What are your favorite programs?

That’s a rather loaded ques­tion. I’ll just make a bul­leted list of some of my most used appli­ca­tions and why I use them.

• Mac OSX Lion – This runs pretty sta­ble on my desk­top right now. I tried to get it work­ing on my lap­top, but it’s way too unsta­ble. My rea­sons for using it over Win­dows include its win­dow man­age­ment fea­tures (exposé, spaces, and even the dock), the UNIX ter­mi­nal, and its gen­eral pret­ti­ness. I’m sure I’ll get sick of the pret­ti­ness, but for now it is a nice break from Win­dows 7.
• Win­dows 7 – This was a great release from Microsoft. It’s prob­a­bly their best release so far. From what I’ve seen of Win­dows 8, I think I’ll end up lik­ing it more than Win­dows 8. It runs quite well on my lap­top, so I’m happy.
• Google Chrome – I gen­er­ally use Chrome. I like Fire­fox, but Chrome lets me sync my set­tings across com­put­ers quickly and eas­ily. It also includes web devel­op­ment tools built-in (rather than hav­ing to down­load Fire­bug) and tends to be a bit faster than Fire­fox in my experience.
• Spo­tify – Gen­er­ally, I lis­ten to Spo­tify. If I want to lis­ten to music already stored on my com­puter, I’ll use iTunes on Mac and Win­dows Media Player on Win­dows. Yes, there are bet­ter pro­grams. No, I don’t feel like installing them.
• Adium – I don’t do a lot of instant mes­sag­ing. I mostly use Google Talk and Face­book. Adium lets me com­bine them into one pro­gram. On Win­dows, I’ll use Pid­gin; it’s not as pretty, though.
• Microsoft Office – Libre­Of­fice is handy and works quite well. Frankly, though, I like Word’s for­mat­ting options. I even like the rib­bon inter­face. I just wish that 2010 for Win­dows was as good as 2011 is for Mac.
• Adobe Pro­duc­tion Pre­mium CS5 – I use this to do web design, graphic design, photo and video post-processing, and basi­cally every­thing. I wrote about Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor, After Effects, and Pre­miere Pro else­where (try graphic design pro­grams and post-processing pro­grams). One thing I didn’t men­tion is Adobe Bridge. It’s pos­i­tively won­der­ful. I can tag files, rate files, and have pretty decent inter­ac­tion with the entire Adobe suite. I use it more on Win­dows than on Mac, though, since Mac lets me pre­view RAW files.
• Ever­note – I use this to take notes in class. Back when I had an Android tablet, I used it there and loved it. Now I like to run it on my lap­top. I can record class lec­tures while tak­ing notes and keep every­thing together. It indexes all my notes, so I can search for a topic and see all the places I men­tioned it. Plus, notes are stored on the cloud so if I write them on my lap­top, they’ll be avail­able on my desk­top when I get home.
• Filezilla – This is really handy. It’s a small file man­ager that lets me edit files through FTP. I rigged it to open .css, .html, and .php files in Notepad++. When I save a file in Filezilla, I alt tab to Filezilla and it uploads it for me. Sure, it’s not as effi­cient as some­thing like Dreamweaver, but it’s also a lot more free.
• Notepad++ – This is my text edi­tor. I like every­thing about it, espe­cially the fact that it’s free. I have yet to find a free Mac equiv­a­lent. If you know of one, post a com­ment. I’ll love you for life.
• Blender – I don’t often do 3d work. But when I do, I pre­fer Blender. It’s small, easy to down­load, I know how to use it, and it’s free.