Well, maybe I could live without them, but I wouldn’t enjoy it!
Here’s a list of tools that are either freeware or opensource, from a variety of different categories. These tools are almost guaranteed to have nice GUIs and be lightweight — I’m very picky that way.
Security and privacy tools
Keepass
http://keepass.info/
Free, open-source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager.
Truecrypt
http://www.truecrypt.org/
Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows XP/2000/2003 and Linux
Network tools
Wireshark
http://www.wireshark.org/
Wireshark is the tool you turn to when you want to really see what’s happening on your network. It is an award-winning network protocol analyzer developed by an international team of networking experts.
uTorrent
http://www.utorrent.com/
EXTREMELY lightweight and functional bittorrent client. Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in µTorrent, including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT (compatible with BitComet). Be sure to turn on ip filtering in uTorrent and update your filters regularly.
Chrome
http://www.google.com/chrome
Yep. It’s Google Chrome. I’m just not a big fan of IE. Call me crazy. Firefox and Firebug is still tops for web development / javascript debugging.
Royal TS
http://code4ward.net/CS2/Default.aspx
Royal TS allows you to organize and manage multiple remote desktop connections. Incredibly useful when managing LOTS of boxes.
Desktop utilities
IZArc
http://www.izarc.org/
With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more.
Belarc advisor
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html
Builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser.
Microsoft Powertoys for Windows
Download here
Mostly for the ‘command prompt here’ and the ‘TweakUI’ powertoys.
CutePDF writer
http://www.acrosoftware.com/products/cutepdf/Writer.asp
The reader is free from Adobe. Now you can write PDF’s as easy as printing something.
Virtual Clone Drive
http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html
Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Image files generated with CloneDVD or CloneCD can be mounted onto a virtual drive from your hard-disk or from a network drive and used in the same manner as inserting them into a normal CD/DVD drive.
Video / audio
Handbrake
http://handbrake.fr/
HandBrake is a GPL’d multiplatform (Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows), multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. The cool thing about this puppy is you can go straight from DVD to the ever-portable MP4 format.
ImgBurn
http://www.imgburn.com/
Versatile DVD ripper. Copy a DVD to an ISO, rip the whole disc straight to the filesystem, rip specific streams from the disc – a very valuable tool. Fantastic when used in tandem with Handbrake
Windows Live Photo Gallery
http://download.live.com/photogallery
Yep. It’s a Microsoft product that actually makes sense. I can grab photos off the camera, organize them on the fly and upload to Flickr/Facebook all from one app. And it’s free. And it rocks.
Apple iTunes
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
Buy music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks, or download free podcasts from the iTunes Store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Organize and play everything on your Mac or PC. Then sync it to your iPod and bring it along. Anywhere. In true ‘give away the razor, sell the blades’ fashion — this is free software with a hook. You can buy music, but organize all music and video in the MP3/MP4 formats for free.
Subversion
http://subversion.tigris.org/
The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system. The software is released under an Apache/BSD-style open source license.
TeamCity
http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
By the same guys that brought you Resharper and IntellJ IDEA — TeamCity is build management on the cheap.
UnFuddle
http://unfuddle.com/
Unfuddle is a secure, hosted project management solution for software development teams.
Tortoise Subversion client
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows. Since it’s not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like.
Firebug
http://getfirebug.com/
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
Consolas font pack for VS2005 and VS2008
Download here
Yes. That’s a font pack.
Diet and excercise
Nutrition data
http://www.nutritiondata.com/
In summary, Nutrition Data does three things better than anyone else: 1. Helps you quickly find food composition data. 2. Helps you understand that data. 3. Helps you share that data with your friends.
Del.icio.us bookmarks
http://del.icio.us/
Bookmarks, but … better. Tag, share, search, and discover new bookmarks. Your bookmarks will always be where you need them — online.
Miscellaneous
WordPress
http://wordpress.org/
It’s the software that runs this site. It’s also the software that runs www.wordpress.com (so you can use wordpress even if you don’t have your own hosting account!). WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
TaxACT
http://www.taxact.com
OK, this isn’t actually free, and it’s not actually software — at least I don’t use the downloadable version — but it’s dirt cheap (less than $20!), incredibly useful, easy to use, and I don’t know what I would have done the last 2 years if I didn’t use it.
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January 16, 2007 at 9:15 am
Firebug FF Extension: Great for debuging JS in FF
Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking system… my life has never been the same.
Photoshop CS2: Image manipulation program. Great for making mockups and putting my brother’s head on a ballerina’s body.
Aptana: Similar to Notepad except more…. thick. It has as autocomplete built in (which is awesome for CSS and JavaScript… thats right, I said JavaScript)… Feels more like a program than a notepad on steroids (no offense to NP ).
Any Linux OS: Yes
January 18, 2008 at 9:18 am
Do you install the latest stable release of these toys or the bleeding edge beta?
What about file compare? Do you use WinMerge?
You’re luckily that your company doesn’t have any restrictions on you installing all these toys…
January 18, 2008 at 10:23 am
Have you tried Paint.NET?
January 28, 2008 at 1:13 pm
I like Password Safe for password storage on Windows and SourceGear’s DiffMerge for comparisons.
January 19, 2009 at 11:52 am
Hey you might be able to help me with this…. I currently use Photoshop Elements to create a jpeg with lyrics to a song. Then I pull those jpegs plus the audio track into Windows Movie Maker to make my own ‘movie’ of a song w/ onscreen lyrics. I use these for the kids at church to learn new songs. I have to convert the Windows Movie Maker file to an .avi file so I can play it on the DVD player at church. This has worked okay although there is some distortion going on. Do you know of another way to attempt this? Or another format besides .avi that would be better? And of course, any freeware??