More software recommendations
After my recent mention of omnipad, a really nice, free text editor for windows, it dawned on me that it would be a good idea to recommend some more software that has proven useful, fun or plain invaluable, some of which i stumbled across just recently, so here’s a short list:
- yahooPOPs! – some time ago (i think in 2002) yahoo disabled pop access for their freemail service. Yahoopops automatically queries your yahoo mail account and allows you to retrieve your mail in your mail client of choice. Especially useful if you’ve got some important old mail stuck there but didn’t bother to manually forward/grab it.
- uniform server – installer for simply setting up a wamp environment on your box for some quick’n'dirty webdev stuff. In the past i first used php triad before it went more or less dead and more recently commercial (under the new name of sokkit) and then foxserv, but i really like the smaller download footprint and ease of install of uniserver. I always had trouble setting up foxserv (nothing major, but still annoying), but uniserver simply worked out of the box.
- vlc media player – this isn’t exactly an insider tip, but i heard of this player just quite recently and perhaps there are others out there who haven’t heard of it yet. At first i’ve been a bit deterred by the rather poor ui of the windows version, but since then most doubts have gone. This is a very capable media player (the first one that allowed me to play xvid without any trouble) and by now my default video player. It’s available for pretty much any platform. I have the impression that it sucks lots of system performance, though.
- argo uml – a nice uml modelling tool. Perhaps not good enough for professional work, but i used this software in a course and quite liked it. There’s also a more polished, more capable commercial software package based on this open source project, poseidon.
- vexed.net – now to the fun part: most likely you’ve heard of vexed, a brilliant puzzle game available for pretty much any platform. On windows i play this version, implemented in .net.
- Finally, i’d like to recommend sharpreader. I’m sure that i’ve mentioned the software before on this blog, but for the sake of completeness i have to include it in this list. It’s an rss feed reader for windows written in .net. I’ve been using this software for several months now and can wholeheartedly recommend it.
Now if someone could point me to good windows versions of tetris and arkanoid, i’d be most grateful.
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