Software for my new laptop 2

Time for a new laptop, and to replace software. Here’s my new list.

A lot has changed in the last 5 years. Mainly, I use the browser, cygwin and Portable Apps a lot more. (The last is to escape jailers, not registry bloat.)

Media

• Chrome [new]: For browsing and development. Fast, light, and stays out of the way.
• Firefox: I keep it just for printing. Chrome sucks at printing.
• Media Player Classic: Nothing against it, but I decided to stick to just one app, which is…
• VLC: Continues to be the best media player, IMHO.
• WinAmp: I just manage my playlists as M3U files, using Python programs.
• Audacity: Still the easiest way to record audio.
• Camstudio: The simplest free portable screen capture software I know.
• PicPick [new]: Lightweight, powerful screenshot grabber
• VirtualDub: Not the simplest, but still good for what I need: cropping and joining video.
• MediaCoder [new]: Good for video/audio conversions. Maybe I’ll install this later.
• Foxit Reader: The simples free portable PDF reader I know, better than…
• NitroPDF Reader [new]: … which is good for Printing PDFs – better than…
• Primo PDF: … which has trouble on rare occasions.
• Microsoft Reader: I have a lot of ebooks in .LIT.
• Kindle for PC [new]: I don’t own a Kindle, but I’ve bought a few ebooks.
• Paint.NET: Good enough for cropping and adjusting colours on images.
• Windows Live Writer [new]: The best way to write this blog WYSIWYG
• Inkscape [new]: I occasionally edit vector graphics.
• Google Earth. Google Maps is good enough.
• ImgBurn: I no longer use CDs/DVDs. Just flash drives and external hard disks.
• Picasa: I’ve stopped browsing pictures. No time.

Sharing

• Dropbox [new]: Simplest way of sharing files.
• Skype: I use it more than my phone.
• Google Talk: For those friends who have chat enabled on Gmail.
• TeamViewer [new]: Pretty efficient screen sharing. Works better than Skype, I think.
• Google Calendar Sync: To keep Outlook in sync with Google Calendar.

Utilities

• 7-Zip [new]: Covers all compressed formats, and has the best compression ratio.
• WinRAR: 7-Zip has it covered.
• AutoHotKey [new]: Shockingly powerful macro functionality. Shockingly underused.
• Clip [new]: Command line clipboard. dir | clip copies the directory to the clipboard.
• ClipX [new]: Stores multiple clipboard entries and history. Invaluable.
• DiskTT [new]: I’m paranoid about disk speed. I keep measuring it.
• WinDirStat [new]: Best way to find what’s taking up space on disk.
• ProcessExplorer [new]: Just in case Task Manager doesn’t show you everything.
• Google Desktop: Well, it’s dead.
• mDesktop [new]: A Virtual Desktop Manager (multiple screens) for Windows 7.
• PowerToys: doesn’t work on Windows 7, but I got X-Mouse working.
• Teracopy: I don’t worry too much about copying files any more. Maybe later.
• Junction Link Magic [new]: To map folders. But I now use Cygwin, and symlinks rock.
• uTorrent [new]: For bittorrent.
• ntlmaps [new]: proxies requiring a password to a proxy not requiring a password
• Putty [new]: SSH for Windows, but can also act as an SSH tunnel
• TrueCrypt [new]: To securely back up my bank details on the cloud.

Development

• Cygwin: UNIX on Windows. I also install make, curl, lynx, wget, tidy, mercurial, git, openssh, rsync, optipng, pdftk, sqlite3, imagemagick and sgrep. Also cacert.pem.
• ActivePython: My primary programming language. I also install NumPy, SciPy, ipython, tornado, tabular, lxml and eyeD3.
• ActivePerl: … isn’t as readable.
• node.js: Soon becoming my favourite programming language. Fast, popular.
• XAMPP [new]: Fastest way of getting Apache + MySQL + PHP running
• nginx [new]: Faster than Apache, but no CGI, and I like CGI.
• Google AppEngine [new]: To maintain sites like 250.
• redis [new]: My new favourite database. In-memory, and fast.
• CouchDB [new]: Simple, persistent JSON store. (Or MongoDB. Both’re fine.)
• Fiddler2 [new]: To see where traffic is really coming from.
• IETester [new]: I’ve stopped developing for Internet Explorer 6 or 7. 
• JDK: Sadly, some apps require a Java compiler. (I like the JRE. Can’t stand Java.)
• Notepad++ [new]: Excellent editor. I’ll probably go back to it some time, but…
• Sublime Text 2 [new]: … is just a little bit cooler.
• Crimson Editor: Didn’t have Unicode support a long time ago, so I switched.
• Subversion. I’ve switched to Mercurial and git.

Data Visualisation

• R [new]. The God of all statistical packages. Install reshape and ggplot2.
• Gephi [new]: Does network visualisations quite well. 
• GraphViz [new]: Does network visualisations not quite as well.
• Google Refine [new]: Helps clean up messy data.
• qhull [new]: For voronoi treemaps. Don’t ask.
• wkhtml2pdf [new]: To print web pages as PDF.

What am I missing that you really like?