For those that haven’t been following along at home, we’ve been doing an entire series of netbook related posts. Today’s posting is about what software we enjoy using on our Netbooks, specifically Windows compatible software (after all we did just talk about installing Windows 7). Most of the software here is probably going to come across as “run of the mill” to tech-heads, but I’m also taking a small bit to explain WHY I think it is good to have on a Netbook.
- Firefox — I’m a big fan of open source software, but more to the point I really loathe Internet Explorer and love my Firefoxy. On top of my love for it as a browser, Firefox has a lot of extensions and communicability. This is really important because you can make Firefox better fit the Netbook screen size. In other words, you can make the UI tiny and have as much space as possible for browsing (critical when you screen is only 5″ tall). The next blog post in the series will be about Optimizing Firefox for Netbooks.
- The Combined Community Codec Pack — CCCP is the best all around media playing package I know of. I’m a big fan of Media Player Classic, which they package as one of the two players in the CCCP. MPC has one feature that I find critical for Netbooks, the ability to boost the volume (In MPC — View > Options > Audio Switcher > Check “Normalize” and “Regain volume” then drag the “Boost” slider up as needed > Ok). I find that with some environments (say a car) and some video files — even with the volume all the way up (in Windows too) it just isn’t enough — this is where the Boost comes in. At the current version, if you use MPC on Windows 7 to watch anything with Subtitles, it wont work unless you follow this fix.
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Skype — Since we use Skype at the office, it is a requirement for me to have it. That being said, Skype is useful for even the part time users, because of its excellent VoIP to POTS services. Translation: You can make damn cheap calls to and from anywhere in the world. If you make a lot of calls, Skype has many subscription plans. Even if you don’t, it is only $0.021 per minute to call the US, which is cheaper than most people pay for long distance inside the US. Now keep in mind if you are in San Francisco or Sydney, it makes no difference to Skype — as long as you can get on the internet. Also for those really long trips Skype has Video Chat, which works well since most Netbooks have webcams.
Tomboy — This is a note-taking application that was originally written in C# and uses Mono for Linux. Since Mono was originally written to replicate .NET on Linux, it is fairly easy to take Mono projects back to Windows, which is what they’ve done here. In order to install Tomboy you’ll need to install GTK# for .NET first. I used Tomboy originally when I was running Ubuntu and found it a decent, lightweight note taker. It doesn’t have a ton of features, but it doesn’t really need them. It has a spell checker, simple styling, and support for as many “notes” as you’d like. Another option is Notepad++ which is a far more powerful version than Windows’ own Notepad. Generally I’ve got both of these.
One resource to keep in mind through all of this is PortableApps.com. While they aren’t packaging apps for netbooks (actually they package them to run on USB drives sans install) specifically, having prepackaged applications can be handy in many cases. Generally they are fairly speedy and it saves you from needing to have a bunch of “crap” installed.
There are hundreds of pieces of software that work “well” on Netbooks (or are just plain required — like Adobe), unfortunately I don’t have time to use them all. If you’ve got any other suggestions for good Netbook applications, I’m interested in hearing it. Especially in the way of music players/organizer. Right now I’m using Songbird which is lighter than iTunes (while still supporting iPods) but still not exactly the smallest crayon in my Netbook box. Suggestions for Twitter clients also very welcome, normally John and I both use TweetDeck (and we do love it), but it isn’t exactly a lightweight either (especially since it also needs Air); thus we are both on the lookout for an alternative option.