My Tools List for 2008

These tools are ones I use regularly and help me be more productive. These are always installed on every box I use.

A lot of these are free; you owe it to yourself to check at least those tools out.

 

Graphics

Xara Xtreme 4 [$]

Still the best vector drawing app that exists for Windows. Super-fast. I’ve used this one for over 10 years.

 

Corel Painter X [$]

Best bitmap illustration app. In the 10 years I‘ve used  it, there are only two negatives. First, it’s suffered from feature agglutination but the core is strong and nothing comes close. Second, it still will occasionally crash – save often!

 

Adobe Photoshop CS3 [$]

I’m not sure what class this application fits in anymore – but whatever it is; it’s the best. Only Photoshop CS4 can displace this thing.

 

Hypersnap [$]

My favorite for taking screen shots - the best combination of features, light weight, and simplicity. SnagIt it is a great competitor in terms of features, but I find SnagIt to be to “heavy” .

POV-Ray [FREE]

File Utilities

Robocopy [included with Windows Vista]

Fast, Reliable, It just Works. I try SyncToy every now and then but I find using RoboCopy for my needs is far easier.

 

 

FolderShare [FREE]

the most reliable way I’ve found to share files between PCs on different networks (home/work,roaming,etc)

 

7-ZIP [FREE]

The 7z format is getting popular, but I just use this for ordinary zip files. Bonus points for the nice and simple installer.

 

Visualization

ATT GraphViz [FREE]

You give them the nodes and the edges, it gives you a pretty graph

 

Microsoft Microsoft Automatic Graph Layout (MSAGL) [$]

like GraphViz but from Microsoft.

 

Visio 2007 [$]

I couldn’t effectively communicate without this application. This is a very under-appreciation application.

 

Misc

Office Picture Manager [$ part of Office 2007]

I wish more people knew this tool existed. I use it for its excellent batch image conversion and naming features.

 

Windows Live Writer [FREE]

Blogging software. How do you you think I wrote this post.

 

Camtasia Studio [$]

Record screen video – Expensive but worth it. Short of recording the video signal  this is the best you will get. My only wish is that Windows Media player could natively play the recorded files. All the screencasts I do are made with Camtasia.

Video

TechCrunch Youtube video download tool [FREE]

Sometimes you just have to watch these videos offline

 

Network

Fiddler [FREE]

Such a valuable tool when you need to see what are those http clients actually sending over the wire. 

 

Backup

Vista Complete PC Restore [FREE with Vista]

Finally you can use imaging technology to backup and restore your computer

 

Acronis TrueImage 11  [$]

If you are running pre-Vista machines or need some more advanced features, this is a great imaging/backup tool.

 

Software Development

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 [FREE]

Adds several much-needed features to the VS IDE.

 

HTML Agility Pack [FREE]

A practical HTML parser that is able to deal with real-world (in other words “malformed”) content.

 

Hardware

30” LCD monitor (Samsung and Dell make some nice ones)

For me this works so much better than a dual-mon setup. When I purchased one for home I liked it so much then next week I bought another one for work.

 

Windows Home Server  [$]

I finally got tired of being a network admin in my own house and purchased this device. The backup / storage features are awesome but what makes it very useful for me is the remote access features.

 

 

Fonts

Inconsolata  [FREE]

I made the switch from Consolas. It’s not perfect but I think it looks very nice and find it very readable.

 

 

Tools I need to look at soon

NDepend - dependency analysis for .NET apps.

OneNote

Snippet Designer

A Graph Tree Drawing Control for WPF

QuickGraph, Graph Data Structures And Algorithms for .Net

A Professional Ribbon control

Tools I want but can’t find

- Convert FLV to WMV or AVI

- an XML diff tool that shows a pretty diff visualization