Links

Productivity

  • TaskBeat – Ultimate business management application that I use for everyday project and task management for all my personal and business projects
  • Microsoft Office – the ultimate and irreplacable office productivity suite, also used as software as service using the Office 365 variant
    Postbox – a much better e-mail client, faster e-mail management superceding Gmail and Thunderbird, also borrowing the best of those two.
  • MetroTweet – a much better tweeter client, now discontinued due to various policy changes announced by Twitter Inc.,
    RSS Owl – The ultimate reader for all of us who still seem stuck in the concept of feeding news over the RSS channel.
  • Copernic Desktop – document indexing engine which I’ve been using years before one could hear about Google Desktop.
  • Everything – file indexing engine allowing to search for any file on the nt file system with low system footprint
  • Foxit Reader – lightweight and powerful replacement for Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Software Development

This represents a catalogue of software packages, which I use for a living, hence my vital interest in every single site quoted below:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio – Finest software development environment for .NET
  • Embarcadero Delphi – Finest software development environment for Windows
  • SmartSVN – Ultimate SVN client, exceeding most of the other popular clients by miles.
  • TextPad – Very simple and extremely reliable text editor supporting multiple encoding systems.
  • UltraEdit – Preferred web development editor with direct FTP support and support for multiple file encodings.
  • PHP Storm – Powerful web development editor with support of the latest PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS, both syntax and debug.
  • WebStorm
  • ReSharper
  • TeamCity
  • AutomatedQA – Powerful functional testing suite for Win32 and .NET

Music

  • Foobar2000 – silly name and a bit hard to learn interface, but highly configurable. Just made the player of preference due to its low memory footprint, excellent reliability, last.fm support and lots of other features.
  • Focusmusic.fm – brilliant music service with selected tunes optimised for focusing during daily routines
  • Last.fm – brilliant music discovery service. Allows playback of “radio” stations based on your personal library of music or “social radio” – based libraries of music of your friends.
  • Tidal – brilliant music streaming service. I’m an account holder of the Premium version meaning unlimited access to so many tracks on the net as well as on the go (Android), making one question reasons behind owning any music.
  • Winamp – quality audio multi-format player application with wealth of sentimental value. Currently being replaced with whole string of new versions lagging behind when it comes to pure utilitarian value.

Pictures

  • FastStone Image Viewer – the best picture browser, mostly valued for its speed and low memory footprint, as well the most complete list of supported graphical formats.

Photos

  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Corel PaintShopPro
  • Paint.net

Transport

  • National Express – I’ve got a long history with the companies. We had our ups and downs, but most notably I’ve spent so many days and nights on their coaches that I’d have to dedicate a separate topic on its own to reveal even an iceberg’s tip of the whole story.
    Interglobus – transfers from Berlin to Szczecin
  • EasyJet – cheap flights within Europe

Merchandise

  • eBay – online auctions and general interest, I’ve been building my current reputation over there for many years now.
  • DotPay – payment processing system, favoured by myself and many thousands of people using my products.

Multimedia

  • SplashPro Player – one of the most surprising discoveries on the web. The ultimate MPEG player pushes the format much further with full Motion2 support. The only player capable of pushing AVCHD to full HD and full frame rate at the same time. The additional bonus comes with 1% CPU utilisation with Nvidia CUDA support.
  • The KM Player – is one of the most reliable players with up and down history. Its the foobar of video files with plenty of formats supported and even more options to tweak
  • WinVLC – preferred video player with lots of formats supported
  • BlueBerry FlashBack
  • TechSmith Camtasia
  • Mirilis Action
  • FastStone Capture
  • HandBrake

File Management

  • Altap Salamander – is currently the most frequently used file manager superseding previous preferred tools: TotalCmd (years ago) and Directory Opus (most recently). Tons of utilitarian value-based in the minimalistic package.
  • Directory Opus – is the most feature-complete file manager I’ve ever come across. Supporting the project since the very early version. Also making to my top of FTP managers and graphic browsers and viewers.
  • Space Sniffer – Not only a cool way of browsing what occupies space on your hard drives but also very accurate and practical.
  • WinMerge
  • JDownloader – I’m not a great fan of torrents, but download managers come in handy. JDownloader also makes the only Java application that an interface I can actually stand.

System Tools

  • Uniblue – Uniblue suite is the new Norton Utilities for Windows. The first impression doesn’t give you much confidence as this is a really pretty package, but tools such as Registry Booster, Spyware detection are worth their price. Be careful with SpeedUpMyPC and DriverScanner as these cannot be absolutely trusted and can mess up things really quickly.
  • HijackThis – TrendMicro’s easy to manage performance and system tweaker
  • AntiRootkit – Sophos Rootkit scanning, detection and removal
  • FileHippo Update Checker –
  • WinRar – needs no introduction
  • Acronis TrueImage – Backup suite dramatically decreases overall maintenance and boosts reliability, allowing me to manage several servers without significant impact on my schedule.
  • WinSplit Revolution
  • Sizer – http://www.brianapps.net/
  • OpenDNS
  • Speccy

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