Polka, Burgers, and Sound Financial Advice

While waiting for the completion of the Sunday Polka Worship Service (…) at my cousin’s baptism, I observed a number of people making burgers for what appeared to be the upcoming outdoor beer-and-polka festival. The large number of blatant health-code violations aside (including one woman who repeatedly picked things off the bottom of her shoes using her gloves), the one thing that stood out most was how incredibly inefficient they all were. To make a burger, each individual worker (of four) would do the following:

Take out a single wrapper and place it at the edge of a rather large and empty table
Grab two bun-halves out of the bun-bag and place them on the wrapper
Lean over towards the slow-cooker, pick up the tongs
Open the slow-cooker, grab a burger-patty, close the slow-cooker
Carry the patty over to wrapper and set it on the bun
Go back to the slow cooker and replace the tongs
Go back to the burger, wrap it up
Turn around and carry the burger to a cooler about four steps away
Open the cooler, place the burger arbitrarily in the cooler, close the cooler
Walk back to the table and start over

For most people, this probably seems fine. However, this offends most computer geeks on a deep and personal level. We (with the exception of Linux users) like to finish tasks, especially menial or repetitive ones, as quickly and efficiently as possible. For this reason, using the right tools (read: programs) for the job can mean the difference between minutes and hours when trying to get something done.

When I’m looking for a new program to help with a specific task, I always spend quite a lot of time (sometimes hours) perusing my different options, looking for the best program for the job; all the while secure in the knowledge that my time is well spent and will save me long hours of frustration and repetition in the long run. You, however, are in luck today – I’m going to spare you the long hours of research, and simply tell you what you want!

The following is a short list of what I believe are the best programs to use (for Windows, although many are cross-platform) for a given task. All of these were picked based not only on functionality, but also user-friendliness and support.

Notepad Replacement

Notepad++ – This baby has it all. Spell checking, code-highlighting, macros, tabbed viewing, find-and-replace in entire directories (it’s more useful to me than Windows’ built-in find function!). It has SVN and FTP support, can work as a hex-editor, and much, much more. Notepad++ is free and open-source.

Taking Screenshots / Screen-videos

Jing – At first I didn’t like Jing because it has a nasty OpenGL overlay that interferes with a lot of programs, but once I realized you can disable that and use a keyboard shortcut, it became indispensable. It can take screenshots and videos (with sound support, automatically compressed) of individual windows, areas, or the entire screen, and save them to your hard-drive, upload them via ftp, or send them to Screencast.com (requires a free account) for anyone to see. Jing is free.

Todo Lists

Toodledo.com – Of the many websites and programs I looked at for Todo lists, this was the best. It has everything you could ever need, in an easy to use interface. And best of all, it’s free! (They do offer a paid-for version with even more features)

Financial Budgeting

Mint.com – Many people would recommend Quicken Online for this, but I’ve found that Mint.com is not only better, but also cheaper – in fact, it’s free! They make money by making recommendations (which you only see when you request them), and from my research I’ve determined the site is both extremely safe and secure to use. Check out their FAQ for more info on their security practices.

Other free software I couldn’t live without

Launchy – A Quicksilver clone that allows you to run a program just by entering it’s name. Vista has this built in, but for XP it’s a godsend – everyone I’ve showed it to has told me they love it.
Allsnap – A program that forces all windows to snap to the edges of the screen and to each other. Additionally, you can tell it to force all windows to stay inside the screen at all times, making it a breeze to move a window to the corner of the screen (for those rare occasions you want to move a window outside the screen, you can still do it simply by holding alt).
Taskbar Shuffle – a program that allows you to rearrange the icons in the taskbar by dragging them. It also allows you to use the "group all taskbar items" feature to force items of the same type to be near each other, without also collapsing every window into the same damn icon.

These are but a few of the plethora of programs I use constantly – there are many more (email, instant messaging, backup, firewall, antivirus, Internet browser, IDEs, video player…) I rely on almost every day.

So tell me – what programs could you not live without?