Products I believe in

I have dozens of applications installed on all of my PCs, but there are a core set of applications that I truly believe in because they have made my life easier over and over again.

This article lists out a few of them - one's that are on my mind right now.

UltraEdit - far and above the most valuable application in my arsenal. It's a text editor. Something that in a lot of cases i could just as easily have used notepad. But the capabilities of this application are so extensive that I end up using it on pretty much a daily basis. I even purchased lifetime upgrades for it.

Dreamweaver - Now owned by Adobe, I am concerned for the future of this application. They at one point had a strong competitor to dreamweaver, but even adobe finally admitted it was better to buy the company than to compete with it. I have my problems with Dreamweaver, but as far as web editors are concerned, this is the shiznit.

Firefox - far and away the best web browser out there - largely due to the vast amount of plugins people have developed for it. My favorite plugins - the web developer toolbar and the color picker.

Corel Draw - there are photoshop fanatics all over the place - and I agree that photoshop is a pretty strong product, but for vector drawing, you can't beat the ease of Corel Draw. I could be biased because I've been using it since version 3. I can't say much for Corel the company though. They've caused me to look at competitive products often because of the dissatisfied taste they've left in my mouth.

Putty - it's free, it's stable, and it never fails. In fact, all of this guys application rock.

Trillian - I don't use instant messaging nearly as much as I used to, but that's because I got too stinking busy. A solid product that sometimes lacks support for some advanced features of messaging apps, but they have their own plugin architecture that extends the capabilities of messaging apps as well.

Office - I've tried to get over to open office. It didn't work. A great solution for linux, but Microsoft hit the nail on the head with Office. They even bought out Visio and added it to the mix. One of the main reasons Bill Gates is so rich that he can hire people to buff his dog to a mirror shine and nobody will say a word to him about it. (other than "Holy Cow! I can see my face in your dog!")

Copernic Desktop Search - forget google. Copernic is way better. Google may have added support for alternative file formats, but the results are still organized like search engine results. Copernic's results format is better, the document format support is better (or at least was), and it behaves like a windows application should. I own and believe in copernic's other products, but I have yet to use them as much as I really should.

Safari - Safari is an online library. They have all of the O'reilly books - the good books with the animals on the cover, and a significant amount of books from other publishers as well - all tech related. When I started, I think I used it daily for a couple of weeks and then forgot about it. Then one day, I needed a little help with Perl and couldn't find a decent resource for what I needed on the web. So I went to Safari and sure enough I found exactly what I needed inside a couple of minutes. I've been using it very frequently ever since, and now I've even upgraded to a 20 book Safari Max account.