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Useful Apps for First-Time Windows Users?
pauljoyce asks: "I'm a Mac fan who is intrigued by the possibilities of Apple's Boot Camp software. Now that I have a chance to painlessly dip into the Windows world, what I'd like to ask you is, what Windows software amazes you? I want to build a list of unique, elegant, can't-do-without apps, so all us new Boot-Camp babies can finally experience some of the great innovation happening over on the Windows platform.
I roughed in a quick blogpage to collect the info, and to house any useful discussions. It'll probably deteriorate into a flame war at some point, but hopefully I can get a few contributions to each category before then. Would those interested please chime in with their list of favorites?"
Total Commander, or Salamander Commander. Both are excellent file managers, and they make WinZip un-needed.
I don't know if it's a can't-live-without sort of app, but it's a personal/desktop wiki application that comes in handy for jotting down notes:
http://www.gersic.com/zulupad/
If you're going to be using Windows, you might want to get these cross-platform apps:
- Cygwin or at least MingW/Msys to drop back to comfortale familiar shell, and not the hell that is command prompt.
- VLC media player: the only media player worth using on Windows because it's 10 MB and doesn't put any files in any places but the install directory.
- Obviously Firefox/Thunderbird or Opera depending on your taste
- Putty: Great ssh client
- Spambayes: Best spam filtering (at least in my opinion)
- Eclipse: One of the most powerful IDEs on the market
Windows only:
- Beyond Compare: the best diff utility I've found. Integrates very cleanly with the shell (not free, but still very very good)
- TextPad: The best and easiest text editor - doesn't get in your way and is extensible like crazy. (Free with nag screen)
- Picasa: Image organization + basic editing
- Google Earth: When you need 3d Google Maps (although it has cool plugins like real-time flight paths)
- Trillian: MSN, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, etc (free and pay version)
- WinAVI: Very easy to use and the fastest video conversion program with great quality (not free)
- BitComet: Very slick bittorrent client
- Microsoft Visual Studio: One of the slickest IDEs around for C/C++ but still lacks in some modern IDE features found in Eclipse/NetBeans
There's plenty other apps I'm sure you'll come across. These are the one's I generally can't live without (except for MS Visual Studio).
And obviously all the games you want to try.
* Crimson Editor An amazingly powerful freeware text / script editor.
* uTorrent Is there an open source Torrent Client in under 200k? Does it have RSS searching, bandwidth scheduling, automatic resume, and trackerless support? Yes? Oh, good then.
* As -U- Type. Spell check anywhere. It's a great piece of software, if you can get over the fact that the author barely speaks any english.
* 3 Plane Soft Screensavers. Ok, they're screensavers. And they're a rip off. But damn they're nice.
* Trillian. 'nuff said.
* The Bat! The second best mail client created, behind only KMail.
* IZarc If there were need for zip clients anymore, this would be the one to have. Also handles about 50 other file standards, integrates really well with explorer, is small and efficient, and did I mention free? Best unzipper out there, including the pay options.
* Folder Size Shows you how big your folders are. If explorer were made by Apple, it would do this by default.
* True Crypt Data so secure even it doesn't know if there is more to be found in a file.
* Thumbs Plus Arguably there are a lot of good applications in this space, and there are ones out there with better interfaces. But it is the only thumbnail application I've ever used that can handle upwards of 20,000 files in a single directory. If you take lots of pictures, this is the one.
* DVD Decrypter Recently bought out by Macrovision to shut down it's decryptey goodness, DVD Decrypter is really a no-nonsense, no-fuss DVD ripper and burner. Want to rip a movie from a DVD so you can watch it later? One button. Want to rip it back to a DVD? Another button.
* Microsoft Power Toys Nifty stuff from people who both hate and make the operating system.
And remember to use an antivirus, a firewall, and two anti-spyware suites. My personal favorites are AVG Antivirus, Kerio Personal Firewall, Spybot, and Ad Aware.
The ______ Agenda
I have worked with a LOT of designers, artists, video professionals, and even web developers who have REFUSED to ever work on anything but a Mac, and have never used Windows for more than a few minutes. It always amazes me, but I have found myself in situations more times that I can count, where as the one guy in the studio who has ever touched a PC, I have to explain all sorts of simple things, because they don't know the first thing about Windows.
Unlike all the useless comments that recommend Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy, I'll point you towards a thread called "the 'neat application I stumbled across on the web' thread" over on the ArsTechnica OpenForum: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/t pc/f/99609816/m/1400961263
I'm a software developer. I've worked for IBM. I maintain and develop several Open Source software applications. And I haven't been a Windows user since Windows 3.1.
I always have to laugh when some Windows user thinks that it is simply not possible to exist in the computing world without using Windows. However, it's quite a bit easier to live outside the Windows world than you think.
How did I do it? Long before Windows 95 existed, I used a fine 32-bit, pre-emptively multitasking operating system called OS/2, which I used for most of the 1990's. Towards the late 1990's, when OS/2 was on the decline, I started working for IBM as an OS/2 developer, where I also did a lot of Unix/Linux work. Around the same time frame, I started running Linux at home in parallel to my OS/2 machine as a way of running software through X that I didn't otherwise have access to.
With the serious decline of OS/2 in the 2000's, I moved over to Mac OS X (along with running a lot of Unix systems). For the last number of years much of my paid work has been in Java comsulting, where I get to pick what platform I use.
So I haven't had a Windows machine since 1993 at this point. True, I have encountered them here and there over the years, but I've been able to avoid being assigned to a Windows machine in my home or at any place of work I've held in all that time. The trick is damn simple for the most part: be so freakishly good at what you do that people will be happy to comply with your platform requests, and let them know up from you have no interest in working with Windows. So far, it's worked every time here.
Yaz.
Windows Free since '93.
Seriously, why doesn't anyone mention MS Office?
Visio and Access for rapidly and easily designing and prototyping, powerpoint for presentations. There are other applications that can replace Word and Excel, but they don't support ythe same level of integration. Just drag and drop a table from Excel into a Word document.
Because Office doesn't support exporting to PDF yet, you'll need CutePDF writer: http://www.cutepdf.com/
Can't speak for the original querent, but for myself, for the past 10 years I've been in Linux-land and NetBSD-space, avoiding the crappy software distributed by the criminal corporation Microsoft as much as possible.
The last PC that I owned that ran Microsoft software had Windows 3.1 installed, but I just ran it in DOS mode. I've never owned a machine that ran any version MS Windows as its primary OS.
I had one job (actually two separate stints at the same place) where I had a Windows box on my desk; I used it only to run Lotus Notes for e-mail (the horror...), Netscape for browsing (this being pre-Firefox), the X server that let me get work done, and MS Word a couple of times (the horror...).
If you beleive that there aren't people who haven't dabbled in Windows than I must say I think you're the one who's demonstrating extraordinary skill at head-burying.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities for Windows. Very good list and a good newsletter. Subscribe to the paid newsletter and get more recommendations: Extended list of 81.
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Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
Exactly, they knew full well it was going to turn into
Modded 5 : funny.
So even if they wanted serious answers it was naive to think they'd get them.
That said, AVG for antivirus, run firefox so you don't need anything for spyware.
get Desktop Earth for your background because it looks really cool.
Get power menu to help control always on top windows etc
Get Snagt for screenshots.
Get newsleecher for news
Get SmartFTP for FTP
Get Winamp for media (or VLC if you must)
Don't get itunes. The PC version is hideous compared to the mac one and in this scenario you already have OS-X.
And remember that a surprising number of the apps you use on OS-X, and possibly Linux, have ports. Open Office, Putty, VLC, Firefox etc.
Cygwin is nice. One of the first things I do on a Windows box (and about the only thing I ever use IE for) is go to start, run, and type iexplore "http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe"/code to launch straight into the current setup program and get myself an xterm, a proper shell and openssh to make my workday considerably less painful. Any OSX fan that spends any time in a shell will probably miss the shell before long, Cygwin provides that in Windows. It's too bad cygwin doesn't ship a win32 KDE...not having my keybindings, having the Start and Menu keys working as advertised instead of doing something useful, lack of multiple desktops and just overall rigidness makes Explorer get in the way more than anything...
Help us build a better map!
Bullshit straight back at you. My dad had a Mac SE when I was old enough to think coherently, back when Apple was the field leader and MS was a whelp (yeah, it surprised me too, gizmodo came out with a '20 years ago...' post that was quite informative). Since then it was at each point easier to upgrade within the Apple line rather than switch over to Windows, even though Windows took over as market leader; when I got to university and could pick my first computer, I used the nice 25?33?% apple education discount (UK, don't know what it's like in the US) and got myself a flat panel imac. I was used to macs, and though I'd used programs in windows on the school computers, it was never enough to find out what a lot of the subsystem stuff was. Since then I've bought an iBook, using the handy installation process that copies your entire hard drive and filestructure over so there's no effective change between the first computer and the second. When I left uni and got a job, the office I now work in uses Apple computers exclusively, except one PC for the designers when they need to make a Rhino file in the right format for a windows user to recieve.
.dll files, and I think that BIOS is the sublayer you have to drop to when you want to configure new hardware like RAM or partition your hard drive. But while I've come across the term 'flash BIOS', it means jack shit to me. The only context I have it in is a quick wipe, and that's only because other utilities use the term in that way, and it's a complete guess when applying it to the BIOS as I understand it.
Sure, I'm a rare occurence. But while I've wandered around the web enough to come across the terms (especially on bash.org), I've never had a need to find out exactly what they do. I think there's a difference between DLL and
You know why I don't know? Because I don't care. I'm a geek who uses macs, and I don't care about the hordes of people who told me I was doing it all wrong when apple were going down the tube, and I still don't care about the hordes of people who think I'm a moron for using macs. I have no need to know anything at all about the windows subsystem, and so when I come across the terms I see them but ignore them completely. I simply have no need to know what they mean, in the same way that when I see arcane sigs here, I can recognise them as being *nix terms or cryptography (I have familiarity but not mastery of the linux stuff, and I've read Cryptonomicon) - but their meaning isn't obvious simply by looking at them, and I don't have a reason to learn the meaning of each and every single one of them by looking them up or figuring them out.
I may have more understanding of what they are than the average Windows user, just like the gpp. But by no means does that mean I understand them completely, nor that I care to know what they do. I don't need to.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
That's not *entirely* true. There are plenty of pissed windows customers looking to move to... uh, anything else. Management just isn't listening and doesn't care. I work at one of these companies, though not one that's listed here.
But, let's keep this in the spirit of the original post:
Solidworks: not available on a Mac.
Pro/E: not available on a Mac.
AutoCAD (and all other Autodesk products save Maya[maybe not for long...]): not available on a Mac.
Delcam: not available on a Mac.
In fact, ANY CAM software: not available on a Mac.
That's the list, or something close to it. Everything else (yes, everything), is available in one form or another on a Mac, so this is the only essential non-game industry that's only available for Windows. Therefore, if you're not doing anything industrial and not gaming, it's a waste of time to worry about Boot Camp.
BTW: Ashlar-Vellum's stuff doesn't even compute - unlike the byline, it doesn't work the way the average cad operator thinks (i.e., no primitives, etc.). PITA.