Apps and Alternatives

[pasithea]

Come to think of it...

What do you guys do with your computers? What sorts of applications do you own/run/steal, and how much do you use them?

I confess that my computer is more or less my entire universe.


There's the basic set of apps that I imagine everyone runs. Music (iTunes), web browser (FireFox), chat programs (Audium AIM/Yahoo), Colloquy (IRC), Savatar (MU*)) Mail (Mac Mail), Skype, SecondLife, etc. I also frequently play DVDs on my computer when I'm working on other stuff in my studio.

Then there's basic office type stuff that one frequently needs. Spreadsheet, text editor, etc. I mostly run OpenOffice, though lately I've been using GoogleDocs more. I also have google calendar linked into iCal but that's still not fully satisfactory for how I'd really like to use it.

At work I use it to develop in C++. I run XCode with G++4.0. XCode isn't the greatest IDE in the universe. It's got a lot of things I like about it and the debugger is faster and friendlier than GDB but I admit that Microsoft's Debugger is superior (though their IDE is not)

I also do on and off development in a variety of shell scripting languages, java, perl, tcl, and python. Mostly for work, sometimes for personal use. This is where I get into needing the power of Unix on my machine. I have lots of neat little scripts for re-timing and renumbering animation sequences that are stored as individual images. This is extremely difficult to do on Windows. I also have a bunch of scripts for a variety of bot and game projects and other things that I make.

Outside of work, I use my computer mostly for artwork and animation. This is also where I spend the majority of my money on my computer.

I use Photoshop and Illustrator the most, probably followed by Frame Thief, then ToonBoom or Maya, then Premiere, After Effects, and Flash. I also shouldn't forget my sound programs. Audacity, Garage Band, Sound Booth, and my weird little apps which translate whistling/singing into a score in Garage Band and my guitar tuner app (I'd be lost without that. I can't tune by ear to save my soul)

These are the apps that I'd have the most difficulty finding replacements for on some other platform. GIMP has made a lot of progress but it's still somewhat lacking compared to Photoshop. AFAIK, there isn't an equivalent of Illustrator or ToonBoom for linux, and I'm pretty certain there's nothing that compares to Premiere or After Effects. The closest thing I can think of would be Combustion and ... I got Combustion for free with Maya... After a few days of serious hate, I uninstalled it. It's supremely inferior.

Likewise, I might be able to find a few things that would output flash animation, but ToonBoom provides that for me. When I use Flash it's actually to use Flash's scripting language. I more or less hate Flash but sometimes it's a necessary evil. Maya only recently became available on Linux, and there's Hash and Blender. So I could conceivably switch for 3D stuff.

I'm sure there must be basic sound editors and frame-capture programs, but I don't know if they'd be as full-featured as the ones I presently enjoy.

I have no games on my computer, and I very rarely play games period. Games are probably the only selling point for Windows over Mac,and honestly, most of the good games are on console systems these days, so why bother?



Anyhow... That's what I use and why I use the system I use. How about you guys? What sorts of apps do you run on a regular basis?

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

There's Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative, but I think its UI is awkward the same way the Gimp is. In general the free software world's UIs are ass. I don't think there are any open-source animation programs.

When my machine boots, it'll run Mail, Adium, iTunes, and Illustrator. I'll usually launch Safari (or a Webkit nightly) soon after. That covers most everything I do on my machine, really. Now and then I'll enter something into iCal.

I never use 'office' functionality. I don't even have a 'word processor' on my machine; I use either TextEdit or TextMate, depending on what I want to type.

Oh, and there's Flash, but I really only ever boot that piece of shit when someone's paying me to. Flash CS3 is unusably slow on my little G4.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I've been using googledocs for things like making my packing list for Burning Man. Being able to access a document remotely and share it with someone else for editing is quite nice.

I also confess I've been using spreadsheets to categorize mushrooms I've found in the area. It's not the best method available but it is functional. I also sometimes use spreadsheets to make x-sheets for my animation.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I use Google Docs for things Nick wants to work on with me. Most of my text lives on my machine or on paper, though. I did use their spreadsheet to calculate stuff for the show because I didn't feel like installing one just for that.

[glych.livejournal.com]

My PC:

Photoshop, mostly. I also use Word, code in Notepad 2, Firefox with webmonkey webmasters tools plugin installed to help me with the CSS. Itunes and Media Player for burning CDs.

My Mac:

Photoshop, mostly. Illustrator, In Design, After Effects, Garage Band, Word, Firefox, Itunes, Ical, stickies, and Preview.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Your opinion of combustion comes from, I can only speculate, ignorance of it's true power.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Nope. I gave it a week of serious attempts at use before I broke down and bought an entire new set of Adobe apps. It's genuinely terrible. (Though perhaps it's only the macintosh implementation that's so bad, but since it's openGL, it seems like it's just bad)

Anyhow. The UI was defaulted to bigger than my display with no way to reconfigure it. It was painfully slow. It crashed frequently, and the feature set appeared to be like a very limited version of Adobe After Effects.

In short, it stunk.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Quite the reverse, Adobe After Effects is like the playschool version of combustion. When being schooled in it I did not have the same problems you attest to, but I can assure you that if you were properly using after effects to composite ashy in front of that chroma key the results could have turned out much more... consistent. I hesitate to say better :) It is a vastly complicated program though. I remember hours of plotting 3d space and camera motions to make film x line up with film y and in-software created motion graphic z-z'-z''-z''' etc. In the end though I had a picture of a camera panning around me while I stood in a strange black no space which was continually populated by strange hexagonal patterns and more patterns still swirling around me in a spiraling cylindrical path and all sorts of stuff. I couldn't do it again. Never touched the program after the class I had on it. Massively complex.

[centauress.livejournal.com]

Functions are useless if the UI is so bad.

And its UI is terrible.

Perhaps if the UI could be manipulated either on screen or in configuration files to take out useless buttons and scale the UI to fit on various screens...

...But it couldn't even remember where on the screen it last was. UI elements that don't scale are useless.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

The program's not broken, you are! You don't know him like I do! *runs to bedroom crying and slams the door.*

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Apps I use regularly: Audacity, common IMs(should get pidgin to replace multiple crappy add-caked IM programs), Firefox, SimpleMU, Folding @ home, Adobe Illustrator, Open Canvas, Winamp, BitLord, MS office, soon to be replace with open office when my new computer gets up and running. Lately BitPim for hacking my verizon phone.

[salia-chan.livejournal.com]

I use pidgin for all IM stuffs, and lately I've been using VNC a fair amount when I wanted to poke at other computers. Or Xming when I want to poke at a Xwindows running machine. Random video games, gimp when I need to edit images beyond what simple stuff paint can do.

My main apps would probably be firefox, winamp, and IRC really though. I've been mostly playing megaman 9 the past while, which is a Wii game rather than a PC one. I'm planing on playing through all the rest of them though, to the extent of my abilities at least.

[xinjinmeng.livejournal.com]

Gracious, I am so old fashioned. I still cling to Corel software and to the old-fashioned Microsoft Office suites. Trillian is used for instant-messaging; BeipMU is my current muck client of choice -- I have installed both on Windows and Ubuntu computers (using WINE, of course).

I do not idly confess to playing video games. :)