A bit of voyeurism on this Sunday evening: there's no shortage of opinions on best applications out there (and @ProfHacker often has great suggestions), but I'm curious what my DH colleagues and friends commonly use as apps. This question was initially motivated by my continued flirting with Linux (and a desire to bootstrap my knowledge of useful stuff), but I'd suggest the net be cast across platforms. Here are a few of applications I use most often with some very subjective commentary:
- Firefox I know a lot of people complain that it's slow, but I actually haven't found that, maybe because I have a ton of RAM (that's not to say that Javascript intensive sites run as fast as they do in Chrome, but for the vast majority of sites I don't see a difference). I've also ported by profile between machines so many times that I'm very comfortable that I won't lose things (whereas the profile situation for Chrome on Mac is much less clear to me) – I think both Firefox and Chrome are moving to synchronized profiles, so that may be less of an issue in the future. I also still prefer Firefox's location bar and its suggestions, and I also find Firefox on the whole more customizable. I mostly use Firebug and Zotero for extensions (plus a couple more)
- Thunderbird I've actually just shifted back to TBird from Apple Mail – I like the UI of Mail, but the lack of good shortcuts drives me insane (you can set keyboard shortcuts in system preference for individual apps, but I find them flaky). I've also just now installed Lightning for calendars and I really like how it's integrated into my mail screen
- Eclipse Yep, I love it for just about all the coding I do: Java, XML, PHP, Javascript, Ruby, Python, etc. I really like the team plugins (SVN and Git)
- Textmate I can't quite explain why, but I usually come back to Textmate for very quick editing, either code or plain text
- Textwrangler I'll use this instead of Eclipse or Textmate if I need to open very large files
- Dropbox No need to say much here...
- Screenflow I like this for video capture and editing (QuickTime works well for capture but lacks some of the editing features
- Omnifocus I try to use this properly but usually end up piling up a bunch of stuff in there and then not really going back to the list as I should
- Expandrive I like the Finder integration of this for SFTP
- Keynote I still prefer this for presentations
- OpenOffice I do my best to use this, but I still find that going back and forth from MS Word isn't always as smooth as it should be (especially for lists)
- Ripit To, um, make a backup of DVDs for cultural prosperity
- Voilà Powerful screen-capture and editing (yes, you can do most of it with free software, but...
- etc. (Skype, VLC, Echofon, Handbrake, Audacity...)
I go back and forth with the opensource and free software: I don't mind paying for applications, though I do tend to prefer the customizability of open software. I'm also making more and more effort to have most things in the cloud to ensure that I'm not too locked into any one system.
What do you use?
