Mark Geller

Earlier this week I mentioned I store most of my files and data in the cloud now, and that, when my computer crashed recently, all I had to do was restore my OS and reinstall most of my desktop apps and all was good to go.

As I was writing that post it occurred to me it might be somewhat helpful to list what desktop apps those were and why they were worth reinstalling. So here is a list of most of the desktop apps I use and why:

• Google Chrome (browser) – I started using Chrome while I was still at Google, mainly to see how it worked and make sure my product was compatible with it. After a few days, I quickly became addicted. For me, Chrome is the browser of choice because it is noticeably faster, almost never crashes and if so does it gracefully. Also, Chrome’s innovative design uses less screen real estate at the top, so it shows more of the web page; being able to drag the tabs at the top of the browser is great, as is being able to drag a tab to create  new window or back to the main window. The ‘Find’ feature is superb and overall the usability is awesome. Very infrequently I encounter a web site that is somewhat incompatible with Chrome (maybe once a month), however for me this is a price that is easily worth paying.
• Skype - My phone service with AT&T/iPhone at home is fairly spotty, so I use Skype for most of my phone calls, which costs $2.95 per month for unlimited calls anywhere in the U.S. Also great for IMing with friends and colleagues.
• Jing (from TechSmith) – This is a great free app for making screen grabs (cutting out pieces of the screen and saving them as images) as well as screencast videos up to 5 minutes long.
• KlickFu Alpha Version – This is the app we are developing now to play instant games and apps on the desktop–more details coming soon!
• Adobe Photoshop Elements – Great program for creating lightweight illustrations and mockups, can also be useful for photo-editing, although I do not do much of that.
• Microsoft Office – As I mentioned last time, I use MS Office mainly to open and work with files sent to me by others (usually attorneys). Otherwise, I use Google Docs to create new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
• iTunes – Gotta have for sync’ing my iPhone and playing around with developing some new apps for fun. I have not gotten to the point where I buy or download movies or music with iTunes.
• Norton Internet Security – I am still not necessarily convinced the benefit of using standard anti-virus software justifies the cost and computing overhead, although in any case, I needed install NIS to test with KlickFu so it was a no-brainer.

Other:

• DropBox – This is tray app for the DropBox service I described earlier
• Core FTP Lite – Great free FTP client
• Firefox – For the few web sites that have issues with Chrome–also I want to start to learn to use Firebug, which is a great web development tool that runs best on Firefox
• 7-zip – Utility for zipping/unzipping .exe files that cannot be sent using the standard Zip program
• MSN Messenger – I have a few die-hard friends who refuse to use anything else
• Python, wxPython, TortoiseHg, HTML-Kit – Development tools for building Python apps and web sites