REAL PLAYER!!!
Just kidding 
My desert island apps would HAVE to be Winamp (2.xx, not the crappy 3.xx version) and Agent newsreader. Oh, and Opera of course. Photoshop is fun, Cooledit Pro comes in handy, but I couldn’t get by without Winamp, Agent and Opera. I just downloaded Media Player Classic, and I think I’m gonna like that a lot too.
Jon
I used to be a support technician for a QuarkXTension, so I have to agree. QuarkXPress was great (don’t know anything about the new versions as I bowed out at 4.2).
But that was work, for play I am seriously addicted to Snood.
Rainlender (with shadow skin) , if you want to change your wallpaper into a calender.
MasterCook - I love to cook, collect recipes, and am on WW - this does the nutrition calculations for me, I keep the recipes on my hard drive (can clear out magazines), can organize by recipe type, can search by recipe ingredient, can print out a copy of a recipe and not be upset when I spill something on it because another copy is just a click away, plus the software version I have came with several years of Cooking Light annual recipes. Makes me very, very happy.
Susan
I’m going to go for something that I use every day at work.
Hyperion Pillar
It’s a budgeting/planning software. When I started this job, we budgeted using Excel spreadsheets with links galore. There was always something that didn’t roll up properly or a link that would break. Now we load the data into Pillar, and it’s just a big, wonderful budget database.
It has made my job infinitely easier on so many levels, that I honestly don’t know how I did it without it.
And I’ve got to agree with Susan that MasterCook is great, but unfortunately I’m not using it as much as I should be. I’m considering getting the latest version that was just released, since what I’ve got I bought used off of eBay and it’s really old.
At risk of being flamed to death, I have an addition…
Windows XP Pro.
<hides behind credenza>
Seriously. I haven’t crashed it yet, and it’s almost creepy how it knows how to handle so many previously difficult tasks.
It keeps itself up-to-date. When the msblast worm was doing its bit last week, I didn’t have to do anything.
Plug in a digital camera, and a box pops up asking if I want to save, edit or print the pictures. No hair-pulling terror of driver installation needed.
Pop a wifi card into a laptop and get a similar painless installation.
I haven’t been able to break it yet.
IrfanView.
Small, free, completely self-contained (so no DLLs get overwritten or registery changes are made), you can use it to look at pretty much any graphics format out there, convert between most graphics formats, batch convert, create slideshows, and with plugins (also free) see and/or listen to most of the standard video and audio files. It’ll also do some minor graphics editing, but it’s really set up look at stuff.
I’ve introduced this wonderful little app to lots of people, and everyone has LOVED it.
EverQuest. It’s an application for sucking up enormous portions of your life and making you really, really care, and almost be willing to pay real cash money for, items that don’t actually exist.
Hey, you asked!
Proxomitron.
I’ve been using this program about 2 years now and I haven’t seen a popup since I installed it. I hardly ever have to scan for adware or spyware anymore. I love how it’s self-contained and doesn’t mess with the registry in any way. It’s also easily customizable.
PS Thanks Morgyn. I’ve been looking for a program like that for a while. The fact it’s self-contained just makes it even better. I knew there would be some good recommendations in this thread.
Now if I can just find a free program that’ll list all the files on my computer in order of size…
Ulead Media Studio Pro. I used to try to make Adobe Premier work for me, but the summabitch just doesn’t do what i want it to. MSP beats the bejesus out of Premerie.
I also like Warcraft 2 b/c the A.I. was very easy and maps were easy to make and changing characters’ stats was cool too.
As soon as AIM gets pounce abilities (like GAIM) then i’ll add it to my list.
If you’re running Windows, you already have a program like that, don’t you? Type . in the search box, then arrange by size. Or was there something else you wanted to do besides list them?
I’ll name a few of my favorites (with preference given to free programs):
[ul]
[li]Xnews - freeware newsreader (Usenet, a.k.a. the newsgroups) that’s quite suitable for both text and binaries.[/li][li]VirtualDub - a freeware godsend for those who like to capture and encode video.[/li][li]AVIsynth - Terrific frameserver, freeware of course, and with lots of good, free filters, both by the author and by third parties.[/li][li]Normalizer - A very fast, very small, and very good command-line program for normalizing WAV files. Freeware.[/li][li]Asterisk Key - Ever have a situation where you entered a password into a program, the program saved it, then a little while down the road you realize you need it for something else and all you see in the program is a row of asterisks? Well, this program uncovers the password underneath those buggers. It’s saved my ass a few times.[/li][li]AVIcodec - Again, freeware. This handy program will tell you what codec your AVI movie is using and where to get it if you don’t already have it installed.[/li][li]Agnitum Outpost Firewall - This one has a Pro version with more features, but their free version does the job nicely for me. The layout is more organized and less ugly than ZoneAlarm. Like ZA, it makes programs ask to access the Internet.[/li][li]GTA Vice City Mod Manager - I love this sucker. It makes inserting real cars (and some not-so-real ones, like the Batmobile, a flying saucer, and the hovering DeLorean from Back to the Future 2) into Vice City a breeze. Instead of editing configuration files by hand, all you have to do is pick the car you want from the list and click “Install.”[/li][/ul]
Final Draft 6. I just finished my first screenplay. I’d tried writing them before, but Final Draft takes care of ALL kinds of weird screenplay formatting stuff. And it handles quite a bit of the routine typing by hitting Tab and Enter. I always think “Why can’t Word be this good? I wish word processors worked like this.”
I was a card carrying Microsoft-basher, but I am going to have to agree. I’ve spent the last 6 months rolling it out to end users at work, and it hasn’t always been pretty. But for my own personal use at home, it’s just awesome. Personal faves: fast-user switching, and autodetecting of network changes (I swap routers, and XP renews its IP address! How cool is that?) I’ve been spending less and less time playing around with linux as I find that there isn’t anything that I do that I can’t do with XP (which wasn’t the case with previous versions of windows).
I’d also give a nod to Dreamweaver. It handles simple webpages or massive complex sites with equal aplomb, is easy to use, and has every feature I could ever want, and then about a dozen times as many that I don’t know anything about. And none of those get in the way of using the ones I do use. What more can you ask for?
For web browser, it has to be Firebird (formerly phoenix). It may be beta, but it crashes far less than IE does, and handles every page I’ve come across. Oh, and by the way, what’s a pop-up ad?
But the top of my list hast to be GroupWise, which is light years ahead of any other email system I’ve ever seen. If the client were easier to use as a POP3 client without connecting to a GroupWise server, I’d never use anything else.
JPEGView and The Tilery, neither of which has been ported to OS X, unfortunately. The Dock and Preview just don’t have the same… spunk.
I miss AppleWorks, too. I guess I’ll have to break down and buy it.
Another vote for Safari and iTunes (and the Music Store).