The Initial Transformation: Part III

July 13th, 2006

I’m back with the third and final installment of my series on essential software for all new computers. While the first and second parts of this series covered the basic necessities, this third part will cover software that is just good to have around (for both Macs and PCs). Lets start with software for OSX, and finish with a couple PCs applications.

For OSX:

Internet Telephone skype_logo.png Skype: Skype allows you to speak to anyone in the world with a computer and an internet connection for free. You can also currently make free calls to any telephone number in the US, and make international calls for fixed minute rates. Video chat is also available.
Application Launcher quicksilver.jpg Quicksilver: An application launcher, Quicksilver can speed up drastically everyday tasks by allowing you to do a variety of things with simple keystrokes.
Space Saver quicksilver.jpg Monolingual: Monolingual is a must have application for all users that are, well, monolingual. Basically this program allows you to remove all of the unneeded language files except the one you need. It can save you up to 3GB of space!
Notifications growl.png Growl: Growl is a notification system for OSX that can alert you about anything from instant messages, to finished FTP tasks, to a new song playing in iTunes, all with a beautiful customizable interface.

For PCs:

Archiver
WinRar: WinRar is a replacement for windows compressed folder handling. It allows you to both create and extract all kinds of compressed filetypes.
iTunes quicksilver.jpg iTunes: There’s really no good reason to recommend iTunes except that its probably the best music player out there for windows. Also, I really like it because it gives Windows users a look into the simplicity that is Mac OSX.

Well that pretty much wraps up this series. I hope that it helped and if you know of any software that I missed, please let me know in the comments section and I’ll add it.

my writing

my website is a collection of my work and writing since 2004, so please don't be surprised if things seem a little outdated, particularly in the technology section. That said, the concepts behind most posts should be interesting given all that's happened since they were written so enjoy!