Useful apps and utilities

[Darren S]

Just thought it might be worth adding your favourite applications and utilities that you use regularly, but maybe aren't that familiar to a lot of other people.

It goes without saying, please do add anything illegal, silly or inappropriate. It would be useful to get a little list going that we can all refer back to, should we be on the lookout for an app that "....just does this little thing."

A couple here that I can think of...


XnView Classic image viewer. A freebie image manipulator that I've used for years now. I personally prefer the XnView Classic app to the newer XnView MP version, but that's just me. Excellent for resizing or file format changes en masse with the batch converter.

https://www.xnview.com/en/xnview/



TreeSize Free. Never ceases to amaze me where hard drive space disappears to. Again, another I've used for years and we even have a corporate version at work. Lists the entire contents of your hard drive(s) in nice, easy to read lists - along with the storage space that they take up on the drive itself. I personally use it for a quick glance at the Steam Library footprint, especially as I have it spread over multiple drives.

https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/



Rufus - USB boot tool. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who's had little niggles in the past creating bootable USB media for Windows desktop and server operating systems in the past? This tiny app (less than 1MB in size) makes it very easily to chuck and extract a downloaded ISO onto a bootable USB stick. Very handy.

https://rufus.akeo.ie/



CCleaner - PC cleaner. It's been out there for seemingly ages and works very, very well. PC cleaning can be very hit & miss with dodgy bloatware, but Piriform's release is very good.

https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner



ClipX - clipboard utility. The obvious fail of the usual Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V combo of copying and pasting - is that it's limited to just one item. ClipX allows you to build up a backlog of many copy and pastes and easily refer back to them. Used it a fair amount when creating documentation and referring back to previous comments regularly.

https://download.cnet.com/ClipX/3000-2384_4-10315450.html

 

[Gareth]

Microsoft PowerToys Image Resizer - adds a Resize Pictures menu to the right-click menu for quick & easy resizing of pictures.

https://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer/

 

[SharkyUK]

Notepad++ - source code editor and Notepad replacement. Supports multiple languages and this has been my 'go to' text editor on the MS Windows platform for years.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/


Beyond Compare - a data comparison utility. Aside from comparing files, the program is capable of doing side-by-side comparison of directories, FTP and SFTP directories, Dropbox directories, Amazon S3 directories, and archives.

https://www.scootersoftware.com/


Filezilla - a free software, cross-platform FTP application, consisting of FileZilla Client and FileZilla Server. Client binaries are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, server binaries are available for Windows only.

https://filezilla-project.org/

 

[botfch]

VLC player - plays videos
Fusion 360 - free cad software, cross platform so handy for Mac etc.

 

[Darren S]

Freecommander - think of it as an evolved File Explorer for Windows. Quite handy if you're messing about with files, their locations and attributes on a regular basis.

https://freecommander.com/en/summary/

 

[realnumber 1]

Double driver, great for grabbing drivers off your pc before a rebuild.

Snappy driver. Great if you forget to do the above.

Ninite (website) good for getting all the latest apps (vlc, Flash, open office, av etc) all from one place rather than going from site to site for them.

 

[Greeny.]

FileLocator Lite/Agent Ransack - Powerful file searching utility which can also be used across the network

https://www.mythicsoft.com/filelocatorlite/download/

https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

 

[Greeny.]

RVTools - Used for interacting with vCentre, great for reporting.

https://www.robware.net/rvtools/

 

[Greeny.]

SuperPuTTy - Easy way to manage multiple SSH sessions

https://github.com/jimradford/superputty

 

[Greeny.]

Terminals - Easy way to manage RDP sessions, can also be used for SSH but ive found it abit ropey

https://github.com/terminals-Origin/Terminals

 

[adamlstr]

Mouse Without Borders

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=35460

This is a lovely little piece of software out of MS, no idea who they bought to get it.

Control multiple hosts on multiple screens as one through one main host KVM.

 

[Andy.]

https://www.nirsoft.net/ - loads of useful (free) tools.

http://executor.dk/ - hotkey launcher. Saves me loads of time

https://pathcopycopy.github.io/ - copy UNC paths to files with one click.

ninite.com as mentioned. Great for all the legitimate free software without addons.

 

[Jack!]

For OS X:

f.lux - For modifying your display colours to help reduce eye strain - this has become built in to many things these days, but f.lux goes far deeper.

iStat Menus - Gives lots of useful information in the task bar, like CPU usage, memory, hd space, temps, upload/download etc.

BetterTouchTool - For resizing windows, and snapping them to places, and for lots of touchpad combinations.

HyperDock - For giving you window previews of what's in your dock when you hover over an open app, easier than right clicking to find that pop up window that p**n site you visited opened. Basically does what Windows does as standard.

Bowtie - For creating keyboard shortcuts to control iTunes or other media players.

 

[Darren S]

^^^ - cheers Jack.

My mum has inherited my wife's hardly used MacBook Pro. Created her an Apple ID and wiped the MBP clean with a fresh install of High Sierra - so easy to do when you don't have various drivers and hardware to worry about!

Might have a look at some of those - especially as mum is totally new to the Apple environment.

 

[sn00p]

Alfred. Irritates me when I use a Mac that doesn't have it installed.