My favorite PC software

June 20, 2004 · Comments

When I first purchased my little 2.4 Ghz Celeron in January, I thought I’d use it to check a few websites here and there. Ha! To be honest, I’m on the PC about 50% of the time. I regret that I didn’t get a more powerful machine, and with prices for PCs as low as they are my next computer will be a mid-level PC (I expect a good few years before I have to replace the G5) I know all the Mac propaganda. I’ve recited most of it myself over the years. But Windows XP is not *that* bad. It’s even pretty good a lot of the time, and the software I’ve purchased for it has made the experience better. And dare I say, enjoyable?

h2. “Office 2003″:http://office.microsoft.com/home/default.aspx

I know, I know. Don’t say it. I resisted for a while. I’ve already mentioned a few times about the fact that I’ve settled on Outlook 2003 as my email application. Still no regrets. Entourage 2004 tries, but it’s not nearly as fast and the calendaring features in Entourage still fall far short compared to Outlook. Yes, it’s big and overly complex in certain areas, but the bottom line is that my professional life is more organized than it has ever been and I owe much of that to Outlook. It syncs beautifully with Palm’s Outlook conduits, and I’ve added some software to Outlook that make it function exactly as I want it to (Entourage’s AppleScript support doesn’t cut it):

* “SpamBayes.”:http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ Near 100% spam filtering accuracy.
* “Lookout.”:http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/ I’m spoiled. If a search of my 200MB mail database takes anything more than 0.05 seconds I’ve waited too long. I can find *exactly* the email I need just by the way I enter the search term in the field.
* “Anagram.”:http://www.getanagram.com Highlight any text anywhere in an email message, website, Word file, you name it. Hit a key combination and Anagram intelligently figures out if the text is a new contact, a task or a note and adds it. Much better than the built-in “Add Contact” menu item, since I can highlight over the sender’s signature and get his/her phone number, address or whatever other information is there that I should have in the contact besides their email address. I can highlight over “Okay, let’s meet on 6/30 at 9:30 am at the High Ridge Starbucks” and that information is scheduled as a meeting. Very handy.
* “Outlook Quote Fix”:http://jump.to/outlook-quotefix You can have your cake and eat it too. By default, when you reply to a message in Outlook it’s set so the original message is on the bottom and your reply is on the top. You can change a setting so the quoted text is proceeded by the “>” character but it breaks terribly and it’s still difficult to add your reply in between as folks are used to seeing on mailing list. Outlook Quote Fix is an add-in that lets you do “Internet style” replies where the text is quoted and line breaks are handled well and the insertion point is underneath. When I’m replying to personal mail, I prefer the default Outlook style. When I’m replying to a mailing list thread, I use the fix.

But beyond Outlook, I gave in and purchased Office for my PC. It kills me what I’ve wasted getting to the point where I’m satisfied with my decisions, but it’s the kind of mistakes I’ll only make once I guess. I resisted. On the PC I was using “OpenOffice”:http://www.openoffice.org/ to read/edit Word files. But it’s slow. Dog, painful slow. Maybe it’s my PC. Maybe it’s just dog, painful slow and people put up with it because supporting the open source movement and getting something for free is more important than having truly fast, functional software that you’re willing to pay the dark empire for. I don’t know. All I know is that I was saving attached files to the Mac so I could open them in Word 2004 because except for straight text files, the conversion to OpenOffice was not smooth. That was working fine, but I was having problems with templates that I designed for clients not looking the same when they opened them on the PC. Word 2003 opens on my PC in about a quarter the time that OpenOffice did. I’m careful about viruses and only open files from people I know and trust. I backup and scan my drive for potential problems regularly.

h2. “Trillian”:http://www.trillian.cc/

iChat is a wonderful instant messenger client. However, I do have some folks that prefer MSN, Yahoo, etc. Trillian is a combined messenger application that works better than anything I’ve tried on either platform. It’s missing the video chat features, but if someone wants to video chat with me they can ask and I’ll turn on iChat on the G5.

h2. “Feed Demon”:http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp

::sigh:: Much has been said about NetNewsWire and PulpFiction and other feed readers for the Mac. But I’m sorry to say that the winner for me is on the other platform. I’ve tried going back to NNW on the Mac and I find that I’m no longer comfortable in it. Feed Demon is very fast, you can highlight and filter feeds according to whatever terms you want (I’m told this is a strength of PulpFiction, too). I spend far less time in Feed Demon futzing with the interface and more time reading headlines.

My favorite thing about Feed Demon is that it only hits the server for the channel group you’re in at the moment. I don’t even know how many feeds I subscribe to (it’s a lot) but it doesn’t feel unmanageable because I have them categorized. When I load the group, only that group is updated and I can set each group to update on a different schedule. Use the built-in browser to load a page, listen for a beep and that means that you can subscribe to the feed with a click of a button (auto discovery). Click on one of those orange XML buttons to subscribe too. I know other feed readers have these features, but there’s something about Feed Demon that does it better and makes me feel like the others are doing catch up.

No disrespect to Erik Barzeski or Brent Simmons (developers of PulpFiction and NNW respectively) but in my 2004 motto of “Best tool for the job” I’ve made my choice and I haven’t had a reason yet to turn back.

h2. “MyIE 2″:http://myie2.com/html_en/home.htm

Way back in February, “Lex”:http://thefriedmans.net/blog/ recommended this browser to me in a comment. Thanks again, Lex. I’m still using it as my default.

I *want* to use “Firefox.”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ And I do. I use it for the Edit CSS extension and from time to time. But for some reason it’s just not fast to me. This is both on the PC and the Mac. Safari is faster. My IE 2 is *much* faster.

MyIE 2 is essentially Internet Explorer without all the things that makes IE suck. It has tabbed browsing, pop-up and ad blocking and other nice features.

h2. QuickBooks Pro 2004

I already “talked”:http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/the_biplatform_life/adventures_in_troubleshooting_with_a_happy_ending.php about this application. I can do without the Intuit ads all over the place, but my billing is beyond organized and up-to-date.

h2. “RoboForm”:http://www.roboform.com/

This came as a freebie with MyIE 2, and it’s so good that I bought the full version. It’s a web password/login form manager that is dead-on accurate. Like for example, on my Mac I have a login for my website, a login for webmail and a login for the blog. Safari can’t tell them apart so if I tell it to remember the password for the blog it autofills when I load the webmail page. Web Confidential can retain web login information, but it’s not as seamless as I would like. RoboForm sits “on” the browser (like Google’s toolbar), is encrypted and does a great job. That’s a big reason why (provided that I’m careful) I do nearly as much website surfing on the PC as I do on the Mac.

h2. And speak of careful, “Registry First Aid,”:http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/Reg1Aid/ “Norton Internet Security 2004,”:http://www.symantec.com/sabu/nis/nis_pe/ “Advanced Uninstaller Pro,”:http://www.innovative-sol.com/uninstaller/index.htm “Spybot Search & Destroy”:http://www.safer-networking.org/

How many protection, repair and similar utilities do I have on my Mac? Um, I think I have a copy of Disk Warrior lying around here somewhere. But it’s like when you move to Manhattan. You have all the benefits of living in the big, crowded city but along with that comes triple bolted doors and not looking people in the eye when you’re walking down the street. Norton does its thing in the background and doesn’t cause any trouble. I have it set to do a full system scan every Friday night. I run the others when I even remotely suspect that something funky may be happening. Usually I scan for spyware/adware every 4 or 5 days, give or take.

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