# What is your favorite piece of software?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [August 17, 2003, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689 "2003-08-17T01:33:46Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@wakimika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wakimika)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/1 "2003-08-17T01:33:46Z")
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.
So what is your favorite software?
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### Author:  [@ParentalAdvisory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParentalAdvisory)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/2 "2003-08-17T01:58:26Z")
For creating beats at low cost, I’m going to have to say FruityLoops, and just about all the SoundForge products. I’ll throw in CoolEdit too.
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### Author:  [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/3 "2003-08-17T02:16:38Z")
Borland’s C++ builder was a good fave until I let my programming skills (and interest) deteriorate.
I enjoyed the demo versions of Truespace 3 and 5 while they lasted.
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### Author:  [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/4 "2003-08-17T02:52:07Z")
I’ve been using Paint Shop Pro quite a bit lately.
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### Author:  [@Trigonal\_Planar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trigonal_Planar)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 2:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/5 "2003-08-17T02:57:04Z")
ICQ
Get 2000b. No other IM software even comes close.
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### Author:  [@wakimika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wakimika)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/6 "2003-08-17T03:14:40Z")
I forgot to mention that the Apple apps are awesome: Itunes especially, and Safari is an excellent browser.
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### Author:  [@Some\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Some_Guy)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/7 "2003-08-17T03:41:52Z")
[Emacs](http://gnu.mirror.widexs.nl/software/emacs/emacs.html).
What other piece of software has a [religion](http://www.stallman.org/saint.html) devoted to it?
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### Author:  [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/8 "2003-08-17T07:30:20Z")
Tossup between iMovie and Safari – I don’t use iMovie as much, but when I do, it’s just _way_ too much fun. 😉
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### Author:  [@Crusoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crusoe)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 8:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/9 "2003-08-17T08:29:16Z")
It would either have to be the [Opera 7](http://www.opera.com/) browser, a genuinely fast and full-featured alternative to IE, or Cerulean Studios’ [Trillian](http://www.trillian.cc/trillian/index.html), an IM package that manages Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, ICQ and IRC through a single discreet interface, and also provides mail notification.
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### Author:  [@yosemite](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yosemite)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 9:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/10 "2003-08-17T09:23:05Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@that.sound.again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/that.sound.again)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/11 "2003-08-17T10:44:26Z")
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](http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?reaktor4_us). 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…
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### Author:  [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 10:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/12 "2003-08-17T10:51:52Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@New\_Improved\_Scott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Improved_Scott)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/13 "2003-08-17T13:20:17Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@LucysLogic101](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LucysLogic101)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/14 "2003-08-17T14:56:05Z")
Corel Draw 7 and Corel Photo-Paint (give me 5 minutes, i can make you into a freakin supermodel)
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### Author:  [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/15 "2003-08-17T15:06:56Z")
MS Works 4.5. It’s basically the lite version of MS’ more expensive Access, Word, & Excel.
I use the word processor make CD/DVD booklets and disc labels. It works a lot better than Roxio since I’m able to tweak the settings.
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### Author:  [@Flymaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flymaster)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2003, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/16 "2003-08-17T15:45:11Z")
The Google Toolbar for IE, especially now that it has popup blocking.
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### Author:  [@keithnmick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/keithnmick)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2003, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/17 "2003-08-18T12:25:01Z")
[www.rhino3d.com](http://www.rhino3d.com)
Great nurbs based surfacer for a fraction of the cost of Alias. I wish all my applications shared it’s interface.
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### Author:  [@UnwrittenNocturne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UnwrittenNocturne)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2003, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/18 "2003-08-18T14:49:37Z")
I think I have to pick two:
\*\*Cubase SX \*\*- have been a longtime Cubase user and love SX to bits
**Propellerheads Reason** - another must for musicians
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### Author:  [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2003, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/19 "2003-08-18T18:57:21Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [August 19, 2003, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-piece-of-software/195689/20 "2003-08-19T00:16:35Z")
I’ve been using [Audacity](http://audacity.sourceforge.net) to mix some audio and it really is a fantastic app, made more so by being free.
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