Productive programmers bag of candy

The bag of candy is up for grabs!

You can either get these tools by following the links below yourself, or as a single zipfile right here. Enjoy!

The zipfile is identical to the one Jan-Erik and I handed out on a stick during the end of our lightning talk at the wonderful Smidig2009 conference earlier today. Thanks for a great conference!

Now, for the contents. Divided into categories, the bag of candy consists of the following:

Category 0: Bread & Butter
Bread & Butter is basically the stuff you need to get around. We didn’t originally intend to include any bread & butter in the bag of candy, as much of the infrastructure essentials such as continuous integration (we would have chosen Hudson) and version control (we would probably have chosen Subversion, or GIT ) is already given in our project. However, we decided to include some of the smaller utils that, albeit not being candy, should be part of every productive programmers toolkit.

• SysInternalsSuite – a Swiss Army Knife that lets you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications
• WinSCP – the best SCP and SFTP client for Windows. Works well with Putty.
• SyncToy – Synching content between folders just got easy
• Notepad++ – Just a decent, free text editor.
• FSCapture – Powerful, simple util for creating screen captures in a snap

Category 1: Structure your thoughts

• FreeMind – A great mind mapping tool. Is better aligned with the brain than a traditional todo-list

Category 2: Effective launching and indexing

• Launchy – A lot of competitors here, but Launchy is a nice one. A document or wiki page is no longer than a few keystrokes away.

Category 3: Stay in the zone

• Tweak UI– should have been included by default in Windows, but isn’t. No more annoying balloon tips!
• Command window here– another MS Powertoy that does pretty much what it says on the tin. Adds an option to the explorer context menu: Open Command Prompt Here.
• ClipX – Unlimited clipboard and a visual representation of both text and images. Tip: Change the paste shortcut to Alt+v (Mac-like!)
• Instant Boss – A neat timeboxing tool
• Manic Time – Monitor what you actually spend your time on
• Ghoster – focuses the active window and dims everything else.

Category 4: Automate what you do often

• AutoHotKey – a great all purpose tool for writing powerful macros real easy
• Cygwin – Almost bread and butter, a Linux like environment to Windows.
• Selenium IDE – Firefox plugin that provides an integrated development environment for Selenium tests.

Category 5: Effective developer tools

• Firebug – A FireFox plugin that lets you inspect CSS, DOM, javascript and more
• JADClipse – A Eclipse plugin that decompiles class files, seamlessly integrated in Eclipse
• Mousefeed – Theres a keyboard shortcut for everything in Eclipse. Mousefeed forces you to learn and use them.
• JDiff – Ever needed to compare two versions of an API? JDiff presents the diff in a Javadoc-ish style
• Apache Chainsaw – A GUI based log viewer – gives structure to that gigantic logfile, and live logging too!

The slides from Smidig2009
Bare in mind, these are in Norwegian!