Top Tools for 2012

Everyone else does a ‘top tools’ list, so I thought I’d join in.

Before I do though, I must defer to the most excellent Scott Hanselman’s 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. I regularly go here to check out what I’m missing out on.

These don’t include things like Windows7, Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio etc. Everyone knows you have to use them (well, for .NET anyway). These are more the “developer’s choice” selection of everything else that makes up your toolkit.

Oh, and another thing. Lots of the tools listed below are included in Ninite. Go and have a look. Basically, you select what you want to install, then download a automated install program which silently install all those applications. Takes no time, no mindless clicking, it’s brilliant for new installs.

In no particular order…

Spotify. I listen to a lot of different music, and like experimenting with different genres. Being able to do so instantly and legally, from anywhere, is brilliant. Get Spotify Premium, it’s only £10 a month, and you’ll save that in your first day if you listen all day at work.

Notepad++. If you develop you need a good text editor you’re happy with and that lets you perform magic tricks with text files. You may not get on with Notepad++, but I do.

Paint.Net. I don’t do massive amount of graphics work, but when I need to crop, rotate, layer and otherwise mess with photos, Paint.Net has everything I need, and it’s free.

CCleaner. This has been around ages. I have absolutly no scientific stats which show that it makes your computer cleaner, faster and a better place to work – but it feels like it does.

MyDefrag (previously JKDefrag). See above.

Evernote. You can use any note-recording software you want, but try and use something. It helps ease your mind knowing you don’t have to try and remember everything.

FastStone PhotoResizer. Bulk resize, squish, rename, watermark or otherwise mess with images. Good to have in the toolkit for when some marketing dude gives you 3TB of TIFF and wants them on the web.

Fiddler2. Excellent tool for monitoring HTTP traffic from your machine. Helps debug awkward communication problems.

FoxitReader. Faster than Acrobat Reader, seems to work just as well. There’s probably things it can’t do but I don’t do much with PDFs and I’ve not come across any problems.

MagicDisk. Easiest way I’ve found of mounting ISOs.

SearchEverything. I don’t use this very often, so I don’t keep it running 24/7. I don’t mind waiting for it to rebuild its cache on first run, because once it’s done, it can find anything instantly.

DropBox. Either as a handy mini-back of important files (or files that haven’t made it to backup yet) or as a way of sharing files across multiple computers, you need some sort of in-cloud storage solution. There are others, but DropBox gives you 2GB free and has a nice tool to keep it all synchronised.

TrueCrypt. If you have, ahem… sensitive material, or if you really do have sensitive material, then have a look at TrueCrypt. It creates a new drive volume which you can drop stuff into, then encrypts it into a file. Reverse to decrypt. As of May 2014, TrueCrypt stopped being maintained and now has unfixed security issues. There’s a great write up of alternatives to TrueCrypt on this Cloudward.net page – The 5 Best TrueCrypt Alternative Services.

7-Zip. You need to have some way of extracting a variety of different archives, and you need to be able to compress files properly, and fast. The built-in Windows compression seems to have some issues, and can only work on ZIPs. 7-zip is free and fast.

WinSCP. FTP tool, with support for scripting and embedding into batch files. Saved my life recently.

LogMeIn. This has been a God-Send for diagnosing problem’s on Mum’s computer (200 miles away). Closer to home, sometimes it’s just really useful to be able to jump on a machine at home from the office in order to start something running, downloading or converting.

Finally…

This isn’t really a ‘tool’, but it’s a bit of fun and may interest you:

Wakoopa. Keeps a track of what programs you use and for how long, then charts it for you. I display a badge for this on the homepage, and you can see more information about my usage on my Wakoopa Profile Page.