new in wherever you like? That's amazing! That is just so cool!"

By modern standards that editor was pretty crude, and I certainly appreciate lots of the new features in text editors/word processors. But nothing since has ever got the same reaction from me, by being such a huge leap forward over its predecessor.

These are tools for developers, but many non-developers would find them useful if they understood what they did. And they're all cheap or free!

Beyond Compare: file and directory comparison tool. http://www.scootersoftware.com

WinGrep: Windows GUI version of classic GREP search engine. http://www.wingrep.com

TortoiseCVS: An almost invisible interface between Windows Explorer and CVS source control. A beautiful integration into Windows.

I'll second the nomination of TextPad, though cursor navigation doesn't behave exactly like I'd expect or desire. Starts fast, stays focused, respects my preferences. When Visual Studio removed Brief mode, my productivity suffered tremendously. CodeWright was good. Best text editor ever? TPU on VAX/VMS. For actual writing (as opposed to producing "documents"), nothing beats a good text editor.

Firefox. Sure, everybody raves about tabbed browsing, which IE 7 will have natively, but IE doesn't give me the same sense of control with everything else. Far superior cookie control. One button to clear caches, cookies, history. Simple preferences pages. Adblock. Accelerator keys for quickly changing text size. Incremental search for text on a page. I just wish it would start up a little faster and that form controls wouldn't wreak havoc with ClearType text on Windows.

TurboTax, until a couple versions ago when they starting moving to a klunky Web-like interface on the desktop version. I got so fed up with scrolling to hit the Next button last year that I'm trying TaxCut this year.

TeX. Open, powerful, portable, but a pain to learn. I never bothered re-learning LaTeX after the big re-design. I've got my own TeX macro packages for manuscripts, screenplays, etc.

While I can't say it's an application I love because I only played with it, rather than use it day-to-day, however the most intriguing applications I experimented with is Kai's Power Soap. While I did not find it particularly intuitive because all of the widgets were graphical without any textual descriptions, it stands as having the prettiest interface I've ever used (even after all of these years) - light years ahead of anything else I've used.

One of the most significant feelings I remember when I played with this program is how *fun* it was to play and experiment with the tools. The combination of not having any textual descriptions and extremely attractive widgets (which looked like and were shaped in proportion to common physical objects, but had a futuristic and sometimes unfamiliar look them so that you do not necessarily knew what it would do) actually encouraged the user to experiment with the tools to figure out what to do. In a way, it's akin to "Myst" where you were figuring out what to do - what this button did, what happened if I pulled this level, what if I dragged this tool over the canvas? There was also a tremendous amount of satisfaction when you figured what what the tool was and how to use it.

This is far from the types of interfaces you would ideally design because of learning curve required to figure out how to use the application, however I have never been compelled to explore an interface and be rewarded with such a level of satisfaction once I learnt the interface as I have with any other application. While it probably should remain as an experimental project rather than a template to base interfaces on, is there anything we can learn from it? I personally struggle to figure out what parts I can use from it to develop my own interfaces, however this product and the feelings it evoked still be remembered for a long time to come.

There are 2 software components that I "live and die" by...

Internet Neighborhood. FTP interface for Windows Explorer. This is installed on EVERY PC I own or use. I couldn't maintain my websites, etc with out it! Been a fan for YEARS. Clean, simple, seamless. Life IS good. :)

GoToMyPC. Runs 24x7 at home. I do the opposite of the commercials. Who would want to get to work from home? Not me, I'm doing the fun stuff at home. However, sitting at work, and realizing, "oh... I did that 2 months ago at home"... "connect... file transfer..." <ding> files done! Also good for testing external facing work functions from my desktop inside the network. And now with File Drag & Drop between desktops! Anyone who has to work for a living, should have this. As the commercial for another product says... "don't leave home without it!" <slobber><drool> LOL

Oh.. and an honorable mention to DotNetNuke. Open source for windows that works! Not a zealot yet, but definitely leaning in that direction!

M.U.L.E for the Commodore 64.

The game is great and the interaction design for the auctions is perfect that it adds to the fun of the game.

Okay, I'll give a third call out for TextPad. I'm a professional writer as a sideline (it's not a job you live off of) and I do all my writing in TextPad. It doesn't get in my way the way Word does. It's there when I need it, but only when I call for it. I've been using it for years, and unlike many programs it hasn't suffered the fault of trying to be bigger and better every version. It's a text editor and it doesn't try to be anything else.

Infranview is another must have application. It's an image views, and has been for years. Many image viewing programs fall into the trap of trying to become editors and end up vanishing because of it. Infranview was stayed the course and produced one of the best images views out there.

There is also Boost, which isn't a program exactly, but a set of libraries. If your program in C++ Boost is a must, it fills in a lot of the gaps of the STL and just makes writing code easier.

"CATraxx" (http://www.fnprg.com) is my most important tool when digging into my music collection. It would unbearable to loose the information entered...

KeyText (http://www.mjmsoft.com/keytext.htm) because in a crazy GUI world it's still possible to type speedy and selfcomposed macros!

Also, -biased as well, I'd like to tell you about our homegrown tool "Simple Failover" which keep our web-shops open all the time - automatically. Any disaster can happen, and it can compete with any multi-millon dollar Cisco box installation, and sometimes outperform it.

I love Mac OSX. I just works, and is very intuitive.

The iLife suite as well.

iTunes. I could do without the stupid brushed metal look, but iTunes was the first mainstream media player to get managing a music library Right. Quick and easy filtering on artist, album, and genre. Easy to use playlist generation. Ratings. Weighted shuffle. Search based playlists. None of these were pioneered by iTunes, and I bet at least one other player put them together this way. But iTunes was the one I saw first. My first serious exposure was setting it for my mom so she could use her MP3 player. That little exposure was enough to sell me. Since then I've been eagerly tracking iTunes knockoffs for Linux (Rhythmbox is pretty close if any other Linux users are reading).

SnagIt (http://www.techsmith.com) - this is the capture tool I really love. Has beautiful interface, is easy to use, and produces really nice output with minimal work from me.

Miranda IM (http://www.miranda-im.org) - a really nice replacement for ICQ, MSN and a couple of other IMs.

MyInfo (http://www.milenix.com) - some sort of free form organizer. Has nice UI, simple to use, looks like another Office app (btw I like MS Office apps interface very much ;))

WinZip (http://www.winzip.com) - actually I use WinRar, because it handles both most popular file compression formats, but WinZip is a much more beautiful application and should be an example for good UI for many developers.

I think it's very interesting that most people mentioned smaller utilities than larger applications. I think that underscores how hard it can be to make a complex, feature-rich application truly lovable (which is why I admire the efforts of the Office team as you strive to do so).

I think Photoshop has come pretty close, but I'll never understand why they decided to create ImageReady as a separate application. Adobe's worst sin, though, has been allowing the same tools to function differently in each of those two applications. That was when I lost my love.

I do love Final Cut Pro. That's a pretty complex application that's also elegant and a pleasure to use. Maxon's Cinema 4D is another example.

OmniGraffle on the Mac. It's not as full-featured as Visio, but it also doesnt suck. Visio is a very useful Tool, but somehow it is incredibly frustrating to use.

Best feature: Imagine two shapes of different size close to each other. You drag one of the shapes up and down. As soon as the tops, centers or bottoms of the shapes are aligned, OmniGraffle shows horizontal lines between the two as a hint that this is where you stop dragging if you want those two aligned. Extremely useful, and faster than having a "vertical align top" etc. menu item.

Powerpoint should do this, too!!!!!!!!!!!

OneNote. Absolute must have for day-to-day work.

StrokeIt. Mouse gestures for windows. Approximately as addictive as heroin (or so I've heard) once you get accustomed to using them.

Rogue. The best ASCII graphics game EVER. I've won it only once. Good stuff.

It's kind of odd to me how I haven't seen any Microsoft applications yet in the 20+ comments...but I will mention at least one Microsoft application:

I love OneNote. It's not perfect, but it makes it easy to organize all of my client files and it has some great indexing and reporting (action flags) features. It's also one of the few applications that really works well with my Tablet.

Outside of that, it's all about the great utilities:
- Hoekey is fantastic for creating universal shortcuts, and it takes up less than 100k of space!
- GoToMeeting is lightning fast, inexpensive, and much easier for participants to configure than the other products I won't mention here
- ViceVersaPro keeps my computers in sync with all sorts of nifty customizations
- Firefox. Fast and lots of great add-ins.

Some of the others mentioned by peers here are also favorites, like TextPad and SnagIt. However, programs like iTunes and Trillian, which I use all the time, wouldn't be in the same category as the others--they're bloated and resource intensive.

I remember once-upon-a-time when software was designed for hardware rather than the other way around. When applications are light and fast that makes them that much easier to add into one's regular tools.

A couple years ago I tried out Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook and ran into all sorts of problems, but the biggest issue was that it installed SQL Server to link everything together. I don't know if that's still what it does, but talk about a CPU killer! I live in Outlook for work but I also run Eudora (12 years now!) for personal email, and it's faster than any iteration of Outlook, both in terms of searching and navigating.

I'm a huge fan of the way 37signals designs software: less is more. Code it well. Don't try to be everything to everyone.

One piece of software I fell in love with when I was a student was VNC. The ability to make any computer become any other computer (safely) is fantastic. I use it for work and for fun...

Also Excel is something I actually enjoy using for work. I code a lot of macro's and the latent power of the software is incredible... The graphing could do with a SERIOUS overhaul which I hope is coming in office 12, but it's cheaper easier and, with my programming, more powerful than the company standard software (Diadem)

<a href="http://www.macromates.com/">TextMate</a>, by far the best text editor I've ever used, and <a href="http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/">Quicksilver</a>, and the best whatever it is (brain extension software?) that I've ever used.

TextMate is the only program I've ever used that felt like it was made by my future brain that already knew what I needed in a text editor (and nothing more!). I can't explain in words how it fits me perfectly like a glove.

Quicksilver learns from your behavior so quickly it feels like it's reading your mind.

I miss both whenever I'm working on a Windows&reg; computer at work.

1. MindManager - a great brainstorming and idea management tool and the best non-MS Tablet PC app yet (I do love OneNote too).
2. ActiveWords - automate everything with virtually no UI unless you want or need it.
3. Anagram - add contacts, appointments, and tasks to Outlook with a single keystroke.
4. Tablet Enhancements for Outlook - You have no idea how useful Outlook can be on a Tablet PC until you try this elegantly designed and feature-laden add-in.

Access 12!

But more (or less) seriously, the software I've gotten the most enjoyment out of ever is Blizzard's Warcraft 2 (actually, I'm surprised no one is mentioning games in general). As far as more serious software, any fairly lightweight text editor (even notepad) is something I always love having around, and I also like Trillian (someone said it was bloated and resource intensive, but last time I used *just* ICQ, it was more resource intensive, so I figured I had a definite savings).

Mac OS X (Tiger) is a must-have for me. I'm a recent switcher and the whole thing was based on the fact that the mac feels alot more streamlined, for some reason. Tiger + Quicksilver (or Spotlight, but i prefer quicksilver, leaner UI) is an amazing experience. Most Mac OS-software the recent months have been great experiences. the main thing is how programmers treat the user with respect. no spyware and nothing infecting my browser is a refreshing idea. Oh and textmate for the mac. it's love since it's so small and yet so powerful.

Photoshop is another one of those (I'm mostly used to it on Windows), especially CS, the version before this one. The sheer and raw power, the intuitivity (this is based on the fact that i've used ps for quite a few years) and the general feel of it is love.

Contrast this with for example Word for Mac. horrible. I've got no beef with Word for Windows, I find it pretty nice, though I guess the ribbon, by the looks of it, will attract me alot more than Word currently is. But Word for Mac is just l'horrible!

I love Windows XP Media Center Edition. I had been using ATI's Multimedia Center for a while with an All-in-Wonder and it was crap.

MCE is great for many reasons. It has a very simple and elegant interface, it is loaded with features (record an entire series, remote recording, all the usual PVR stuff, and so on), and it's stable. ATI's MMC would always lock up my PC (hooray for crappy device drivers). MCE is 99% of what I could ever ask for in a PVR.

MacOS X + TextMate (hands down the best editor I seen)

Windows side is
VS2005 + Code Express

I think my #1 is still InfoDepot for the Mac. (I'm slightly biased; I briefly worked for the developer.) Think outline + spreadsheet + mild databases + massive flexibility, scriptability, and just an all-around powerful tool. Back then it could do a LOT of what Project, Outlook and Excel do for MOST users today ... The interface looked simple, but the simplicity hid great power. Since I didn't have anything to do with its code or construction, I've often thought of building a clone of it ... definitely for Mac, possibly for Win ...

(I still have two legal copies ... one shrinkwrapped; it's my "collectible." LOL.)

Shortly beneath that is iTunes -- either Mac or PC, your choice. (Although I swear the Win version runs slower than the Mac-native version.)

Interface Builder on the Mac (and prior, NextStep). (I'm a developer ... And I'm finding the connection-action paradigm beautiful when compared to Win's message pump ... which is itself beautiful next to trying to do ANY decent UI in Java ... )

I gotta say something Microsoft, since this is a Microsoft blog ... And Visual Studio takes the taco there. If I could Visual Studio's integration, power and flexibility with IB's simplicity, I'd be in 7th heaven. (Too bad there's no Objective C for .NET ... and too bad no official .NET on Mac ... )

Firefox. Clean, simple, beautiful, fast.

Someone beat me to it: OneNote. Clean and intuitive for all the common note taking tasks.

More MS products:

MCE is also very nice. It has a very high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) and even my old mother appreciates it and could use it to do basic things right from the start.

Microsoft Digital Image Suite Library 2006. Many of my friends have tried Picasa etc., but once they tried this program, they were hooked. It is also intuitive and fast which makes it fun to work with.

Common apps:

Firefox - I love the flexibility, but mostly I love bookmark keywords and typeahead find. Between the two (and the occasional greasemonkey hack to fix a website), I can efficiently navigate without having to use the mouse. I combine bookmark keywords, keyword queries, and bookmarklets to turn my address bar into a command line. e.g. 'gg <term>' is a google search, '/.' takes me to slashdot, 'style' opens up a popup allowing me to edit the page css in real time. I've got gestures so I can quickly operate the browser without a keyboard as well.

Vim - Exclusively a power user app, but I have never found a faster way to manipulate text. One day I'll write an article detailing how the modal interaction scheme is good UI for the task and target audience. Its lack of fancy IDE features are mitigated by my 2000 line vimrc and it's universal availability (I install it on all my windows machines and it comes pre-installed in every *nix environment I've run across).

Odd apps:

wmi (not wmii) - http://wmii.de/
A linux window manager and another power user exclusive app. This is a mixed floating and tiled window manager that is intended to be interfaced primarily from the keyboard.

The big advantage of wmi over other window managers is the ability to set up your environment so that switching between windows becomes a tacit behavior. In most window managers, you can alt+tab efficiently between two windows and it doesn't break workflow. If you're working with three windows, then you're reduced to hunting through the alt tab list or the taskbar because there's no stable keyboard shortcut to switch between the apps.

My solution is setting up a very rigid frameset in wmi where I've taught myself to flip between 6 windows without breaking workflow. wmii (read wmi-2) reorders its windows, which breaks this pattern so it's no good. Apple's expose is another solution and works better than anything else mainstream but you still have to hunt for windows.

leo - http://leo.sf.net
I don't like how it looks, I don't like the default keyboard shortcuts, I don't like its UI warts, but I love the basic premise. Leo is an outline editor, which means that instead of operating on a single document, leo operates on a tree of text nodes. The organization of those nodes is up to the user. Branches of the tree can be declared as files (or directories) so entire projects can be built within leo.

Some examples: A node containing a unit test for a function can be placed right next to the node it tests within the hiearchy. Documentation for a function can likewise be placed right next to the node containing the function itself while being cloned into the documentation branch for inclusion as part of the manual.

I used it for programming but other people use it as a planner, journal, and tool for building a static website. I'd love to see the outline editor concept to be incorporated into a more polished app.

Tools:
FAR Manager + Colorer + S&R
Beyond Compare
XnView

Big apps:
Excel
OneNote
Firefox + GreaseMonkey

New kids:
Microsoft Max :)

SnagIt.

Statbar (statbar.nl) I would love to see an updated version of this.

Favorite software:
QuickBasic
What makes it great?
It always responds intuitively and provides a great debugger. The only downside was its limitations (memory and 16-bit).

Can software provoke the same sense of "gotta have it" that a tech gadget can?
Yes, but it has to be useful (as in, I have to need the software's features), easy to use, and friendly to my computer. To get me excited, it has to do something extremely well (features' performance).

How much does a great user experience factor in to your feelings about a software product?
It factors in a lot. If it's hard for me to get to something, I keep looking.

Performance is my only other major criterion. If it responds quickly to tasks that usually take a long time (e.g. file processing), it gets bonus points. :)

What exemplifies a great software experience for you?
OneNote, the .NET framework (all versions), and the accompanying versions of VS .NET.

vi / vim

I saw it mentioned once before, but I wanted to mention it again. I can't imagine a more efficient way to write code than in vi. The universal availability of at least some version of vi on all unix platforms means it's a tool you only have to learn once (it's also availble for windows, though not quite such a good fit there, unless running cygwin). Then the amazing number of features in newer vi's (i.e., vim), let you manipulate pure text better than any other tool i've ever seen.

some examples of the potential power in vim include word completion, macros, multiple copy/paste buffers, regular expressions, and a fairly full featured scripting language. also, the easy integration with the full tool set available on a unix system (i.e., :%! sort | uniq) makes anything that vi can't do easily itself easy to do using outside tools.

also, the biggest thing for me is never having to take my hands off the home row on my keyboard (i.e., no mouse). using "hjkl" for basic movement means you don't even have to move over to the arrow keys! perhaps for people without natural keyboards it's nice to have to spend half your day reaching for your mouse, but with a nice split board, it's a pleasure.

obviously it's not a tool for everyone (big learning curve, doesn't immediatly lend itself to "documents"), but for me, it's the best thing ever, and i'm glad i get to spend 8 hours a day in it.

Remote Desktop

Mozilla + Gestures

because the feature set is pretty much identical to what I actually need. Inline as you find was the killer feature for me -- no mouse involved.

FeedDemon

beacue it's a great little RSS Feed that's really simple to use and doesn't have 8,000 features I don't need..

Trillian

because it makes me not think so much about different IM networks.

Google Talk

for the auto-expanding message box and how if when I send a message right after another it doesn't repeat my name.

Remote Desktops

for simplifying the annoyances of multiple desktops.

Intellisense, Outlining, Form Designer in VS 2005

for making life so much easier. Moving away from the grid view was a delight. While much of VS still irritates me, there have been some improvements that have made me shake in my seat for joy.

Pegasus Mail. Because it is slicker and feels less bloated than any other mail application I've used. I have an archive with over 9000 mail messages and Pegasus loads and sorts the list in a couple of seconds.

WinAmp. Because it puts the playlist in the center of the application and not hard to find like WMP.

Other previous loves include:
Norton Commander - I'm still not sure Windows' Explorer has caught up.
Delphi - Made Win32 programming fun.

The core functionality of OneNote is very very good although the UI is just a touch busy. I've tried a half-dozen other similar products (mostly on Mac OSX) and none of them feel right in comparison.

I would pay a small *monthly* fee for an AJAX based implementation of OneNote that I could use from any modern web browser.

Google Mail and Google Maps are both very slick.

Expose on MacOSX is really awesome window navigation for touchpad based usage. I haven't spent enough time using it with a mouse to know if I'd still like it there.

Transmit (an ftp client) and Unison (a news reader) are two very elegent Mac OSX apps by Panic software.

I enjoy TextPad although I haven't used it much in years.

There are some very good elements of Visual Studio.net 2003 that I've come to love (in spite of some of the regressions it made elsewhere). The spring loaded dockable windows are a personal favorite. Tabbed window file organization is also excellent.

I like some of the new features in Trillian 3.x like the wikipedia links in messages, the dockable auto-hiding buddy list and the tabbed chat windows.

As far as text editors go, I'm a huge fan of Crimson Editor. It has support for syntax coloring of more than 100 file formats, and it's real easy to make your own coloring specifications. Throw in fast loading, large file support, and column editing, and you have a real winner.

Visual Studio. I can't live without it.

This will be a long one... Back in the old DOS days:


1. Volkov Commander (http://www.egner-online.de/vc/en)

A Norton Commander 3.0 clone, but lot more functionality and customizability, and it wasn't screwing up LFNs, built-in editor and hexviews. In fact, I still remember the function keys!


2. Norton Utilities 4.x 5.x, 6.x, 7.x

Disk Doctor, Speed Disk, Unerase, Unformat... these were really breakthrough utilites that did same me more that once. It would take years before Microsoft even bothered to add similar functionality to DOS.


3. Arcview (not to be confused with a GIS system)

A freeware package that worked external viewers/editors for NC clones. Lots of supported formats, including ZIP/RAR/ARJ/LHA archives, DOC/TXT files, GIF/JPG viers, a hex viewer/editor, EXE file viewer (MZ header) etc.


4. Borland Turbo Pascal 7.0, Turbo C 2.0 (http://www.borland.com)

Integrated source debugging. How could anyone live without it before?


5. RAR 1.xx (http://www.rarlab.com)

Simply the best compression and extensive recovering features (remember, everyone used 3.5" HD floppies!)


6. Interactive Disassmebler (IDA) 3.xx by Ilfak Guilfanov (http://www.datarescue.com)

A real hacker's tool. It would even reconstruct the machine code into high-level language source! BTW, the author also runs the http://www.hexblog.com/



Windows 3.11/95/98 era:

1. Twelwe Tone Systems Cakewalk Pro 4, Pro Audio 5, 7 (www.cakewalk.com)

Simple and efficient, right what a newbie needs, although not without limitations. More recent versions of Cakewalk Pro and Sonar Pro are more powerful, but they lack the ease of use of these classics.


3. Microsoft Word 95

These were the days when there actually was one single toolbar, and that was as easy and efficient as it could get.


4. Microsoft Excel 97/Word 97

The features of Excel just blew me away, as did number of toolbars.

File format conversions could have been handled better though... only 4 years later I would stop saving all my files in two formats, that is Office'97 and Office'95, and I got all sorts of localization issues - for example, if a non-Unicode TrueType font was used in the file (and there were still very few Russian Unicode fonts besides the ones supplied witn the OS), the file opening logic would fail and wrong conversion table would be used, so all your characters looked wrong and you were screwed unless you knew how to edit RTF headers and replace non-standard font witn a Unicode one. And MacWord to WinWord conversions and vice versa never, ever worked.


5. Internet Explorer 3.x, 4.x

More simple and visually appealing than Netscape, although not without localization issues, again.


5. Paint Shop Pro 4.xx (www.jasc.com)

Small, nice and easy. Covered all of my image editing needs in a glance.


6. WinRAR 2.xx

Even better than the DOS counterpart.



Windows 2000 era:

1. Windows 2000

The whole thing was so much stable it was nearly unbelievable. Like you could work for the whole day, hibernate your PC and then continue working the next day! Technically, it would run for weeks without a single OS restart. And it would run almost all of your Windows games and software.

Of course, as the writers of bloatware drivers and services started to get used with NT platform, these wonderful times has came to an end... and the Net Worms begun, has.


2. Office 2000/2002

Way better in handling localization than Office 97, nicer toolbar layout, but bloated as hell. And Word 2002 would hardly give me one single day when it wouldn't crash on something.

Form and report designers in Access would remind me the good old days of Windows 3.11 and WordBasic. How could this desing survive for nearly 15 years with not a single change?


3. Adobe Creative Suite 2

Word 2002 is still easier in most aspects, but the fact that I have to go down 2 menu levels to perform every non-rivial change to paragraph and font formatting is simply frustrating.

InDesign 2 is so much better in this regard, with so manu tools and palettes that let you change everything you ever need right away. And they finally got internalization issues ironed out, at last.


4. Mozilla FireFox

No ActiveX bloatware, very powerful bookmars organizer, tabbed browing. Some sites do not work though.


5. Spybot Search&Destroy

I was very surprised when it came to me that my antivirus software would not even try to detect trojan ActiveX controls and IE extensions! Installed SpyBot and it did very quick job getting rid of them. Don't really need it since I switched to Firefox.


6. WinRAR 3.xx

Better than ever!


7. Adaptec/Roxio Easy CD/DVD creator 5.x, 7.5

Really easy CD/DVD burning program. Recent versions are way too bloated with unneded stuff.


8. Cakewalk Sonar 4 Producer Edition

Finally has the same features as Cubase VST/SX, but with familiar and easy interface (although not as easy as Cakewalk Pro Audio 5)


9. HFSLIP

Makes far better work of slipstreaming hotfixes into slipstreamed Windows 2000/XP/2003 installations than Microsoft itself.


10. Paint Shop Pro 8, 9, X

Got bigger and baddier, although still not as feature-complete as Photoshop, but maintains ease of use. Many nice semi-automatic tools suited for editing photos.

In terms of "gotta have it," the upcoming Word and Excel come high on the list. I use these the current versions on a daily basis, and they are quite horrible. If this new UI does what you say it can do, I'll rush out and buy them the day they come out.

Of course, that's just me buying into marketing. The application that I have and can't live without is Visual Studio 2003 (2005 is too buggy to use). The application has so much functionality tucked in every little corner that it soon becomes indispensible. The find & replace dialog, for example, contains 10 options and 4 search commands. I've probably used every bit of functionality in that dialog at one time or another. Find & replace is not an isolated case, either. Visual Studio is like this the whole way through. Tons of power where you need it, when you need it.

Opera. It is the only painless browser -- it is as though it and I are in a mind-meld. Firefox feels very clunky compared to it, and IE isn't even in the running. I wave and Opera does. Fast-forwarding through images and "Next" links is brilliant. Switching on Fit-to-Window-Width or disabling styles reduces aggravation. Full page zoom -- so easy, so convenient. Password management is perfect -- remembered login forms get a golden halo that is deliciously attractive on any colour scheme, and you either Ctrl+Enter or wave forward or hit the toolbar button to continue.

Oh, and Opera's non-destructive toolbar customization may be of interest to Office. Dragging copies instead of moving, and dropping half-way does not delete the original. To actually remove something, you have to right-click on it and choose Delete Button. This is probably the most newbie friendly approach.

Also of note is Total Annihilation, a game that lets me to general my armies instead of sergeanting them. Queues are easy and powerful, and troops behave intelligently. They start firing when in range and obey lists of attack precedence. You can give orders far in advance and then do other things while those are carried out.

Xara X, Opera...
Both very fast, small, cool and useful.
Opera also very customizable, while still very small in size.
FAR Manager - robust, fast, customizable... also I considered it as cool. :)
MS Office 12 beta - I tried it. It has HUGE usability improvement, so it will be useful when released.

In thinking about this post and the comments, I realized that there are a lot of crazy applications out there that use some really unique user interfaces to great effect.

I would highly recommend investigating Pixologic's ZBrush ( http://www.pixologic.com ). ZBrush is a 3D modeling and painting tool that has an insane quantity of features crammed tightly into very little space with some logical custom controls. The Epic/Unreal-engine guys swear by it.

Along that line of thought: has the Office UI team put any (almost academic) research reguarding implementing the Ribbon in other large, complex applications such as Visual Studio, Photoshop, Maya, Quickbooks, etc. ?

My savior is Ghost and I really don’t know how anyone lives without it. But! What amazes me even more is the fact that no windows has/had this backup utility built in.
I don’t mean to backup the some files I mean to do as Ghost does. But, then you are probably frightened of pirates again. So, we have to buy another program to do what I believe should be in the Windows anyway.

The original Cool Edit. Well, I think it was Cool Edit 95 I started on. I could just fly on editing with that thing. I've kept upgrading even after Adobe acquired it (all the way to Adobe Audition 2, which just came out!) and I love the new versions too, but still, there's something about that app that compelled me to edit faster. Probably like people say--it was relatively simple then, and the latest version of Audition can do about 10x as much.

The only two programs I can't live without are:

CLCL ( http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html )
which is a clipboard enhancement - saves multiple items on the clipboard, but not in the annoying way that Office 2003 did it. ctrl-c, x and v work normally, until you want to paste an older cut, then just hit a slightly different combination (ctrl-shift-v for me) and a menu of the last 50 or so clipboard entries is shown. up/down to select, then enter to paste in place. Harder to explain than to use :). It also persists the clipboard.

Synergy ( http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ )
Works on pretty much all platforms, and allows you to use your mouse and keyboard on multiple computers at once. Once you use this, you'll NEVER figure out how to live without it. I have three PCs (one is a laptop) at home, and I use this on all of them.

Oh, and strokeIt (mentioned above) is great too, although I only really use it for back and forward in editors and firefox.

The most innovative product, in the productivity suite area, was without any doubt VisiCalc - the first spreadsheet. For every other productivty program you can find a similar way of doing in the non-computer world. However, the spreadsheet idea is a totally new, electronic only, way of increasing your productivity. There is no equivalence in the non-computer world, still it is widely adopted by novice and advanced users.
Excel has brought the spreadsheet concept to great sophistication and ease of use, but the credit for this revolutionizing idea goes to the original VisiCalc team.

I've gotta join the crowd and say that Firefox rocks. I particularly love extensions - the ability for the user community to change the way that the app works. I also can't do without tabbed browsing, expecially how you can middle-click a link to open it in a new tab.

I'm a pretty serious developer, so Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 rate highly on my list. 2003 is good, but there are a number of bugs that irritate me. 2005 is better in a number of ways, especially for editing XSL documents, but I think that the new find/replace dialog is a BIG step back from the one in 2003.

I also love Paint Shop Pro for its bitmap editing abilities. I can do anything I like with it, and fast. I'm trying to teach myself Photoshop, but it's a bit of a learning curve. One thing that I don't like though are the vector editing tools. Definitely not intuitive. The text tools are the worst. One tool to edit text, another to move it and change its colour. And you've gotta click on one of the letters to make either tool work - miss, and you've gotta go back and try again.

HomeSite. It's a little buggy, but I've been using various versions of HomeSite since 1997, and I love it. The best HTML and text editor I've ever used, bar none. Between being able to map keys to tags, the explorer window at the side of the page for easy drag-and-drop linking, and the templating, as well as so much other stuff...I love it. I do all of my writing in it, because most of my writing comes out as HTML eventually anyway, and if I write in Word I have to manually go back and add tags.

Unfortunately, it's no longer being developed, which is sad. But the thing I like best about HomeSite is that it does just what I need it to do, and otherwise just stays out of my way!

I never thought I'd say it about a web app but I'd have to vote for GMail. It's so fast, minimalist and easy to use, and the conversation view has literally changed the way I deal with and reply to email. I spend less time trying to work out the context of emails and more time writing them. It's difficult to pin down why but it makes me feel more organised. I can also find emails far quicker than in any other email client.

Until it came along I'd never have believed I'd be using a web interface for emailing over a Windows client app.

Oh, and more conventionally TextPad - development without it would be hell.

I have two I'll mention:

Alias Sketchbook Pro 2.0 (there's a free download). The UI is incredible ... wonderfully elegant and a joy to use. What's great about it is how over time, normal use of the menus/options become gestures that you naturally just learn. I've never seen a UI that moves you down the path of UI-power-usage so persuasively as Sketchbook Pro.

Also, I'll second the nomintion for M.U.L.E for the commodore 64 and Atari 800 (there's a bunch of emulators to play it today). There are so many unique folds to it, like the Gambling room that encouraged players to end their turn as quickly as possible. Every aspect of it was really thought out well.

Quicksilver. Someone's already posted a description of it, but it's the way keyboard interfaces should be.

Firefox's extentions.

FF itself is an alright browser, nothing hugely special on it's own.

But add in the extensions and it becomes the best browser.

All managed, and updated, from one location, and you can get an extension for basically every need.

Favorites are:
Adblock
Filter.G updater
Download Them All
Netuseage item

These items are why I now use it. If IE had an extension function on par with FF Id probably go back to IE (I used Opera for a while aswell). Every FF Zealot has to agree that pages that do not render well really suck, yes it's the page coders fault, but Im the one burned.

It's fun to read everyone's choices--I'm going to download a lot of new software tonight!

I have to vote for the original Mac OS Notepad--which was not a text editor. It was a simple note-taking app: it had a single window you could type notes into, with a little page-turn widget in the lower left. If you wanted to jump to a certain page, you could double-click on the page number and a dialog box would pop up. And that's it--there were no other features, no buttons, nothing else--and it succeeded brilliantly at doing what it did. Now I've moved on to OneNote, which I love and has hundreds of features (that are often useful to me), but I still wish I had Notepad sometimes.

P.S. Jensen, thanks so much for addressing my comment in yesterday's post. It's exciting to know you're reading our comments and thinking about them!

Quicksilver (MAC) is the most amazing piece of software that I've used. I don't mind using my Windows machine at work, but I miss Quicksilver every single day.

Excel (WIN) is my favorite large software program. It's a fantastic tool that is incredibly efficient. I love it as is - I can't wait to see how good it gets in the next release.

- TextMate, editor that is *fast* to code with
- Transmit, Really the most intuitive ftp-browser, although it lacks some features
- Xbox Media Center, the only media center there is. It does it all, and perfect.
- And, well, I could say Photoshop but I think I'll go with "Mac OS X". I always was a Windows user but OS X makes me happy. I enjoy working again, and I guess it's the most important thing of all.

I'm looking forward to Office 12. It looks like I'm gonna enjoy working with Office much more. Hopefully it comes for OS X soon and make my environment complete.

My personal favorite is Microsoft Money 95. It has a very slick, intuitive navigational interface, and a manageble number of places/forms, and the things it does it does very well indeed. Especially the reporting interface is stellar.

However, after that 95 version the program got destroyed and has exploded into an awful mess of pages and places out of comprehension, and mutated into some sort of bad web browser.

I have to say that Remote Desktop changed my life. The reason I moved to XP from 98/ME. I actually thought xp was just a prettier version of my current windows.

VS2005 ranks high in my list, but textpad for me is a necessary companion. Loved eclipse for its code refactoring abilities, but it was quite limited.

Outlook 2003 by far is my favorite email client. I tried everything else but outlook is still the best to me.

Fruity loops is nifty music making program. Really intuitive interface. Learned it about 5 minutes, and then I was making beats.

Cygwin. Made being a windows user in unix academic enviroment a lot easier. Sshing into a workstation to turn in problem sets using x-windows from my window box was pretty convienient. Convoluted but convenient.

vim
sysinternals tools
cygwin

been using vi then vim for a very long time. steep learning curve, but very powerful.

sysinternal tools, especially process explorer, filemon and regmon.

cygwin because as a command line CMD is substandard.

Asides from a lot of the already mentioned stuff (OneNote I love you too), the one really stand out piece of software I have is the TabletPC Snipping Tool.

Simplicity and Perfection in one tiny package.

My latest "gotta have it" find is uTorrent. I don't need all kinds of customization in a BT client, when all I need is to get the latest shows from TWiT. uTorrent is simple and it's just one file, no install.
Others::
4DOS/4NT - DOS prompt replacements
WinAmp (still using 2.x!) mostly because of the easy keyboard commands - the five play control buttons can be clicked with the ZXCVB keys, so if I want to skip a song, I Alt+Tab to WinAmp, hit B, then Alt+Tab back to whatever I was doing.
Trillian free version - Runs fast, doesn't have all the fluff like videos and winks that I'd just turn off anyway.
VC 6 + WndTabs - Best IDE Ever.
VLC - when I need to play some whacky movie format, VLC is there to do it.

- Trillian
- FireFox
- Office 12

Trillian:
I love instant messaging and have at least 8 screennames on different services. Trillian is just great in integrating them in one interface.

FireFox:
Tabbed browsing, fast, extendable, easy to use UI.

Office 12:
This might sound cheesy...I read about Office 12 and it's new UI in a slashdot post. Then I watched a 45 mins video of someone at MS showing off the new UI and explaining the rationale behind it. The geek in me was totally hooked. When I got into the beta program, I was very excited. When I got beta 1, you couldn't get me away from computer for a very long time. The new interface totally fascinated me and got me hooked (new features in the programs with the new UI and OneNote 12 got me even hooked more after that). I've totally switched to Office 12 Beta 1, and only will use 2003 if I really can't do something in beta 1 due to a bug.

Chalk up one for M.U.L.E. on the C64 for me too. I have burned countless hours playing it with friends. It continues to whittle time away from my life, thank you VICE :-)

My favorite software of all time has to be the Commodore 128 OS (Made by Microsoft). You had a BASIC interpreter, operating system, disk utilities, sprite editor, assembler, and more and yet it took so little time to start up. The BASIC language was so much better than the C64's (PLAY "A" as opposed to some 12 lines of PEEK's and POKE's). Truly an innovative OS for its time.

For modern utilities, I swear by both TextPad and EditPlus. TextPad for its ease of working with huge files and regular expression engine, EditPlus for its built in FTP capability and superior syntax highlighting. YMMV on those.

Then there's Cygwin. It is the first thing to get installed for me on any new install.

The IE team's DevToolBar has also become a can't live