My “Must-Have” Software Applications

I use a lot of software in the process of making BEEP. Just for kicks, I thought I’d take a stab at enumerating them:

Commercial Software:

• Autodesk Maya – digital content creation
• Beepa Fraps – recording OpenGL viewport
• Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 – yeah, I need all of em

Open-Source Software:

• Audacity - for audio editing / recording
• Firefox – internet browsing / operating system
• Open Office – word processing / spreadsheets
• Ubuntu Linux – for compiling/programming
• gcc – my C++ compiler
• SciTE - text editing in windows
• Code::Blocks – programming IDE
• VLC Player – multimedia playback
• Flyspray – project management / bug tracking
• Gimp – 2d image editing
• InkScape – 2d vector art (all of BEEP’s art is done in InkScape)
• SpeedCrunch – a handy general calculator program

Online Software:

• Gmail – email
• Facebook – marketing
• Twitter – marketing
• Wordpress – this blog
• Dropbox – online backup storage
• Vimeo – online video storage
• Google Analytics – awesome web statistics
• Google Search – research, research, research

Hopefully you found something you can use. I’m a bit obsessive about finding the right tool for the job so you can be assured these are all descent-to-excellent applications.

Interesting how short the list of commercial applications is! But Maya costs enough to feed a small country so you can’t accuse me of being anti-capitalism! (And no, Blender is not a viable free alternative to Maya. It’s just not.)

Am I using something dumb? Missing something obvious? Let me know in the comments below…