Saturday, December 03, 2011

Curse You Scott and your Amazing Lists!

I love finding, collecting and using specialized utilities.  It’s as much passion as compulsion.

And though I can go mad-crazy with my linkfest posts running down tool after tool, developing a comprehensive list of my favs and frolics remains a dream for a month-long sabbatical sometime in the future.

So it is with admiration and respect that I found Scott Hanselman of Computer ZEN fame has recently posted his annual “Best of” software tools and software list.

Scott Hanselman's 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

It is an amazing collection.

Scott has done some great organizational work in the post, such as highlighting the new items in Green.  Old favorites that have new back-links have been updated.

Categories include:

  • “The Big Ten Life and Work-Changing Utilities”
  • “Rocking Sweet Windows 7 Specific Stuff”
  • “A (.NET) Developer’s Life”
  • “The Angle Bracket Tax (XML/HTML Stuff)”
  • “Visual Studio Add-Ins”
  • “Regular Expressions”
  • “Launchers”
  • “Stuff I Just Dig”
  • “Low-Level Utilities”
  • “Websites and Bookmarklets”
  • “Tools for Bloggers and Those Who Read Blogs”
  • “Browser Add-Ins/Extensions”
  • “Things Windows Forgot”
  • “Outlook AddIns and Life Organizers”

I’m familiar with many of these tools, but as always, there were some great new discoveries for me in his lists.

Granted, many of the items lean to the programmer (since that is what Scott does) but even if you are not a coder by heart, there are lots of great finds here to pick through.

Most are free however there are some apps listed that are not ($).

Permalink: Hanselman Ultimate Tools List

Bonus Linkage:

obinshah / TED Talks Downloader - freeware - I’m a big fan of stretching my brain-cells and trying to take in new concepts in a wide range of fields and fauna. TED: Ideas worth spreading is a site that provides great (and sometimes provocative) conversations from some of the most interesting people today. Normally I just keep an eye on their site and view a particular video discussion as it calls me.  However, sometimes I want to keep one local for future reference or to view on the road.

TED Talks Downloader is a single EXE that offers a way to grab the list of TED Talks available and then after selection, lets you download them directly to your system in several different quality levels. Super great for when the road calls and you don’t have access to a network connection.  Spotted and described on this addictivetips blog post Batch Download All TED Videos With A Single Click via TED Downloader.

Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin - GitHub - an alternative package to Cygwin. It uses an installer to deliver the goods (~130 UNIX CLI apps) to your system.  Adds a Windows Explore shell window to open a CMD window from a folder, easy install/remove, apps get included in your system’s PATH for easy access.  Not too shabby.

Cheers!

--Claus V.

No comments: