Commercial apps typically ASK you for money.
And I’m talking about contributing money,
not my time.
But many OS projects do ask for money. That was the point of the post I pulled that quote from.
So why would you consider contributing to commercial applications and not to OS applications, if you are about contributing money over your time?
Not sure if this counts as a small software vendor but I couldn’t be without Copernic Desktop Search:
Also, and hopefully this isn’t too cheeky, can I suggest my own small software start-up:
We couldn’t find a blog reader that was exactly right, so we wrote our own.
Due to your post today, I finally got around to registering Clipboard Recorder, which I find infinitely useful.
Other applications I’ve registered in the past include Trillian, EditPlus, BeyondCompare and Winamp (before it was free).
But I thought today was “World AIDS Day”…
If you maintain code, you should have Beyond Compare. Best app for comparing code versions. Side note: Talked the company i work for into buying 100 licenses.
UltraEdit and FogBugz.
Red-Gate SQL Compare. No question about it.
I can’t believe no one even mentioned winmerge. Come on people!
great idea! i gonna register total commander right away. i am using it everday and love it.
I also second Red Gate products - any of them for that matter - but SQLCompare has saved my hide a number of occasions.
I also support DivLoc’s File Search and Replace tool.
I don’t know why it should be a fight or a war. As I told a friend of mine, that’s not the point. The point is, I know 3 operating systems, and he only knows 2.
Thanks for a partial call to rationality, anyway.
I can’t think of any right at the moment. (I’ve been at work for 10 minute and alas have had no caffeine.
Not only is this a great post I must thank everyone for mentioning their favourite software. I can’t count the amount of hours wasted looking for some utility or another. Now we all have a great list of free software to try out.
OOOoo! thought of one that saves me all the time. AngryIP! great little port scanner. (used for ligit purposes, I swear!)
I support Realtime Soft’s Ultramon: http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/
I just can’t use 2+ monitors without it anymore.
One of the things that blew me away when I switched to OS X was the insane amount of really helpful shareware apps. On top of that, reasonably priced and with less nagware than most common windows shareware I was using.
The stuff is usually so cheap that you have a hard time coming up with excuses to not pay for the license.
I would like to mention Aqua Data Studio, by http://aquafold.com . ADS is available free for personal or educational use, or a very cheap license for everything else. If you have to work in a mixed environment with MS Sql Server, Oracle, MySQL, PG and others at the same time, ADS allows you to manage them all and do query analysis from a unified interface. On top of that, the developer is in daily contact with his users through his yahoo group, and he damn well listens to us a lot better than Microsoft or any other big company.
Another mention is Connect360, it allows your mac to impersonate a Windows Media Center, which means that you can listen to your iTunes, watch videos and page through your iPhoto libraries from your Xbox 360.
If you’d like to grab streaming audio, TotalRecorder is well worth buying.
Definitely support the small guys, as their apps tend to be better designed and crafted. They’re often an original idea, a port of a cool idea from another OS, or an alternative to a bloated or poorly designed de facto standard app. A small dev team often has the vision, focus, brains, and drive to create something great instead of mediocre. Plus, the apps are usually inexpensive.
There’s great stuff happening on all platforms, but it’s especially interesting to check out some of the great indie apps on the Mac platform for ideas and inspiration on approaches to turning out a great product.
Back in June, I decided it was time for me to become a “little guy who writes cool Windows software”. That’s why I also started encouraging others, though I still use a lot of free/OSS stuff.
xplorer2: http://www.zabkat.com/
MaxiVista: http://www.maxivista.com/
Should we create a discting OSS day?
This was great! I’d like to throw in 7-zip ( http://7-zip.org/ ), Daemon-Tools ( http://www.daemon-tools.cc ), FileZilla ( filezilla.sourceforge.net ), VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ), SqlYog Community Edition ( http://www.webyog.com/en/ ), and reiterate KeePass, uTorrent, and Espresso Regex