Software/Apps You Love

In My Humble Opinion
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Confession: I am a giant freakin’ productivity app geek. I’m on a constant search for apps to improve efficiency, but I’m really picky about the quality of the interface. I like them to be easy to use and visually slick. Here are my favorites so far:

You Need a Budget - Recently overhauled. I’ve been using this budgeting software for years and it has saved us thousands and thousands of dollars. The new version isn’t as feature-heavy as the original YNAB 4 (which you can still buy) because I think they were in a push to get it out before Christmas, but I overall like the feel of the overhaul and it’s still better than anything else out there I’ve tried, including Mint. They are adding new features to the new version all the time so I’m confident it will get to YNAB 4 complexity eventually. The best part about YNAB is the excellent customer service and free webinars, it’s not just an app but a whole financial philosophy that I think is really useful. If you’re wondering where the hell your money is going, YNAB is for you.

Scrivener - Designed for writing and organizing and publishing large manuscripts, like novels and dissertations. It’s $50 and as a writer, I would pay $5,000 for it. I’m not even kidding. I’m a Scrivener evangelist but recognize this is a niche product so I’ll leave it at that unless someone wishes for me to elaborate.

Nozbe - Not my current productivity app of choice, but I used it routinely for a couple years and I think it’s one of the best productivity apps out there. Based on the GTD task management philosophy, nice sleek interface and integrated with virtually every other app you might use regularly such as gmail and Dropbox, you can attach files to tasks and so on.

Moo.Do for Mac - I’m test-driving this right now. So far I love it. It has a very simple interface - kind of like Work Flowy in that it’s an infinite nesting concept, but better because it coordinates with Google Calendar and Gmail and includes an agenda view.

Fantastical 2 for Mac - This is just a really pretty calendar app. I’m not a fan of the Google Calendar interface and this cleans it right up, also makes scheduling events easier, and most important of all, it’s pretty.

Brain Focus Productivity Timer for Android - Very simple, free app that allows you to measure time spent on various tasks. You can custom set the default work and break times and you can get stats on time spent in each category for any date period. It helps me stay on task throughout the week.

Okay, there’s a start. Tell me about apps you love!

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OmniFocus for Mac OS X and iOS.

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Notepad++ An amazing plain text editor. Not sure how I’ve survived this long without it.

WinDirStat Analyzes your drives and tells you what is taking up space on them. Makes it super easy to clean up disk space, especially if you share a computer with someone else.

PureText Simplest piece of software I use every day. Removes all formatting from any text on your clipboard before you paste it. Incredibly handy!
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PowerToy Calc** A scientific calculator for Windows. Came out with the XP Power Toys package and I’ve been able to keep it working all the way through Windows 10. So much better than the regular calculator and I don’t even use half of the functions.
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VLC Media Player** Another thing that I don’t use all of the functions of, but it plays everything. Even incomplete files! It powers through slow network connections too.

4

**WinDirStat **is bloody awesome and has saved my servers from choking to death on their own crap many a time

NotePad ++ (in conjunction with the ‘Compare’ plugin) is very nice - although I don’t like the remembered files feature and have had to hunt it down and turn it off several times after version upgrades.

**Inkscape **is a very nice vector graphics editor and I have used it a lot

Microsoft OneNote is very useful to me - I jot something down on my PC and it’s automatically available on my tablet, my phone, online from any computer in my OneDrive, etc.

PRGrep - a Windows GUI for Linux-like grep function - searching rapidly for files by a specific bit of their content. (Windows has a file native file contents search, but it sucks)

**Zero Assumption Recovery **- One of the few remaining file recovery utilities that still allows you to recover deleted pictures from flash media (the others tell you what you might recover, if you pay). Enabled me to identify the dumbass workplace thief that stole a high capacity SD card and tried to cover his tracks by replacing it with his own, smaller-capacity card. I recovered his selfie from the media.

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I use Evernote for personal note-taking, and OneNote for work stuff. Of the two, I much prefer Evernote.

I’m also a big fan of ToDoist, which is a great app for managing tasks and projects. It’s available on every device known to man, plus a web interface.

There’s a point where tasks become projects, and Trello is good for managing simple projects.

I love productivity apps. Playing with them is far more fun than actually doing stuff.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Filebot Renamer - It grabs TV episode names from a database, changes the format to what I specified using fairly comprehensive rules, and does it reliably and in seconds.

EditPad - My text editor of choice. A simple notepad that has the features I need and not much more.

Daum Potplayer - My favourite media player. Better than VLC and prettier too.

AMP Font Viewer - Lets me view all my fonts, of which I have hundreds, displayed in different sizes and multiple columns, and with a text phrase I can specify.

Photoshop - You may have heard of this app. You make pictures with it. I use it almost every day.

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No Wait - App allows me to see the wait time at participating restaurants nearby and, if necessary, get in line remotely. Also allows you to check your place in line at any time.

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:eek: I’ll have to check this one out.

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Neu.annotate, for reading and marking up PDFs on the iPad. I prefer it to other similar apps, it’s easier, for me.

Byword, for writing, a plain, no frills text editing app.

Things, for project planning, but lately, I’ve gone back to paper.

MarineTraffic tells me what ships are where, the type of ship, and often has detailed info and pictures. I can look onto a harbour at home, and it’s fun to see learn more about the vessels I see.

10

:eek:

I guess I haven’t kept up my shareware payments… granted it was nice in its day but it never occurred to me it was still an indispensable tool I should keep updated!

:smiley:

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Can you explain to me what one would use something like this for? What’s the advantage of such a thing over, say, opening a Word doc?

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Word processor is to text editor what food processor is to knife. A word processor does some fancy things well but it is most definitely not an all-purpose device for handling text.

You can open a one-million-word text document in less time than it takes Microsoft Word to oblige you wiht the “Open File…” dialog, do a search in it for a character string and have it return to you a list of every occurrence of that char string and enough of the surrounding text to understand the context at a glance, and it does it very very fast.

Also blistering fast compared to a word processor for doing Replace operations, and can take complex instructions for the replace.

For coding, text editors usually will highlight different parts of the code (they recognize most common coding languages) so you can see the syntax visually as you type it.

I’m a Mac person so I use TextWrangler for simple stuff and BBEdit for the bigger projects. When I type a trailing right parenthesis or bracket, e.g. ), the corresponding LEFT symbol ( flashes so I see that I haven’t left one out in between; or if there’s no match, it flashes the whole screen momentarily to warn me.

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Well it’s plain text so you can use it to edit anything that’s NOT a Word doc such as .html, .php, .aspx, .cshtml, .js, .css etc etc (Web site files, basically) And most of those are color coded which means it makes your tags different color than text and that helps you read it better, and spot errors.

I use it to view .csv files because it’s just raw data (without the frame of Excel) which is what a machine would see and that helps me quickly and easily see where formatting errors might be.

It has awesome find/replace capabilities including regex so I can easily do stuff like search for a pattern and replace it, or replace line breaks with commas or whatever.

It has an HTMLTidy feature which helps when trying to clean up other people’s HTML (cuz mine is never messy, yaknow).

It also has a tag pairing feature which is handy for HTML because you can click on your beginning tag and see where the end tag is, which helps trap errors.

It has good line and space functions which help you do quick replacing like “delete all trailing spaces” and stuff like that. More useful than you’d think.

Documents within it are tabbed, so it makes for an awesome actual notepad. I keep it open on my desktop and keep a couple documents in there with text I often have to copy/paste elsewhere. Or if I need to save a bit of text I just save it in there. It actually auto-saves new documents now so even if you close the program without saving it will bring back whatever was open previously the next time you open it.

It’s just such a happy little program. It does so much stuff that I need. I use it every day, and put it on every machine I use.

14

Interesting.

I’m trying to determine if this would be of use to me. When I’m dealing with text it’s usually a grant proposal or a book-length document and I typically use MS Word and Scrivener, respectively. Formatting is key for grant proposals and Scrivener is critical for organizing, storyboarding, outlining, editing, and exporting long texts into a format of my choosing (docX, .mobi, PDF, etc.)

I don’t know if a plain text editor is more of a coder’s tool or something I would find use for as an all-purpose writer.

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For anything large or nicely-formatted in the “humans need to read this” way, stick with Word and Scrivener. NotePad++ is mostly for us geeks, who need to quickly edit text files and don’t much care what they look like to humans.

My vote:

Agent Ransack: basically a UI for grep, but it’s soooooo fast. I loves it.

Launchy: In full disclosure, I’m not using this much, but the rest of my team luuuuurrrvvs it and I’m trying to train myself to remember it’s there.

Oh, I almost forgot, Slack. I’m not sure how I ever got anything done that required collaboration without it.

16

Now THIS I could use. I have something similar for Mac called Found. Lightning fast and can access cloud storage files too.

Then there’s Albert. Apparently Albert has allll kinda macro functionality but what I use it for mostly is opening any app I want with a few keystrokes. It’s also an insta-calculator.

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My Fitness Pal. When I decided to lose weight about a year and a half ago, I searched in the app store for an app to keep track of calories. I don’t recall what, besides it being free, made this one stand out from the others, but I chose it and began using it consistently. Forty pounds later, I still use it every day. It makes deciding on a daily calorie allowance and monitoring intake about as easy as it can possibly be. In over a year of daily use, it has had nutrition and calorie information on every chain restaurant menu item and bar-coded grocery item I have looked up.

18

Excellent choice. I use this on the web and on my phone.

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I’ve heard great things about this. Is it just a calorie tracker or does it manage daily goals as well? Like right now in my life I’m nowhere in the neighborhood of nearly ready to start restricting my calories. I just achieved ‘‘eating regular meals.’’ Like my next step would be making more of those meals home-cooked and less of them eating out. Drinking more water. Taking a few supplements.

20

Found is apparently no longer active.

But Alfred for Mac can now apparently do the same thing - locate files including cloud storage directories like GoogleDrive or Dropbox.