This has nothing to do with being the end of the year. (i.e. These aren’t what I necessarily discovered in the past 12 months.)
I just felt like publicizing my currently favorite, most useful products/tools/languages.
PHP - Useful, easy, fun to use. Even just at home, I use PHP along with MySql to do several things on my private Apache server on my PC, ( including an “expected shipment” list where every time I order something, I enter in the item ordered, the U.P.S. tracking number along with a link to U.P.S. website, and a checkbox to check when received.)
Firefox, mostly because of the extensions API. My favorite extension: Tab Mix Plus Options. I love being able to just double click on a tab, and this protects and locks it.
I hate it when I’m in the middle of a long forum post where I’m either suggesting a solution to a problem, or posting my own issue, and then an email comes in and I immediatley click on the http link, and boom, my forum post is gone.
TodoList by AbstractSpoon
XSitePro - Very easy, instant website generation, with a built-in facility to make sure that your website has search engine-attracting keywords
Slickrun by Bayden - Pops up a tiny command line prompt anywhere on the screen so you can quickly run a command. You can also assign batch files, or explorer instances to “magicwords”.
FeedReader - Free RSS reader
TrackerV3 - Windows Explorer replacement.. finally found something useable. It lets you bookmark folder locations for god sake.. finally can get rid of my silly idea for dos batch file menu that I blogged about months ago.
FindandRunRobot - click the icon on the systray and lets you search for your applications. I have tons of installed apps and this makes my life easy
Subversion - Version source control system. Even if you are merely a hobbyist at home, and write a few web pages with javascript and/or perl or php, I’d still recommend subversion. It makes it easy when you can’t figure out what accidental change that was made ( whether it was you who made the accidental change, or the cat who got onto the keyboard while you weren’t looking), is causing the webpage/script/program to all of a sudden completely fail.
Smartdraw - Makes it obscenely easy to quickly draw flowcharts, graphs, tables, etc.. so that you could visually design the “big picture” of an application, or module, especially when planning out what data structures will work the best.
(Quote: Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. - Eric Raymond)
Update 1/28/07: This was supposed to be Ten, but here is the Eleventh:
Roboform: I am not sure how I got by the last ten years of web browsing without this tool.
I probably have more than 150 username/password combinations between all of the discussion forums, “free service” sites like youtube and msn home, online commerce sites like Amazon and BookPool, and more. Every so often, I like to perform a “cookie-clean” in Firefox, and I never have to go back and search for the username/password since you will have to re-enter them for each site, after erasing web cookies. You just click on the toolbar, because Roboform knows what webpage you’re on, and gives you a button to click that enters in your user/pass.