Sweet Software

So now I have 3 topics I'm going to write about in this blog over the next little while. They are as follows:

- Starters Guide to Linux
- Why the world isn't ready for 64 bit OS's (Linux perspective)
- Cool apps to aid in day to day development

Seeing how I have a bit of time now, I'll post on the Cool Apps front.

So last night, I went ahead and did something I've not done before: I purchased an application online. This isn't to be confused with purchasing applications/software in general, as I've typically gone to the store to do this. However, one app was shown to me a few days ago and I bit the bullet, paying the amazing fee of $11.45CND for this software. That software is called TopDesk, and it's totally awesome.

I wish I could do this software justice in my blog, but rather than trying to, I'm going to just point to the developers site.

www.otakusoftware.com/topdesk/

Both at work and on my laptop, I'm forced to use a monitor at 1024x768 resolution. This, frankly, sucks. I end up tiling somewhere in the range of a billion windows on these machines, and have to sift through, or alt-tab for about an hour, to get any work done. As shown on the webpage, Topdesk emulates one of the Mac OS X features (which I've forgotten at this time) where all windows get tiled to the screen for easy viewing and it allows focus of windows to be brought to the front with a mouseclick. Seriously, this is one heck of a timesaver.

I've always been paranoid about storing apps I've either written or bought, and having to worry that during a hard drive crash, I would lose all my data and that would be that (that happened to me. Trust me, it sucks). Well, an application called GMail Drive (free) fixes part of my woes. What this software does is take any gmail webmail account and lets you store data on that account like you would another hard drive. The plus? Any files you upload are visible from both google's webmail (so anywhere in the world, really) and from other computers that have GMail drive installed. Brilliant! Here's the link:

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Also, check out SlickRun (free) for those of you who want an alternative to the command line. Again, this is a hard app to describe, but it allows you to type a key command which brings up a mini-prompt. From there, you can define 'MagicWords' to launch various applications. It has auto-complete too for these MagicWords. It also accepts regular windows commands as well! Seriously worth checking out. I use it all the time!

www.bayden.com/SlickRun/

There are a lot of apps that I will add to this list, but I'll add them later.