# Open Season

No licenses, no limits.

## January 28, 2004

### My Software World

Matt Conway (of the always entertaining Big Red Blob) had a fine idea: why not share our favorite software with each other? There are so many programs and utilities that nobody can stay on top of them all. He thought it would be interesting to compare what we use, and why. In the Extended Entry part of this post (click on "Continue reading" below) I've listed the software that I use on my machine for everything from system management and writing to image editing and CD ripping. I've also discussed why I selected each piece of software, to the best of my memory.

Matt's idea was for us to share and learn from each other. I encourage anyone who's motivated to post a follow-up comment. You can mention just one app that you really like (and why, and why you chose it over competitors), or you can do that for a whole bunch of apps, as I've done. Let's compare notes!

1. Basic OS:
1-1. OS: Windows XP (Microsoft)
1-2. Email: Outlook 2002 (Microsoft)
1-3. Web browsing: Internet Explorer 6 (Microsoft)
1-4. File manager: PowerDesk Pro 5 (Vcom)
1-5. Anti-virus and system management: SystemSuite 5 (Vcom)

2. Security:
2-1. Firewall: ZoneAlarm Pro 4.5 (Zone Labs)
2-2. Ad Blocker: AdSubtract Pro 2.55 (Adsubtract)
2-3. Cookie Control: Cookie Pal 1.7b (Kookaburra)
2-4. Toolbar: Google toolbar (Google)
2-5. Web form manager: AI Roboform 5.5.1 (Siber Systems)
2-6. Spyware scrubbers: Ad-aware 6 (Lavasoft) and Spybot Search & Destroy 1.2 (Patrick Kolla)

3. Writing:
3-1. Text editing: Visual Slickedit 7 (SlickEdit)
3-2. Scriptwriting: Final Draft 6 (Final Draft)
3-3. LaTeX editing: WinEdt 5.3 (WinEdt)
3-4. LaTeX formatting: MiKTeX 2.4 (Open Source)
3-5. DVI viewer: Yap 0.99 (Christian Schenk)
3-6. Postscript viewer: GsView 4.6 (Ghostgum)
3-7. PDF viewer: Acrobat (Adobe)

4. Images and video:
4-1. Image editing: Photoshop CS (Adobe)
4-2. Painting: Painter 8 (Corel)
4-3. Image browsing: ACDSee 5 (ACD Systems)
4-4. Vector editing: Illustrator CS (Adobe)
4-5. Video editing: Premiere 6.5 (Adobe) and Vegas 4 (Sony)
4-6. Vido compositing: After Effects 6 (Adobe) and combustion (discreet)
4-7. Photoshop plugins: Mostly from Alien Skin

5. 3D
5-1. Core 3D tool: 3ds max 6 (discreet)
5-2. Renderer: Brazil (Splutterfish) and mental ray (mental images)
5-3. Human posing: Poser 4 (Curious Labs)

6. Audio:
6-1. A/V: RealOne 2 (Real) and Windows Media Player 9 (Microsoft)
6-2. CD Ripping: CDex (Open Source)
6-3. MP3 encoder: Lame (Open Source)
6-4. Audio Recording: Total Recorder 4.2 (High Criteria)
6-5. LP Ripper: LPRipper 6 (CFB Software)
6-6. LP Recording: LPRecorder 6 (CFB Software)
6-7. MP3 gain normalization: MP3Gain (Open Source)

7. Programming:
7-1. Quick code hacks: ActivePerl 5.6 (ActivePerl)
7-2. Code Development: Visual Studio .NET 7 (Microsoft)

8. Miscellaneous:
8-1. Web page authoring: Dreamweaver 4 (Macromedia)
8-2. Symbolic algebra: Mathematica 4.1 (Wolfram Research)
8-3. Font management: Printer's Apprentice 7.5 (Lose Your Mind)
8-4. CD burning: Easy CD Creator 5 (Roxio)
8-5. DVD Authoring: DVDIt LE 2.5 (Sonic)
8-6. Maps: Streets and Trips 2002 (Microsoft)
8-7. Screen grabs: Hypersnap-DX 5 (Hyperionics)
8-8. Disk partitioning: Partition Magic 8 (PowerQuest)
8-9. Slideshow screensaver: gphotoshow 1 (gphotoshow)
8-10. Presentations: PowerPoint 2002 (Microsoft)
8-11. System tuning: PowerToys XP (Microsoft)

Discussion:

I don't own the latest and greatest of every product that I use. Sometimes it's because I just don't use it often enough to justify upgrading. Other times, it's because I don't need the new features, and the version I have works fine. And occasionally I'm comfortable with a given version, and simply don't want to have to spend the time to learn a new interface or new commands. But in general, economics and time permitting, I try to stay up to date with new releases. Although sites like VersionTracker try to stay up to date, I usually find it easier to go to the publisher's home page and check for updates there. I run Microsoft's automatic update tool in the background. It pops up when there's a new patch or service pack for their software, which I almost always apply immediately.

1. Basic OS

My computer came from Dell with Windows XP installed, and it's worked just fine for me. I loaded up the Office 2002 suite, though I mostly use only Outlook and PowerPoint (I use Word rarely, and Excel when someone mails me a spreadsheet I have to open). For my email needs, Outlook works fine. My ISP does a good job of identifying spam and labeling it as such, so I can simply shuffle spam into its own folder using a simple Outlook rule (which is good, because Outlook's filtering rules are lousy).

I've tried a few browsers, including Opera and Netscape, but I keep coming back to Internet Explorer. I'm familiar with it, and it's easy to use. I've tried a bunch of enhancements for security and convenience; the ones I've kept are described in Section 2 below. I rarely use the Windows Explorer to manage my files, but instead use PowerDesk Pro, which I find to be both easier to use and more powerful. It also includes all kinds of useful built-in tools, such as an ftp client, one-click creation and unpacking of zip files, a file-size manager, and a fast and flexible file searcher. It also adds a couple of buttons to the standard file open and save dialogs that maintain automatic lists of the last dozen or so files and directories that I've accessed. This eliminates much of the tedium of hunting up and down a series of folders to find a specific file or directory.

To block viruses and otherwise keep the system running, I use SystemSuite. I like the convenience of a suite of programs that will do everything from cleaning up the registry and defragging my hard drive to protecting me from viruses. I've tried the Norton suite a couple of times in the last decade, and I've always had a lot of trouble with it. SystemSuite works like a charm, and the system lets you know when a new virus update is ready, which happens frequently. My biggest complaint is that the updating procedure requires me to click "OK" (or its equivalent) over a half-dozen times, but otherwise it's great.

2. Security

Everyone needs a firewall. XP comes with one built-in, and SystemSuite has one as well. But years ago I invested in ZoneAlarm Pro, and it has worked like a champ for me ever since. The free version works just as well.

I don't like seeing ads in my web pages (who does?). AdSubtract simply removes them from the input stream, so I see nice a blank background anywhere an ad would be. It can also block other stuff like background music. I also don't like being tracked with cookies. Cookie Pal lets me easily manage which sites can leave me cookies, and filters out the rest.

My search engine of choice is Google. Their toolbar makes it easy to search their site, and it has a really nice built-in popup blocker. It only allows pop-ups on sites you've put on the "white list", which you can do with a single click. I also tried their taskbar, but I rarely used it and eventually uninstalled it.

Lots of web sites require you to log in with a user ID and password or other identifying information. It's a drag to type that in every time. Windows sometimes offers to save form information for me, but I don't know where it goes or how to edit it, and I've found it's neither consistent nor reliable. There's a better way. AI Roboform sits in the background and watches for these forms - when you enter login data into one, it volunteers to save the information for you (you can invoke it if you want it to remember a form it hasn't volunteered to save). It will save your information and then re-populate the form with one click the next time you visit. You can also make process even faster: pull down a page from a list in the optional Roboform toolbar at the top of IE and choose a page; Roboform will go there, fill in the information, and submit the form for you, all without you doing a thing. It has saved me a ton of typing.

Finally, even the most careful of us can get hit with spyware and other hidden, malicious programs. Ad-Aware and Search & Destroy are two different but complementary programs, both free, that together can find and eliminate almost all the bad stuff. Like virus programs, they work from templates of known offenders, so it's important to always update the database (one click for each program) when you run these.

3. Writing

When I was in college and then graduate school, everyone used one of the two dominant text editors, called "vi" and "emacs". I got exposed to vi first, and after a few years the vi commands were burned into my fingertips. The editor was written before there were mice, so everything is done with keyboard commands. Today, working with a mouse (say in an editor like Word) drives me crazy: taking my hand off the keyboard to grope for the mouse, and then select, and then adjust my selection, and then return to the keyboard, all just to change a single word, completely interrupts my train of thought. I know you can do these things from the keyboard in Word, but for me, I can do everything I want to in vi without thinking; it's that natural for me.

There are lots of vi emulators out there - some are bare-bones and free, others are very fancy and expensive. The best vi emulator out there that I've found is Visual Slickedit (it also emulates emacs and a dozen other editors). I do all of my writing, except for scripts, in Visual Slickedit. That's what I'm using to write these words. I've written my last three books with SlickEdit.

Film scripts have their own wierd formatting conventions. You can make do with Word macros, or you can get a special-purpose program. Final Draft is a specialized text editor for scripts that contains lots of task-specific shortcuts and enhancements. I now write even my rough drafts with this program.

I write lots of material in LaTeX. Once I've written the source in SlickEdit, I open it up in WinEdt, which is a native TeX editor. I can compile my LaTeX directly from within WinEdt using the excellent, and free, MiKTeX system. Then from WinEdt I can turn the result into DVI or PDF. I can preview the DVI output with one click. If I see something in the DVI previewer that I want to change, I just click on it, and it automatically scrolls the WinEdt window to the LaTeX source that generated that output. There's nothing like it for making your LaTeX right. WinEdt offers other features, like a spell checker that knows how to ignore LaTeX commands.

To view PostScript and PDF files I use the free programs GhostScript and Acrobat.

4. Images and video

No surprises here. Photoshop is my main image editor, and Painter is my main drawing program. Anytime I use Painter, and about half the time I use Photoshop, my pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet is invaluable (I use the 6"x8" size). I like ACDSee for browsing my image collections. Illustrator is my vector editor. To edit digital video, I use either Premiere or Vegas, depending on my mood. For compositing and effects work, I'm most familiar with After Effects, though I turn to combustion for a variety of specialized tasks. For image effects and image repair, I use the Photoshop plugins from Alien Skin.

5. 3D

Again, no surprises. The 3D system I'm most familiar with is 3D Studio Max (now called 3ds max). I've played with Maya and Houdini, and I even took courses in SoftImage. But these programs are big and complex, and they all have numerous wierd random gotchas that are too easy to forget (or never learn), any of which can turn the simplest project into a horror. 3ds max is very powerful, does everything I need, includes a great scripting language, and it's also fun to use.

For rendering, I like Brazil. I've recently started using mental ray as well, since it now comes in the box with max 6. To populate a scene with human characters, Poser is good for quick-and-dirty work, though the people almost always look more like mannequins than real people.

6. Audio

I usually use the free version of RealOne for playing music from my digitized CD collection, because it has a convenient Artist/Album view. It's a little thing, but I like it. Real wants to run other, unwanted programs to sell me stuff or lure me to their site. I easily blocked them from accessing the net using ZoneAlarm (see the firewall section above), and that has caused them to effectively disappear. I also have the free Windows Media Player for stuff in formats that only it can play. I've periodically installed different versions of the free DivX decoder, but it always crashes on every third file or so and I end up removing it. I've tried some of the other free players, but they all had one or more quirks that forced me to spend time twiddling with them. I don't want to spend any time at all managing my music player - I just want to find the songs I want to hear and play them. Real and WMP both do that just fne.

To rip my CDs I use the free CDex. It's easy and fast and works beautifully. I encode with the free Lame MP3 encoder, which makes great-sounding files. To record stuff directly from my sound card (for example, if I want to record an audio stream) I use Total Recorder. It can capture anything that my computer is playing. Again, I encode its output into MP3 using Lame. To digitize my vinyl record collection, I used the specialized programs LP Recorder to make .wav files, and LP Ripper to turn them into MP3s.

I listen to a lot of my MP3s at the gym on my little portable player. Often they're not loud enough to overcome the ambient noise of people, machines, and the gym's own background music. MP3Gain is a terrific free program that analyzes a track, and then sets the gain to whatever level you want. It does this non-destructively: it tweaks information that describes how to scale the blocks of data, but never touches the data itself. You can always pump up the level more, or undo the whole thing, and the music itself is never affected. Sometimes it surprises me by reducing the volume of a track rather than boosting it, because it thinks it might otherwise clip on playback. I'd rather it didn't do that - at the gym, pumping up the volume is more important than avoiding clipping.

7. Programming

For writing a quick hack, I like writing in perl with the free ActivePerl. The free CPAN library of perl modules makes it easy to do everything from processing an image to readng and writing web pages. For larger prototypes, I write C# programs using Visual Studio .NET. I love how it lets me toss together a quick and dirty user interface, like the Visual Basic of old, yet enjoy the power of a modern version of the C language.

8. Miscellaneous:

These are one-offs, or programs that don't really fit the other categories.

For creating web pages, setting up the links, and managing all the files, I use Dreamweaver. I like the ability to switch between the layout and the HTML code, but Dreamweaver freezes and crashes far more frequently than any other program on my computer, which makes web design much more frustrating than it should be.

To run symbolic calcuations, make 2D and 3D plots, fool around with new mathematical ideas, and check my hand-computed algebraic and geometric calculations, Mathematica is my choice.

I like to collect typefaces. Printer's Apprentice lets me run through them quickly, install the ones I want to use right now, and uninstall them when I'm done. I make my data and music CDs with Easy CD Creator, and author my DVDs with DVDIt LE. When I'm going somewhere new, I use Streets and Trips to get maps and suggest a route (I like the visual style of the maps it prints more than what's created by the popular online sites). When I want to make screen grabs but don't want to have to select the whole screen, Hypersnap does the job. It also will also automatically scroll a window, so to capture a web page that's much taller than my screen, I just point Hypersnap at the window; it will scroll down until it's got it all, and stitch the pieces together automatically into one big image file.

I don't have to re-partition my disks often, but I've had to do it a few times, and Partition Magic was reliable and easy to use. I sometimes want my computer to show images from my hard drive when it's in screensaver mode; gphotoshow is a free, bare-bones screensaver for just that.

I give a lot of talks. For all its faults, Powerpoint is a convenient way to show one slide after another. I've given many talks in which there is no text; I just show a series of pictures that illustrate my points, or are somehow related to them in direct or indirect ways. Finally, PowerToys is a free utility that lets me tell Windows XP not to force me to log in every time I boot the computer. You can also tweak a zillion other settings, but I pretty much use it just to bypass the login screen.

Posted by Andrew at January 28, 2004 09:03 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Wow! That's an impressive catalogue and post. I'm going to follow up in chunks, a few things at a time.

Browser: I've pretty much settled on Firebird, a lightweight spin-off from Mozilla. (So lightweight that the pre-release versions come without an installer: there's just a folder of stuff with an EXE.) It feels more like IE than Mozilla does, but has tabbed browsing. Now that I'm used to tabs, I find IE far too painful: so much of my web browsing involves temporarily stashing interesting links for later consumption, and tabbed browsing is perfect for just that. In addition, it has built-in popup blocking, and it works better than any plugin for IE ever did for me. Firebird's one downfall is that it does not expose man option to always open a new browser window when you click a link in another app; instead it'll recycle the topmost existing window, which is almost never what I want. I'm planning to fix that by diving into the code some time soon--or at least diving into the dev newsgroup.

Firewall: I have a hardware firewall (LinkSys BEFSR41 4-port wired) and still use ZoneAlarm Pro in addition for a feature Andrew didn't mention: ZA reports applications that try to make outgoing connections and let's you grant or deny them permission. It's a great way to keep tabs on what's going on on your machine and ensure no virus, worm, or spyware is going out on the net.

Code editing: I haven't needed it recently, but in my last year at MS I became a big fan of Source Insight. It has nice code coloring that's customizable per token class, it covers tons of languages, provides click-on-symbol-to-go-there, and a table-of-content sidebar for the current file, among many other features.

Note taking: I've started using MS Office 2003's OneNote application. It was designed for use on Tablet PCs (& thus ink-savvy), but is very usable and useful on a regular PC. I should really do a full length write-up at some point, but feel that I haven't settled into a mature usage pattern yet. Essentially OneNote is a cross between a text editor, an outliner, and one of those digital whiteboard projects they did at PARC. You can click anywhere on a page to start a text blob, the editor has autoformatting (bulleted lists and such) and outlining capabilities, and you can drag text blobs around to arrange as you like. Pages are named and organized into named sections with in each file. It's working for me because there's no decent outliner app around anymore, Word's Outline mode is horrible for note taking, and this provides a bit more structure.

Posted by: Maarten at January 28, 2004 11:50 PM

RE: Firebird

Just for the record, that new-window problem with Firebird can be fixed, at least on Windows. Yay!

Posted by: Maarten at January 29, 2004 11:58 PM

This is a great and incredibly useful list. I don't really have much to add to this list on Windows except for one program which I find invaluable. It's a research prototype called Stuff-I've-Seen and while it's not widely available, there are some similar software packages out there that do the same thing. Essentially they index all your files AND your email and web sites that you've visited which allows for very rapid, Google like retrieval of email, files, etc. The one that I used to use was called enfish and it was quite good though it stopped working when I updated to XP (they've since brought out updates).

On the Macintosh, though, it's an entirely different ecosystem. Two programs that I simply love over there which are not available in the PC world are OmniGraffle (a Visio like editor which I find much more intuitive to use than Visio) and OmniOutliner - a wonderful outline program which is ideally suited to making TODO lists and other ways of organizing one's thoughts. I'm still bemoaning the loss of inControl which was simply wonderful outliner, todo list manager, which integrated well with a calendar. I still don't think there's a compeletely effective TODO list program for my needs out there today (and there used to be one!).

Safari is a great browser, and once one uses tabbed browsing, it's hard to go back. The iLife package is really quite nice for managing photos, music, etc. I haven't tried iMovie (I like a little more power for my video editing) nor have I tried iDVD or the new addition GarageBand, but they both look elegant.
I like OfficeXP better than MacOffice X, but the Mac version always tends to be behind the PC version for those products.

Oh, and one useful program on both platforms that I use to make quick little animations is Flash, even though I'm by no means an expert. Quite nice for illustrating the occasional idea - even if I haven't taken the time to learn how to build extensive web-sites or applications.

Posted by: Steve at January 30, 2004 06:26 PM

Hats off to Andrew for posting this list and taking this thing from a too-often-talked-about-idea to a real blog posting.

I've long lamented the fact that we have no good way to learn from one another about the tools and work habits that we each use. I guess user groups back in the day used to serve that purpose. Talking about tools helps fill that gap a little.

My List:

Browser: Firebird. Everything Maarten says here is right. Great broswer, even at version 0.7. Impossible to go back. I've used a tabbed browser for years, first with Netcaptor (pro: uses the IE as the control, so there's wide compatibility. con: resource hog and the "group of tabs" concept isn't folded into the "bookmarks" concept as it should, which is clumsy). I also had a brief dalliance with Opera but the rendering bugs with it drove me nuts.

Antivirus Norton. Hate it. Why the hell does this thing keep winning awards? Can anyone tell me? Is it even possible to uninstall this thing? It's slow, intrusive, requires deep babysitting (click, wait, click, wait) for updating and ever since installing it, it refuses to die gracefully when I ask my computer to shut down (have to end NAV manually or my machine just hangs waiting for it to halt). I see that Andrew uses Vcom. What do you guys use?

Firewall I use a D-Link 713-P wireless access point that acts as a hardware firewall, NAT and print server. (So few WAPs seem to do this anymore. Grr.) Never thought about using a software solution with this, but I agree with Maarten's opinion on ZoneAlarm - I used to run it and rather liked it. You'd be amazed how much of your software likes to talk to the internet.

Security Same list as Andrew, except for AI Roboform.

Text editing Emacs. I just wish everything text-wise in windows worked with these keybindings.

Doc Layout Depending on the task at hand and the target, I like to use Adobe's InDesign (great font/type control and good OpenType support for ligatures and other fancy stuff). For long technical stuff, there's still nothing in my book (ahem. pun) like FrameMaker though I'm still using version 5.5.

Audio Can't stand Real. I'm looking for a RealAudio replacement. Checking out RealAlternative.

Web Development Dreamweaver MX, but reluctantly so. This is generally pretty nice, but considering how popular and powerful it is, I see it as a pretty flawed solution. Maybe MX 2003 is better, but the WYSIWYG abilities of this top-shelf software leave a lot to be desired. Would love to hear what you guys use.

Screengrab Two tools: Snag-it and for a more feature rich toolFullShot is nice.

Printing I use Fineprint2000 Excellent tool for printing things 2-4-8 up and in booklet format (yea all that page re-arranging, etc).

FTP For when I need more than (um, or less than) a command line, I use CuteFTP Pro. Nice piece of work.

Audio If you want to record a streaming audio file to disk (sometimes this is hard) there's a cool tool called TotalRecorder.
That should do it for now...more later?

Question
Andrew - For your file browser: Why Powerdesk Pro? I know there's lots to hate about file explorer, but I'm curious as to what this tool does that you like so well.

Posted by: Matt Conway at February 1, 2004 07:17 PM

I love all this good information!

After reading the praise above, I tried Firebird, and I can see why everyone loves it. Unfortunately, my programs for managing cookies, ads, and forms don't work with it, and I've grown very used to having them around, so I'll stick with IE and the risk of using an untabbed, monoculture browser.

Like Matt, I use TotalRecorder to record streams - it's in my comments, but I inadvertently left it out of the overall list.

I know that lots of people hate the Real player, at least partly due to its constant harangues to upgrade to the commercial version (and apparently once you do so, it continues to bother you with other offers). I blocked their other software with ZoneAlarm the first time each one tried to access the net, and poof, I never saw them again. They may still try to run, and access the net sometimes, but I never see them. I dislike Real for other reasons. But I found that I could get an artist/album view from Windows Media Player, which was my reason for using Real, so I'll be using WMP from now on.

I've also got a LinkSys router with a built-in firewall, but I love how ZoneAlarm Pro lets me enable and disable individual programs (as with the Real programs above). They keep making ZoneAlarm Pro better and better; for example, it now watches to see if you're sending email too fast (e.g. 10 per second or something like that). If it sees this, it suspects that you've been taken over by a mail-sending worm or virus, and it suspends outbound email until you confirm that this is really what you want to do.

While we're on security, I have no idea why Norton keeps winning awards, but it does. Every experience I've had with the Norton programs has been a disaster. I've bought the full suite twice at CostCo (once for Windows 2000 because I heard the reviews, the second time years later for Windows XP because I thought maybe my first experience was unusual). Both times it created severe system problems, and getting rid of Norton was impossible; both times I ended up wiping my disk clean and re-loading the operating system.

I find that Dreamweaver 4 crashes frequently, and sometimes I can't even edit a particular file any more once it gets into an unstable condition. Maybe the MX version is better, but I haven't tried it. I often end up grabbing all the text from the offending file, deleting it, and then re-building it, which is frustrating and time-consuming. Like Norton, I don't know why people are so positive about a program that is so problematic. Still, when it isn't crashing, it's the best site-making tool I've found.

What do I love about PowerDesk Pro 5? First, it does everything that the normal Windows Explorer does, and in the same way, so there's no learning curve. The plus is that it puts a lot of useful tools right at my fingertips, like a suite. As with other suites, there are probably individual programs available to do each of these things somewhat better, but this does all I need. Here's a quick summary, in no particular order:

Size Manager: A built-in tool that will show me the size of every file in a folder or on a disk and sort them by size (it's great for cleaning out big useless files).
Built-in FTP: I can open an ftp site from the standard folder list. It looks exactly like a file-exploring window on any local disk, so I can simply drag files back and forth (I used to use CuteFTP, but haven't needed it for years).
Preview: A built-in viewer pane gives me an immediate preview of files in most common image and text formats.
Launchbar: A row of convenient app buttons at the top, like Notepad and Wordpad, that I can drag files onto for a quick view.
Zip: From the right-click menu I can unzip files with one click, and I can create new zip files just as easily.
Dialog Help: It puts two buttons on every standard file open and save dialog box, which provide drop-down lists of recently-used files and directories. This is far more convenient and automatic than Windows' "Favorites".
Search: A quick and useful file-finder that can search on a wide variety of criteria including file contents.

I left off my list one very useful utility. I have two computers in my house, which causes all kinds of problems for Outlook; I can only run Outlook on one machine at a time, and typically that's my basement machine. So how can I check my mail when I'm on my laptop on the third floor? The free program PopTray is a tiny little POP3 mail reader. It runs in my system tray and looks for new email, and it lets me know when it's arrived. I can read mail (without removing it from the server, so I can later read it again with Outlook) and even delete the spam. I can't reply directly, since that would require Outlook, but I can open a window on my Yahoo account and send from there. When I'm waiting for an urgent piece of mail, or just want to stay accessible during the day, this is a near-perfect solution.

Posted by: Andrew at February 3, 2004 11:27 AM

PopTray sounded really good, but I can't recommend it for everyone. I installed and ran it on another machine today, and when I got home found that Outlook had downloaded newly unread copies of the past week's email--i.e. of everything that was still on the POP3 server. UGH. [I have Outlook set up to delete stuff after a week.] The issue may be that Outlook was still running on my home machine while I ran PopTray elsewhere.

Also PopTray easily gets confused if another client makes changes in the POP3 database while it's running. I'm guessing Outlook deleted some stuff that was over a week old during my PopTray session--causing PopTray to be unable to open messages.

Posted by: Maarten at February 5, 2004 09:57 PM

Well it looks like a new verison of Firebird is out, and with it, a name change, now called Firefox which, while arbitrary, is pretty cool sounding.

Andrew's note about it not working with his ad-blockers, form-filler-outers and other stuff is a good one, and still speaks to the as yet unsolved user/system problem of tool integration.

Life was simpler when everything was a text-and-a-pipe, eh?

Posted by: Matt at February 10, 2004 09:59 AM

True geeks write and their own proxy server.

Posted by: Maarten at February 12, 2004 11:14 PM

I'm a writer and use "WhizFolders," as an outline database. It replaces an older program, "Info Recall," which went on to become a too-complicated PIM (personal information manager). WhizFolders offers topical heading entries on the left, with an RTF editor (that includes hyperlinks and graphics capability) on the right. It's the best I've seen to develop a rough draft for manuscripts, and to brainstorm.
I also use the freebie: ATNotes, a free Post-it utility to keep scraps.
I use the first Windows 3.x version of "Info Select," a freeform database. Later versions became too complicated, and also went for the PIM customer. But the early version is super fast, very small, works great on any Windows version, and offers an almost intantaneous search of "Get" function. It's character exclusionary, meaning I can have a word anywhere in any record. As I type a character, all windows without that character are removed. Each additional character narrows the pattern, until I have only remaining windows (records).
I use "Stiletto," as my launch bar, and rarely use Windows tools to do anything in this arena. Stiletto has so many features I'm still learning them, and offers tremendous control over Windows in areas only now showing up. For example, virtual desktops.
I also use Microsoft's "ClipTray," which was a terrific utility included in Windows 98. It provides stored Clipboard entries, with a fast, 1-step right-click to load text into the clipboard. It sits in the Windows tray, and keeps certain credit card numbers, web URLs and so forth.
I use the Random House Webster's Unabridged dictionary on CDROM, v. 2.0. Later versions seem to add nothing, and the whole dictionary stores to the hard drive. My test for a good dictionary is if it has the word "fungible" (exchangeable).
I also use New Oxfort Thesaurus of English, which bundles with the iFinger search and configuration utility. It's a local PC-specific application, but also resides in memory and offers synonyms for any word on any web page by mouse hovering. Best thesaurus I've seen.
PaintShop Pro for graphics editing, since I don't do much in that realm other than file format conversions and simple repairs. Also I use American Systems "EZ Macros" for those rare cases where I need an application non-specific way to do repetitious tasks.
There's a pile of other little utilities I've gathered over the years to make life easier, but I'm staying on Win 98SE. I have no interest in XP, and will probably move to Linux when W98 finally can no longer run on an Intel system.

Posted by: Craig at February 21, 2004 12:31 PM

So what do you guys use for a backup solution? I'm looking for timed backups, incremental and full, with support for CD/RW drives, preferably storing the archives in ZIP or some other commonly available compressed archive format.

Is it my imagination, or is there virtually nothing commercial in this space? Not even Norton or McAfee sell products in this space anymore (no, Ghost doesn't count).

Any help?

Posted by: Matt at March 17, 2004 05:36 PM

Maarten's experience with PopTray mirrored mine. I use it only when Outlook is not running. I also only use it for previewing mail and deleting spam.

Matt's question about backups is tough. I've tried several automatic solutions and I've yet to find something I'm happy with. My solution: I burn a rewritable CD periodically with all the stuff that I can remember changing since the last one. In between those times I make backups by dragging important files from one disk to another (not just another partition, but a different, external disk). This "solution" requires a lot of memory and manual intervention.

I agree with Craig that a lot of programs get worser as they grow, not better. If something works just fine, we'll never buy the upgrade, so they have to find something to tempt us with. The real sadness is when this new thing replaces or breaks some pre-existing feature that was just about perfect.

Posted by: Andrew at March 31, 2004 01:28 PM

A browser update: I've started to use the newly-updated, free browser MyIE2. It seems to be the best of both the IE and Firefox worlds: it has tons of features (including tabs), and it supports all of my favorite plugins. It has a fine ad and popup blocker, runs Java applets written for IE, and even supports the Google toolbar. You can move through the tabs with mouse gestures, it has drag-and-drop features for surfing, and you can save tabbed sets. I haven't learned all the features yet. I've only used it for a day now, but so far, I like it a lot.

Posted by: Andrew at April 6, 2004 06:57 PM

I've taken the plunge and moved over to Firefox. The latest version supports AI Roboform and the Google toolbar. Cookie Pal doesn't seem to work properly, but that might just require some finessing. You can't uninstall IE completely (the OS depends on it for some things), but now Firefox is my default and daily browser.

Posted by: Andrew at July 2, 2004 02:22 PM
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