Cubic

I spent a good chunk of today updating this blog to use the latest features of Blogger. Lots of AJAX'ey drag-n-drop goodness is involved, but that's sort of what people expect from Google. Anyway, the right-hand column of this blog will always have lists of stuff I believe to be the best applications around and I've categorized them into various activities. For instance, I tend to be an application developer first but I also wear the hats of web developer, IT administrator, and graphics artist. For the most part I avoid putting stuff that costs money in the right-hand column just because most developers don't want to spend a lot of money on good stuff. And there's plenty of good stuff to be had for almost no cost if you spend the time looking for it. Which I've already done. I mentioned that I'm a graphics artist but didn't put up a category for it. That's because all the tools I use are well known: Photoshop. Make that one tool that I use.

I'm already hearing all sorts of disaster stories involving Windows Vista, Office 2007, and non-Microsoft applications: Applications crashing. (LOTS of Explorer crashes being reported). Companies refusing to release updated drivers for things like 2 year old printers (and other hardware - e.g. video cards).* Application UI problems - ranging from visual artifacts to complete unusability. Applications refusing to run. VPN software not working right or at all. * Microsoft apparently hosed the Unified Driver model for Vista so one driver package can't be used for multiple devices. ATI and Nvidia are up in arms as is every hardware manufacturer...so the various companies are just making drivers for their latest devices to cut their losses. Hurts the consumer, but there is no way around it unless Microsoft fixes this big blunder. Idiots. Haven't heard of any data loss or BSOD scenarios yet, but given that a lot of hardware and software doesn't even work under Vista, I