It halves the number of clicks to switch playback devices. It’s great.
Sadly, a large number of the good/needed plugins (if you’re a developer) are starting to charge as well. It ends up becoming a fairly pricey text editor, when something like VIM can do everything Sublime can for free. Yes, I realize VIM isn’t a suitable alternative for many :) If the price/nag screens don’t bother you, then I certainly agree it is the best editor around.
haven’t really caught up with the latest developments, Sublime Text used to be quite affordable and the plugins were easily accessible a year ago. Oh well, I guess it didn’t pay the bills for those guys.
As for Vim, I unfortunately can’t learn any new special move combos after years of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat ;)
the way I set it up for multiple audio outputs is much simpler: when I have an app that works best on headphones (e.g. Winamp), a utility switches the output automatically every time that app is launched. No clicks.
That’s why I rarely need to switch manually, hence don’t mind doing it the old fashioned way.
I’m curious about the app, but that’s not my use case. It’s not a per-app selection, it’s ‘are the kids awake or asleep and is this child-appropriate’. :)
well, it’s my own app actually :)
That link is dead for the moment, you can download it from here temporarily:
I see your point about the manual cycling. There’s also this utility for the same thing but with keyboard hotkey cycling and a nice Mac OSX style overlay:
http://heilnizar.deviantart.com/art/PlaybackDevice-Audio-Output-Switch-285591834
Appears I may have overstated the plugin situation. There are commercial plugins (the Subversion one is the one that came to mind), but it isn’t “many”.
I don’t know how relevant it is for Vista/7/8, but I’ve found Unlocker to be very handy on XP. Whenever you want to move or delete a file or directory and find that you can’t because it’s “currently in use”, this freeware program releases it and let’s you do so.
Any Video Converter is the best simple (and free) video conversion program I’ve found so far. It has a number of presets for mobile devices as well which is helpful
FoxitReader is a nice, free, lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader (which I find often annoys me with its constant updates and shit).
Mp3Gain is a free program that lets you normalize the volume of your mp3 collection so you don’t have to adjust your speakers whenever certain quiet or loud songs come on.
7-Zip is an excellent archive program.
LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice I believe, and it’s the best free office suite available to my knowledge.
The GIMP is a nice, lightweight, open source alternative to Photoshop.
Recuva and PC Inspector File Recovery are the two file recovery programs I generally keep around.
TuxGuitar is an open source tab editor and player and the obvious alternative to the paid programs you see Ultimate Guitar bombarding you with advertisements for.
Audacity is a great open source audio editor. I mostly use it for fixing clicks and pops, but it’s a lot more powerful than that.
Foobar2000 is my music player of choice. It’s very lightweight by default, but it is extremely modifiable, and has a great community that’s constantly working on it.
And while we’re on the topic, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention OldVersion.com which is a repository for old versions of software, which is very handy if you find that newer versions of your favorite programs have been converted to adware, nagware, or just bloated piles of shit.
Foobar2000 was my music manager of choice for the last 4 years but since I switched to MusicBee, I have never looked back. FooBar2000’s lack of device sync option let it down for me.
It is kind of sad that the Old Old Old hard drive space visualization tool (whatever they are called), SpaceMonger, is still the best, even though it hasn’t been updated in probably 7 years. Space sniffer does come close though.
Paint.NET - Easy to use but fairly powerful painting program for Windows (free). I use this instead of GIMP. I’m a developer not an artist, dammit. (Free)
Fingerprint - Emulates AirPrint for iOS devices and routes print jobs to your real printers. ($20)
AnyDVD HD - Removes DVD/Bluray protection on the fly. Great for people like me who rip their entire collection to a server. Very expensive though (119 EUR for lifetime updates), wait for a 25% sale. Has a patch for revised bluray protections every couple of weeks.
Flux - Reduces the amount of blue on your display at night, making it much easier on your eyes. I use this on my Jailbroken iPhone too. (Free)
TweakUAC - Easy access to override default UAC settings and set a ‘quiet’ mode, where it suppresses most UAC messages. (Free)
WinMerge - Most developers know about this, but lets you do a side by side comparison of files, merging back and forth. (Free)
Well after trying it out I’m definitely a convert. Thanks for the tip!
Living in an old house with lots of wooden sash windows that are often painted shut, this is my favorite windows tool:
+1 on MusicBee. I don’t know why it doesn’t get more recognition - beats out winamp/mediamonkey by far.
+1 on 7-Zip, foobar2000, Paint.NET and Sublime Text. FoxitReader is a pretty good alternative to Acrobat but something made me decide to switch to SumatraPDF some time ago (can’t remember what it was – ads maybe?).
I’ll add Q-Dir as a great Explorer alternative. View multiple windows, each window with multiple tabs. I use it for dev projects where I need immediate access to 2-4 specific file directories. It lets me save “states” to shortcut files so that I can instantly launch the one or another group of directories depending on project. And it’s free.
I prefer DiskSpaceFan. Free version works just fine.
I can’t make sense out of the radial graph thing in that pic you posted. Sticking with WinDirStat. Still, it’s good to know about alternatives, thanks for mentioning DiskSpaceFan.
cygwin beats all :D
If you like radial displays, JDiskReport is also pretty good (and omni-platform).
Ugh, it uses Java.