Kevin Marshall's Epic Work Blog for Awesome People

Kevin the Coder is a maverick. Almost like a team of mavericks.
in

Useful Utilities

As the 2,135,412th read blog on the Internet, I get asked all the time "What are your favorite freeware utilities?"

Here are a few that I use most often:

Reflector - Allows you to view complied .NET code.  Invaluable for gaining insight into the workings of the .NET framework.

FoxIt PDF - A small fast pdf reader that you don't have to install.  <rant>What happened to the good old days of single .exe programs with no installer.  If I don't want it, I just click delete and bam, it's gone.  Now days every program wants to spread its tentacles through my start menu, tray, various system folders, registry, context menus, and other dark corners of my computer.  Macs work this way, why can't PCs?  No I do not want you to load on startup and no I don't care that a new version to buy is available.  So why another pdf reader when we already have abode acrobat?  Could that program take any longer to load?  All i want to do is read a document, not wait 45mins for it to load 10K plugins that I don't care about.  And it crashes my browser 50%.  Its a crap shoot, if I open this pdf from the web what are the chances it crashes my browser?  Arcobat Reader makes browsing the web like walking through a mine field.  You never know when you might accidentally click on a pdf link that will crash IE/Firefox.  I rate adobe acrobat reader in my Top 10 Worst Software.  Only Real Media and Lotus Notes edge it out with their immortal locks on the top position.  Congrats Adobe, you have joined the pantheon of crappy software. </rant>

Cropper - A C# screen capture utility. Its small and fast and lets capture/crop and part of the screen.

Colorpic - Tool to get the color of any pixel on the screen.  So useful for web designing.  Allows you to create palletes and even magnifies the screen.

PixelRuler - On screen ruler. Bonus points for looking cool. Helps me make pixel perfect layouts.

Notepad2 - Free notepad replacement. Colors code keywords.  MS should just buy this and replace the regular one.

CodeColorizer - Produces formatted and colored code in HTML. Look at the code on this site and marvel at the work of colorizer.

Audacity - Free well designed sound editor.  You'd almost think it was a mac app.

Paint.NET - Photoshop like version of MS Paint.  Now you don't have have to scour the web for warezd versions of photoshop.

ISO Recoder - Small powertoy for burning isos.  I can't even look at Roxio any more.  With each release it has gotten worse and worse.  Remember the animated cd guy?  They even include that after the smashing success of MS Bob and the paperclip.  Its like the engineers sit around and say "What could we do to make this worse than the previous release?" Just an amazing decline.  And worse yet, Nero seems to want to follow their lead.  You shouldn't need 500MB to install cd/dvd burning software.  Roxio is a lock for the Top 10 Worst Software list.

TopDesk - Mimics the expose functionality of the Mac.  I'm so attached to this on the mac that I constantly hit the F11 key on my pc laptop and swear everytime the windows don't fly away.  Now I can have the same F11 joy on the PC.
Posted: Mar 03 2006, 09:11 AM by kmarshall | with 1 comment(s)

Comments

lroth said:

thanks for the links - i've been looking for something like TopDesk
# March 3, 2006 11:58 AM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)