WinExtra tapped me for a blog meme. I’m into these memes not only because they’re fun to answer, but reading other blogger’s responses is entertaining and sometimes enlightening. So this meme is about software that I love to use that is not so mainstream, and software I dislike, for whatever reason. This might be a more unusual list because I’m on a Mac. So here goes:

Software I Love

• Fetch: (Shareware FTP client) I first used Fetch in college, way, way, back during pre OS X days. For a long time I was using Cyberduck, but one day when I decided to backup my entire website, I realized how slow it was. So I downloaded Fetch and realized it was still a solid program (I paid the shareware fee – that’s how much I like it).
• Graphic Converter: (Shareware graphics editor) I haven’t installed Photoshop on my MacBook (Intel based) because I need to buy CS3. But in the meantime I’ve been using Graphic Converter for simple cropping, resizing, and adding borders. It’s a good program with a surprising amount of depth as an image editor, and it works with tons of image formats.
• VLC: (Video player) Speaking of opening tons of formats, VLC plays nearly every video format out there, which is a big deal on the Mac, especially when it comes to WMV and strange AVI files. It also uses less processor power while playing back those videos.
• TextWrangler: (Freeware text editor) This is a free text editor from the makers of BBEdit and it does just about everything I would need a text editor for, including color coding and batch find and replace. Tweaking themes and hand coding files is fast and fun.
• WordPress: Maybe this isn’t really a mainstream “program” but it’s a really awesome blog platform and keeps getting better and better.

Software I Hate

• Windows Media Player and Real Player: These video programs suck. They run badly on the Mac, and every time I browse to a website that has a Windows Media or Real Player file embedded, they claim I don’t have it installed. How hard can this be? As mentioned previously, VLC plays WMV files and Real Player seems to be on its way out so this problem isn’t as bad as it used to be.
• Adobe Acrobat: This program is bloated, and the other day I got in this annoying situation where it insisted on downloading upgrades for itself and then couldn’t install them. Meanwhile, the much lighter Preview opens PDFs.
• GIMP: I know it’s open source and I should respect it, but I couldn’t figure this program out, even with the interface that supposedly made it more like Photoshop (GIMP Shop).
• Power Point: I’ve only used it occasionally and recall growing quite frustrated.
• Internet Explorer: Thumbs down. If I could get websites working in just Safari and Firefox my life would be so much easier.

So that’s my short list. Now who on earth should I tap? I’ll let anybody who feels so inclined do so. Just link back to this post and WinExtra.

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