Francois Gelinas

François Gélinas

Francois Gelinas email : be creative @ fgelinas.com

Workflow (or softwares I love to use)

This is a serie of programms that I love to use and are usualy the first to get on a new installation.
Google Chrome: [0$] First software of all is Google Chrome. I used to be a big fan of FireFox because of its support of web standards, but I adopted Google Chrome on its first day. There are many reasons for that :
  • It starts up so damn fast.
  • The start page with most used links as thumbnail is very nice, no need to install extra plugins, and it adapts to the sites you visits, no managemets needed.
  • The 'do it all' box that replace common url box is cool. Know the url, type it in and ctrl+enter (to add www and .com), or want to search for something, just type it in.
  • Google Chrome updates in the background when you don't use it, as opposed to FireFox and its numerous plugins, that just promp for updates when you start it and want to reach a website now, not in 2 minutes.
  • And the best of all, I love the minimalist style, just more room for the web pages.
Launchy: [0$] Launchy is just awesome, with a few keystroke it starts any programs, make quick calculations or find a file for you. I always set up Launchy to start with ALT+Space as Ctrl+space is usualy used for autocomplete in code IDEs. Launchy is invisible when you don't need it, so its another must for minimalist desktop, and prevents you from adding numerous shortcuts to the Desktop or Quick Launch. And when you get used to it, it is much faster to start a program with a few keystrokes then to reach for the mouse and explore various menus. (The new vista start menu is doing good job at that too, but Launchy is much quicker.)
FileZilla: [0$] Thats an FTP client that do the job, lighweight, fast and featurefull.
PuTTY: [0$] The best telnet and ssh client around. All options are in the setup screen, and once set up and connected to you favorite server, its gets out of the way. Everything is there to work the way you want. The only this that is missing is programmable keys.
ColorPic: [0$] When working on websites, this little tool is quite usefull to collect and remember the differents colors I select. There can be many palettes of up to 16 colors, many differents color pickers. It can also grab the color directly from anyehere on the screen. Its a very nice little tool.
Komodo Edit: [0$] I used to code everything in UltraEdit, but when I started learning Ruby and Rails, I tried this nice editor. It has many features and works well. It has autocomplete for many web languages, including Ruby on Rails, syntax highlight, auto indent.
MediaCoder: [0$] A complex but fully featured media encoder. Media (video) encoding can get very complicated, if not frustrating quickly. Media Coder is the best tool I found to encode video from my Sony Ciné's interlaced uncompressed AVIs to deinterlaced xvid compressed avi. And it supports batch encoding.
Picasa: [0$] Picasa is simply the best image (and video) organizer, and liked to PicasaWeb, it makes it super easy to share your favorites pictures with friends and family over the web.
Paint.NET: [0$] A good free image editor, It has alot of features that the standard Paint is missing. It is no Photoshop but it does the job for my basic image editing needs (amateur websites, small edits, software interface, etc)
7-Zip: [0$] Complete compressing and decompressing tool, integrates in the shell (context menu) and supports most common archive types.
uTorrent: [0$] My favorite torrent client, it handles alot of connections and bytes with a minimum of computer lag.
GOM Player: [0$] This is the best video player around. Quick to load, it will play everything you throw at it (as long as you have the codec installed)
CDBurnerXP: [0$] Makes compilation, archives, burn isos, cds, dvds, etc.