To start, I’ll say that the folks at Jelsoft have created a fine piece of software in vbulletin. If you have used bb software from the 80’s to the present, you know how good this boardware is in terms of stability and ease of use. It’s like going from a 1200 baud modem to broadband.
I love a lot of software so I have many runners-up: Adobe makes great stuff from Acrobat to Photoshop and Illustrator. I’m also in love with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. I can’t believe the work I can do with these programs and the final result.
My number one fave? QuarkXpress.
Through all the years of bad customer service, font issues and lagging updates, I still love this app. It is so versatile and just plain fun, that I would never consider moving to InDesign. Thanks but no thanks. Quark rules.
It would either have to be the Opera 7 browser, a genuinely fast and full-featured alternative to IE, or Cerulean Studios’ Trillian, an IM package that manages Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, ICQ and IRC through a single discreet interface, and also provides mail notification.
I like Camino (Mozilla-like OS X browser) quite a bit. I should use Safari more, I know, but my first experience with it (when it was very beta) was unstable, so I’ve stuck with Camino—it’s set up just the way I like.
Couldn’t live without Photoshop.
Couldn’t live without iTunes. Sure, when I’m on my PC I get by with Windows Media Player, but nothing compares to iTunes.
OS X’s Mail. I know, it’s just an email program, and many, many email programs can be configured to a lot of stuff (like spam filtering). But Mail does it so seamlessly and without me having to put in any effort or thought into it. I love it.
Definitely Jeskola Buzz. Beats Fruity Loops hands down in terms of sound quality, number/weirdness of plugins and general obscurity resulting in a large cult following.
Played a bit around with Native Instruments Reaktor. Now there’s a piece of software that can do anything you want in terms of sound generation. So versatile and stable, many musicians/composers just get this and a laptop and off they go to an international career. Plus, it’s fun if you’re into sound synthesis. Beats buying 200 old synth modules in several copies each…
MathCAD is fantastic. It has two major advantages compared to other math packages:
[ul]
[li]Instead of a command-line interface, it has a “worksheet” environment. It’s like a word processor that fills in the right side of every equation you write.[/li][li]It understands units. You can say “(30 mph) * (20 sec) =” and it will correctly come up with 264.224m (or 0.167 mile or 293.333 yd).[/li][/ul]
The units are also useful for checking the results. If the result of a long calculation has the wrong units (say, m[sup]2[/sup] when you were expecting a velocity) you know something is wrong. It’s powerful enough for most of my science work. I just wrote a worksheet which reads plasma temperature and density from a data file and calculate the thermal bremstrahlung and thermal gyrosynchrotron emission. I could have done it in IDL (my preferred environment for heavy-duty data analysis) but then I’d have had to do all the unit conversions manually, and it would have been far more difficult to debug.
Adobe Photoshop. I feel like I can make anything happen by playing with pixels. I’m a huge fan of it, and bought a digital camera not for the pictures so mach as being able to manipulate them in Photoshop afterwards.
It’s not particularly cool, but for my purposes, it’s thoroughly competent and predictable: Dreamweaver. Its site management tools make my life simpler as it knows which files in a website have been changed, (It even tracks file name changes and will update pages that use the renamed file) and it will automagically kick them over to the dispatch/publishing server. DW also makes some pretty nice clean code. About the only way to get cleaner, simpler, quicker code than Dreamweaver is to use Notepad and do it yourself, praying that you’ve spelled everything right.
Before that, I was suffering with FrontPage, which has the power to turn a simple page of text and one or two pictures into a hellish lasagna of tortured HTML. And, its site management tools were all blunt and rusty.
