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June 18, 2002
Soliciting Software Help
My new 'puter is lacking in the software department. This is in part because I decided not to purchase M$ Office just yet, but it's lacking software in general. My old machine, it turns out, has a whole lot of stuff installed on it that I've been taking for granted. Software relics from the employed days, probably not really legitimately licensed, but not exactly pirated either.
I'm looking for suggestions. I prefer free or cheap and would like to avoid installing anything unlicensed on the new machine. I need an HTML/PHP editor, an image editor, a good POP3 client preferably with a good contact manager (also, I need to be able to import my old mail from Outlook 2000), and a calendar-ish app at the very least. I've already installed OpenOffice 1.0. OO has an HTML editor, but I haven't tried it out. I was using HomeSite before and I really liked it, but I'm not about to hand over $400. I used to have ACDSee for managing photos, but I don't want to buy it and I think XP might have decent photo organization features, which I'm at least willing to try. I installed AIM right off the bat because it seems necessary, but if anyone can offer a compelling reason, I'd be happy to test Trillian or something along those lines. I'm also debating whether or not to get the latest version of CookiePal. I like the idea of managing my cookies and privacy, but frankly, it's a pain in the ass.
Please let me know if you have any recommendations.
Posted by buddha at June 18, 2002 02:35 AM
Comments
Well, Eudora is working well for me in the email portion of things. Trillian is most useful if A. You are not behind the stupid firewall at my old job and B. you use multiple messengers. If you're in a bind, text/PHP/HTML files can be created in notepad, though without any frills at all.
Also do let us hear your opinions on XP.
Posted by: Jason at June 18, 2002 04:58 AM
Anything in particular that's good about Eudora? The computer has Outlook Express installed already.
I know I can edit text in Notepad, but for web stuff, I prefer something with syntax highlighting.
Posted by: dan at June 18, 2002 11:28 AM
i'd recommend emacs or bbedit for all your text editing needs.
oh wait! neither runs on XP. maybe you should get a real o/s. :)
Posted by: matt[0] at June 18, 2002 12:08 PM
[0]. that's a terribly cheap shot. :-P You already know why I didn't get an iBook and you just want to be snarky.
They make bbedit for the mac, but they don't make the software I need for taking law school exams. Why? Because Apple is losing the educational market. It's a sad day. I was so ready to buy an iBook, but my law school exams are far more important to me than O/S wars are.
Or were you suggesting I get a nice, easy to use Solaris laptop?
Posted by: dan at June 18, 2002 12:24 PM
You can get emacs for Win32. http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html. Whether this is at all a good idea... dunno. I use emacs because I was raised by wolves, not through volition.
Syntax highlighting is nice, but the real problem with using Notepad is that it doesn't count lines for you. There's nothing worse than getting one of the PHP errors like "syntax error in line 734" on Notepad.
I have tried out Zend's Studio IDE, and it's very nice although way too fat for my piddly Win98 box. However, I don't know whether it would be worth the $200 for you.
BTW, please be sure to get a copy of Unix2dos and Dos2unix. If there's one thing that annoys me, it's people who develop on Windows and check in their shitty Windows linebreaks. And then they whine at you about how they don't know what a linebreak is so how can they be expected to fix it?
It's not OO, it's OOo. Seriously.
What about a nice, easy to use Linux notebook?
Mozilla mail client is good.
Oh, and get the Putty ssh client. Friends don't let friends FTP. :-)
Posted by: Troutgirl at June 18, 2002 04:17 PM
*oh pish*
Posted by: shoop at June 19, 2002 01:48 AM