Shorty Posted July 28, 2008 Share Posted July 28, 2008 Discuss your favourite small applications (those with small filesizes, mostly independent stuff, things with a couple of basic functions) and plugins, for browsers, for your OS, for your media player. Tell me about the things that make your computer - and your life - run easier. Here's a few of mine. I've tried to sum them up in one small sentence first so I don't want to hear any tl;dr! MusicBridge Freeware Music bridge is an application that syncronises iTunes with WMP. Any playlists you make, any files you rename or retag, basically any meta-data can be sync'd from WMP to iTunes, vice versa, or both. I always use iTunes for my music, but when I want to stream music from WMP to my xbox, it's always nice to quickly update WMP with all my playlists and recent music. Shutdown Machine 1.1 Freeware This is a very small, basic app that can shut down your PC at a particular time or in a set number of minutes. There isn't a whole lot of features but it works. I used to use it when I lived with my parents and they didn't like me leaving the PC on all night (I set it to turn off about 20 minutes before they got up). ReNamer Freeware (?) Renames multiple files with a series of options This is a brilliant program. So many options but so easy to use. It is a program for mass-renaming a load of files. You just drag and drop files you want to rename, and then add a 'rule' such as changing all underscores to spaces, capitalising all first letters, adding the band name before each item, removing a certain aspect from each file. It uses all wildcards and is very dynamic. You can view the changes before you hit 'rename' and it's done. Love it. CCleaner Freeware It used to be called 'Crap Cleaner', hence the name. I think most of you know CCleaner but if you don't, it's a great way to clear up your computer (and cover your tracks!). It can dust your registry down and even do things like reset window sizes and sort out your start menu (Windows) CpuZ (?) Gives detailed info on your system. If you're having problems with your PC, this is a great app for detailing information about your system's CPU, mobo and memory which could be very useful to supply experts with. AMIP (Media player plugin) mIRC music integration with awesome search engine. This is a plugin for all major media players (including foobar). Although it's primary function is integration with IRC clients (posting in chat rooms what song you're currently listening to), my personal favourite feature is the search engine it adds to your player. Once installed, you can use Ctrl+J at any time to bring up a search engine for your library/current playlist. Just like the search bar in iTunes or WMP or Winamp Library, except that once you search and hit enter, the window disappears, you continue on the same playlist (rather than staying on your search results) and it doesn't involve navigating to your music player. Perfect when you suddenly decide you want to quickly hear that song. Piclens (Browser plugin) Browse images in a cool way. A thread was made for this plugin a while back. It's basically a flashy way of browsing through images on the web. At the time, I and many others turned our noses up at it. But now.. I love it. It's so intuitive and easy to use, especially with google image results. It's much easier than opening up a bunch of new tabs, then clicking through on each one to see an image which may or may not ever load. Since it first appeared, it's undergone some small but smart changes (for example, when it first appeared, I couldn't believe that once you found a picture you liked, you could neither save it nor navigate quickly to it on the source site, this is no longer an issue). Adblock Plus (Firefox plugin) Blocks ads... For those of you not using this: why. the. hell. not?? I've been using it for years and to put it simply: I can't remember the last time I saw an advert banner or pop-up. At least not in Firefox. It quite simply hides every single advert on the web, based on comprehensive, user submitted filter lists. Pierceive used to offer the only list worth bothering with, but now it comes with the option to use one of several straight out of the box. I love these kinds of apps. They're all sorts of things that I think should be included with your software or operating systems in the first place. So I would love to hear more from you guys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marshmellow Posted July 28, 2008 Share Posted July 28, 2008 CCleaner is definitly a favorite of mine! I use it all of the time on all my computers! Not really sure on what programs are included on this list, but Winrar is a pretty nifty program...for torrents Another lovely program I like to use is Ultramon, actually heard of it off here, but just thought I'd give it a mention. Extremely helpful for multiple displays. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shorty Posted July 28, 2008 Author Share Posted July 28, 2008 Ah yeah! Ultramon. I'm no longer using 2 monitors but when I was, it was a must-have. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dyson Posted July 28, 2008 Share Posted July 28, 2008 Hamachi, virtual VPN. Absolutely brilliant program for playing LAN games over the internet. Useful for, if for some reason, you can't access an online game because..the store forgot to give you an online authentication key. Can also be used to share files, I believe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shino Posted July 29, 2008 Share Posted July 29, 2008 I also use Hamachi and Shutdown Machine, not that frequently though. As for Firefox plugins: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cube Posted July 29, 2008 Share Posted July 29, 2008 Adblock Plus is awesome. The only other Firefox extensions I install are Google Toolbar (but with no toolbar - just a replacement search box) Customize Google, Glasser and Hide Menubar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shino Posted July 29, 2008 Share Posted July 29, 2008 Adblock Plus is awesome. The only other Firefox extensions I install are Google Toolbar (but with no toolbar - just a replacement search box) Customize Google, Glasser and Hide Menubar. Adblock is a necessity, the internet is unbearable without it. What does the Google search box have that the original doesn't? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cube Posted July 29, 2008 Share Posted July 29, 2008 What does the Google search box have that the original doesn't? Probably nothing - although I'm not entirely sure if you can add the "search this site" thing to the normal searchbar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Konfucius Posted July 29, 2008 Share Posted July 29, 2008 All of the following programs are free: I use Spybot and Spyware Blaster to keep a lot of cookies and stuff off my harddrive. Besides "immunizing" the Browser, Spybot also scans for malware. For DVD-burning I like to use Imgburn It's pretty good. The only real letdown is the lack of a direct copy. My downloadmanager of choice is Flashget It has a nice interface and some good functions with mirrors and such. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ike Posted July 29, 2008 Share Posted July 29, 2008 Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. Great for website creators, it shows if the page is valid, shows css errors and javascript errors, loads of debugging tools. And it shows you a ton of information about the page your on, shuch as image alt tags, or javascript used on the page or hidden elements and css classes/id and more! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blackfox Posted July 29, 2008 Share Posted July 29, 2008 ReNamer sounds awesome - I hate it when a whole load of music files are named in the most redic. way and it takes an age to re-name them all, cheers Shorteh! As for me; CCleaner, and audioscrobbler plugins. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Jordan Posted July 30, 2008 Share Posted July 30, 2008 Ultra ID3 tagger isn't free... but the trial is good enough to get a good use of the software. Essentially, its the best tagging software i've ever used. You can rename everything from file names to specific items in a tag. You can auto tag things through %'s... really clever. I actually bought it, it was that good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supergrunch Posted July 30, 2008 Share Posted July 30, 2008 I can think of a couple of Firefox apps - Taboo, which saves tabs and things in a cool way, and Rikaichan, that lets you hover over Japanese words and look them up in a dictionary. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jayseven Posted July 30, 2008 Share Posted July 30, 2008 ReNamer sounds awesome - I hate it when a whole load of music files are named in the most redic. way and it takes an age to re-name them all, cheers Shorteh! As for me; CCleaner, and audioscrobbler plugins. I've always used Musicbrainz to sort out my music files ID3 tagging. Fairly comprehensive database and works fairly fast. All I can think of! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KKOB Posted July 30, 2008 Share Posted July 30, 2008 Transmission - ultra light simple torrent client Last.FM - The recommended radio has turned me on to soo many artists NetNewsWire - Because, where would we be without an RSS reader that syncs with your iPhone so you never read the same article twice by accident AppZapper - Small, effective, and a cute icon! What more could you want?! As for plugins iScrobbler for iTunes and TwitterFox for Firefox are my faves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cube Posted July 31, 2008 Share Posted July 31, 2008 What's wrong with just using WMP for ID tagging and whatever? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Jordan Posted August 1, 2008 Share Posted August 1, 2008 WMP is great if you have only a few files... If you have an album with 300+ songs (ie: a huge soundtrack) it can take forever and ever without some sort of auto tagging. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emasher Posted August 2, 2008 Share Posted August 2, 2008 Plugins: flip4mac - Converts Windows media into a format readable by quicktime. (OSX). iScroll2 - Since the Powerbook G4 has a multi-touch trackpad but no software built into the OS the enables it, this was great for doing 2 finger scrolling, however it broke with leopard. (OSX). UNO - I used to use UNO to apply the Leopard interface in Tiger, however, I stopped using this when I upgraded to leopard. (OSX). Software: TBH there aren't really any small apps I use anymore. I used to use The Gimp, but then I got Photoshop. Games: I have found some great freeware games over the years. The Battle For Wesnoth - A great strategy game similar to fire emblem (OSX, XP/Vista, Linux). Sauerbraten - An FPS with a custom engine (Cube2). The single player is alot like Doom. The multiplayer is great (when people are on). The game also features cooperative online stage building. (OSX, XP/Vista, Linux). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlie Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 Adblock Plus.... I don't use it on principle. The majority of websites' only profits come from adverts and if no one can see them no one will click on them meaning these websites won't be able to stay alive. I want people to see the ads on my sites so I'm doing them the courtesy of viewing their adverts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr_Odwin Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 foobar2000 is the best music app there is (according to me); replaygain scanning and playback, mass tagging/renaming, mass encoding, CD ripping and a very customisable user interface. I love it. Launchy indexes stuff so that you can launch it by pressing alt-space and then typing it's name. But it learns, so that now when I press alt-space then f it has firefox at the top of the list. I use it loads. Great for laptops where using the touchpad is annoying. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cube Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 Adblock Plus.... I don't use it on principle. The majority of websites' only profits come from adverts and if no one can see them no one will click on them meaning these websites won't be able to stay alive. I want people to see the ads on my sites so I'm doing them the courtesy of viewing their adverts. I've never clicked on an advert before. And some sites get money from advert viewings - I'm sure AdBlock Plus still downloads all the adverts, so they couint as "viewed". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shorty Posted August 5, 2008 Author Share Posted August 5, 2008 Adblock Plus.... I don't use it on principle. The majority of websites' only profits come from adverts and if no one can see them no one will click on them meaning these websites won't be able to stay alive. I want people to see the ads on my sites so I'm doing them the courtesy of viewing their adverts. And sometimes all you're doing is giving the hosting network money and the people who work hard on the site don't get to see a penny of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emasher Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 Plus if you're on an older machine, the flash ads take up quite a bit of resources. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sanchez Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 I need an RSS reader, maybe someone here can help. I don't want something built into firefox, I want a stand alone app with a two column setup, for a number of feeds. I want it to give me non intrusive notices for new entries and highlighting as well. I want a mostly vertical setup, but with two columns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlie Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 I've never clicked on an advert before. And some sites get money from advert viewings - I'm sure AdBlock Plus still downloads all the adverts, so they couint as "viewed". Never clicked on a Google advert before? And sometimes all you're doing is giving the hosting network money and the people who work hard on the site don't get to see a penny of it. Touché. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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