I have previously written about which browser and which email client I have been using and why. Here is the time to speak about some more common software I use and why.
Multimedia player
Whatever it is for music, videos or movies, you need a good multimedia player. Back in the early days of compressed audio file, one of the first player that could play MP3 file was Winplayer. It’s so old, I can’t find a reference of it on Google. Not long after came Winamp. It was an awesome music player for a long time. It was well built, supported many corrupted files and it had a great plugin based architecture. Eventually, Winamp added video support to its features list but I never liked it.
While I was playing music with Winamp and it did not have video support, I usually had Windows Media Player, Quicktime and Real Player installed on my computer. I did not really had the choice since if you wanted to play Quicktime movies, you were required to have Quicktime and if you wanted to play real movies, you were required to have Real Player. I found out later about the alternatives choices using Window Media Player classic and free codecs available on the web. That suited me better because I did not have to install those bloated players to meet my media craving. I have been using a combination of Winamp, Window Media Player and free codecs as my media player for a while.
I recently learnt about the VLC media player. I decided to give it a try. It supports a whole bunch of formats even though it lacks some features in some format. It support streams and DVD playback without disabled user operations.
DVD-Video allows the disc to specify whether or not the user may perform any operation, such as selecting a menu, skipping chapters, forwarding or rewinding—essentially any function on the remote control. This is known as User Operation Prohibitions, or Prohibited User Operations (UOPs or PUOs).
It has a minimalist interface with the possibilities for skins if you want to. I still prefer the minimalist approach. That is the player I am currently using. It is a good all around player. However, it does have a few corner case bugs in its current version. I am waiting to see a more stable version. In the meantime, I will be on watch for a better player as usual.
Quick text editor
If you want to try different programs, you are a bit into programming or you are into web development, it is always handy to have a good text editor close to you. In one of the most basic form, you could use Notepad. Going a small notch higher, you could also use WordPad. That is was a did for a while. In the end, I became frustrated with the lacks of features of these two and I choose to try others. I have been using EditPlus for a long time. It has most of the features you expect from a good text editor. I also tried UltraEdit-32. It was also a good text editor. I even tried XEmacs, Vim and some derivatives of those two for Windows. I don’t want to fuel the eternal debate here, but I must say that they have some pretty neats feature that are not usually found elsewhere. What they lack is the ease of use and that is what made me drop both of them.
As of today, I am exclusively using NotePad++. It is a pretty solid editor based on a great text editor. It is based on an extensible architecture with plugins and localization files. It integrates with the explorer contextual menu for quick access. It is free and well maintained. I like it.
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