Discovering software (sites)

[vegas]

Just wanted to share some of my favorite links for getting recommendations on softwares to tryout. Some may have been mentioned on the forum or even in the DC links list, but whatever.  Please feel free to expand on this list.  Shareware, Freeware, Donationware, whatever, just always looking to check out quality programs.

http://www.anova.org/software/
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?page_id=1007
http://www.hanselman.com/tools
http://aumha.org/freeware/freeware.htm
http://www.drff.net/favorites.htm
http://www.shellcity.net/
http://www.powertoolsforum.com/
http://www.ibo-business.com/fab-software.htm
http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/  (left column)
http://radified.com/TheBest/programs_02.htm  (unfortunatley becoming quickly outdated)
http://www.donationcoder.com/ (DUH!)

Browsing Fileforum/Versiontracker releases is fun too.

[mouser]

nice post - always helpful to see concise lists of what people consider their favorite apps.

i didn't know about and quite like the aumha list and edbott pages in your list.
and the hanselman page is great.

ive turned off drfilefinder (drff) myself, though its a nicely clean site.

[mouser]

a reminder that we have a Links page where we list some of what we consider the top software recommendation sites.. http://www.donationcoder.com/Links/index.html

i'll collect what we think are the best from this thread and update that list.

[Mark0]

Great links list. Maybe a little OT here, but I think that FILExt may deserve a place in that list; it's surely one of the greates resources around when researching "What's kind of file is this *.XYZ??!".

Bye!

[Nighted]

Whoa! That program Cropper is awesome! Wow! That's going into my must have toolbox immediately. Great post!

[mouser]

does cropper do anything special that screenshot captor does not?

[Nighted]

It can export to AVI

So you could make a quick video capture...and it's only a 60kb download.

I don't remember if Screenshot Captor can do that or not.

[mouser]

sc cannot export to avi and it's a long way from 60k 
i'll have to check out the avi export function to see what that's all about, seems a little unusul.

[moerl]

I'm scared of that list. Clicking one link may result in hours of software browsing...

* Shangnyun carefully finishes this post... turns around, and sneaks away from this thread.

[Nighted]

Shangnyun, hahaha!

I know exactly what you mean! I only dared click on a couple of them and that killed a couple hours right there...thankfully I'm already familiar with most of the software mentioned...but it was sooooo worth it. I got my fix....what a rush!

[Veign]

Adding to the pile is LifeHacker:
http://www.lifehacker.com/

Great site, constant posts, and good recommendations.

[Veign]

and it's only a 60kb download.

The application is written in C# which means it requires the 22Meg .Net Framework.  So the app is 60K but requires a 22Meg support file.

[moerl]

Shangnyun, hahaha!

I know exactly what you mean! I only dared click on a couple of them and that killed a couple hours right there...thankfully I'm already familiar with most of the software mentioned...but it was sooooo worth it. I got my fix....what a rush!

Phew.. I didn't. I spent hours reading other essentially useless stuff on the web and well, buying a digital camera, a memory card for it, and a card reader! T'was fun too, but marginally more useful/worthwhile, lol.

I really have to stop the software discovery browsing... it takes SO MUCH time, and at the end I sit there with a whole pile of new stuff to check out... but ask yourself, how much of that newly found stuff do you end up keeping? For me, it's usually like 5%. And that's not worth the hours of surfing around.. not to mention the hours spent trying out the new stuff you've found, only to then abandon it again. It's fun, sure, but fun can also be useful/productive, rather than ultimately in vain.

[Haurus]

and it's only a 60kb download.

The application is written in C# which means it requires the 22Meg .Net Framework.  So the app is 60K but requires a 22Meg support file.

Many users already have the .Net Framework, and once downloaded is used by all applications running on the .Net Framework. That isn't very different than VB apps that require the VB runtimes or C++ apps that require the MFC libraries.

The .Net framework is made up of many files. Saying Cropper needs a 22 MB support file, while accurate as far as the size of the download goes, doesn't fully describe its specific dependency situation.  Most of the used external code is in System.Drawing which is 456 KB and System.Windows.Forms which is 2,004 KB.