Essential Software

What software do you need for your daily activities? and couldn't live without?

I use these:
Mozilla Firefox (Chrome might steal this spot)
Live Messenger
Windows Media Player
Open office
HTML Kit
Photoshop CS
Notepad
Calculator
WinRar

Safari (ff had this spot, but safari loads and feels much faster)
Skype (for work)
Mail

That's pretty much it. I use those almost every day.
Other apps that I use a lot is:

MaxIde
TextMate

Well. yeah. Short lists.

must haves:
-Live messenger
-Opera
-Notepad++
-MS word or open office word processer
-Photoshop
-Blender
-FileZilla (FTP program)
-CDBurnerXP

use alot:
-Sharpdevelop
-Max IDE
-Netbeans
-Dev C++
-TV tuner software (watch tv on your computer)

Photoshop
3ds max
Firefox 3
Outlook
Corel Painter
BLIDE
Ofusion (ogre exporter)
Trillian
WinRAR
Windows Media player
Xnview

Pidgin (used to be Trillian, but its too bloated now)
Firefox/Chrome ;)
BLIde (for windows, no good IDE for Linux... yet.. maybe never)
Code::Blocks
CamStudio
OllyDBG
Pandora (internet radio)
Winamp
Pakscape (excellent pk3, simply a zip, explorer)
Ventrilo
Sysinternals system explorer/monitor tools
XVI32

For my daily activities?

OS X
Safari
Mail
ecto
BBEdit
VLC (movies have become much more important to me than music alone, so iTunes falls behind this one)
Aperture
Apple's DVD Player
StuffIt (Expander)

- AvantBrowser
- Photoshop
- TextPad
- ColorCop (Color dropper)
- WinTidy (Save/Restore desktop icon positions)
- Calibre (eBook library manager/converter)
- SysInternals tools
- UnixTools (win32 ports of most unix commandline tools. without grep, sed, awk and the likes windows is almost unusable)
- Skype

Can I just paste the image of the 313 objects on my desktop?

must have:
Maya 8.5
Photoshop essentials
Firefox
Blitz3d
Combustion
<edit> mustn't forget itunes

Go on, Retimer ;)

The basics for me are-

Zoom Player
Opera
Thunderbird (come on people- it rocks)
ACDSee Pro
Office '07
IzArc
Calculator
Plain old notepad

I won't list my giant pile of art programs...

My list:

Mozilla Firefox (Chrome might steal this spot)
Mozilla Songbird
Mozilla Thunderbird
VNC Viewer
IrfanView
Windows Live Messenger
UltraEdit
Putty
Eclipse / PyDev
TortoiseSVN
And most importantly: Calc


Additionally for work:
Visual Studio 2005
Outlook Express
Word

Firefox
Thunderbird
NoteTab Light
Winamp V2.*
ACDSee (thinking to switch to something lighter)
Acrobat reader (gonna get Foxit reader, but been too lazy)
WinRAR (replacing with 7zip maybe)

If anyone has good ideas for alternatives, suggestions are welcome. I want it light, optimized and fast.

ACDSee isn't that bad. What version are you using? If you really need uber-light though, there's always IrfanView.

Replace Winamp with foobar2000. I did, and love it.

Replace WinRar with IzArc.

Replace Firefox with Opera, and leave Firefox for badly coded pages that cuase issues in Opera.

Get Chrome.

When I get home from work I'll be running a speed test showdown between Chrome and Opera. I'd like to see if Chrome can match (or better) Opera, which I love because of its speed.

Project Studio Professional
Notepad++
Firefox
Thunderbird

7-zip
WIndows Explorer
Windows Mediaplayer
Adobe Acrobat Reader
MS Office 97 (have not installed Office 07 yet)
Paint Shop Pro 9
EditPlus
Ultraedit 9.20

I am planning to make some ebooks (CHM, PDF) for my personal use and will be using :-

Planon Docupen RC800
SunRav Bookoffice (cheap and does everything I want)
Abbeyy Finereader 9.0 OCR software (the best OCR software).

BlitzMax
Firefox
Thunderbird
Winamp
Gimp
Photoshop Elements (I bought this instead of pirating the full version ;-p)
Excel
Word
Notepad
Notepad++
Calc
Avast
WinZip
Creative WaveStudio
Audacity
Fruity Loops
WS_FTP

Try XNView instead of ACDSee (far more advanced than IrfanView and very light), Foobar instead of Winamp (as reactor suggested... it is also very customizable), and FoxIt Reader instead of Acrobat Reader (really fast and small).

Apps I use daily in approx order of use...

MaxIDE
Firefox
Mail & Outlook
Skype
Notepad++
Textwrangler
Parallels
Eclipse
7Zip
pgAdmin3 (PostgreSQL db admin)

Oh, and 1Password

Scintilla (my notepad++)
BlitzPlus
IE7
MaxIDE
WinRAR
MS Paint
Notepad

- Firefox3
- Adium
- Word
- Photoshop
- Dashboard

That's about it as far as my Mac is concerned.

- Visual Studio
- Expression Web
- Firefox 3 (now liking chrome)
- BlitzMax with some third party modules + BLIde
- Photoshop CS
- Notepad
- Windows Mail (on vista)
- Thunderbird (on XP)
- Microsoft Office

Opera
Putty
Rainlendar
Launchy
Notepad++
Thunderbird
Firefox
Cygwin
Xampp
Vnc
NXClient

- Visual Studio Express (C#, C++ Editions, DirectX SDK)
- Internet Explorer
- BlitzMax + Project Studio
- Windows Mail
- MS Office
- Photoshop (CS2)
- XAMPP
- Windows Media Player
- Notepad

They are the main ones.

Dabz

I only user Thunderbird, but rarely use my old email account - everything is online now.

Daily use at home:
- emacs
- a web browser - any will do, except Internet Exploder
- Manga Studio EX
- Rhythmbox
- mplayer
- LAMP

Plus every now and then:
- CelTX
- InkScape
- GIMP

Firefox
Thunderbird
XM_Play
divx player (codecs)
Total Commander
Artweaver
X-chat
XP-Antispy
Power Archiver
OpenOffice
Renoise
Codeblocks
Ideal
Blitzbasic
Blitzmax

Thats what i need to start.

No, it doesn't. It tries hard to be like Ritlabs The Bat! but falls short in almost every regard. But the worst part is that the different platform versions do not even have compatible mail archives. Just try to get an email database from the Windows version running with the Mac version of Thunderbird. Good luck!

I wish the folks at Ritlabs would port their program to OS X, but unfortunately it's written in Delphi, so it just won't (can't) happen.

Firefox
Delphi
Photoshop
Paint Shop Pro
Notepad
Calc
FileZilla
VLC
AVG
Sygate firewall
WAMP
Plus a few apps I've written

Eh? You're having a go at Thunderbird for not being compatible across platforms, and then you praise a program that's only on one platform?

Works fine between Linux and Windows, so I can't imagine why the Mac version would be any different.

Must haves:

Blitz 3D
Google Talk
IDEal
KoolMoves
Resource Hacker
The GIMP
WavePad
Winamp

Frequently used:

MS Word
MS Paint
NotePad
Wings 3D

Forced to use by parents' stubbornness:

Internet Explorer 7 (AKA Windows Internet Explorer)
Norton Internet Security (UGH!!!!!)

Really want:

Adobe Flash CS3
Mozilla FireFox (or perhaps Google Chrome??? Hmm...)
ANYTHING other than Norton!!!

And finally, online website services I couldn't live without:

THE BLITZ FORUM!!! W00T!!!
DeviantART
The FlashKit forum
GameDev.net
GMail
Newgrounds
The TrackMania Forum

I guess that about sums it up. ^_^

I like XNview too, much nicer than acdsee which doesn't work with DDS compressed textures. So if doing game dev acdsee just doesn't cut it these days.

Irfanview is ok, but XNview just seems more intuitive with a better UI, easier path browsing and the drag and drop from thumbs to other windows and apps like photoshop, 3dsmax objects etc makes it dead simple to use in a multitasking environment.

It also gets updated a lot more frequently.

The best thing about ACDSee is that it throws large (digital camera) images around like they're nothing. Everything else is just painfully slow in comparison. It also has a very strong database system which is great if you have a ton of images. Plus, it has a really solid batch system (better than anything else I've seen), a nice image comparison tool, and it can view images inside of zips... which is a serious help if you have texture packs with each image seperately zipped up inside of a larger zip.

XNview was just too unstable for me. I agree it sounds good for DDS textures, but for a gallery of photo images ACDSee rocks.

yeah, the database is probably useful if you are organized enough to flag it. XNview is very similar otherwise. Can browse images in zips and rar files too.

I hadn't noticed any stability problems with XNview myself. Acdsee always seemed slow, but maybe that's my single core cpu talking.

I have a single core...

Careful, Reactor; don't overheat... XD

Heh. :)