Software I Use

Here are the software tools that I personally use and (sometimes) recommend. Unless otherwise noted, all software here is for the Windows platform.

Category	Product
Text editor	The SemWare Editor Professional (http://www.semware.com/). This editor is available in a console (text-based) version and a GUI version. The GUI version is nearly identical to the console version. It is very fast and extremely flexible due to its internal macro programming language. It has full undo/redo, color source highlighting, and more. Highly recommended.
Image processing	Adobe Photoshop Elements (http://www.adobe.com/). It's not the cheapest, but good enough for my needs. (Mac or Windows)
Office suite	OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org/). It doesn't have an e-mail application, but it should offer plenty of power for the average user.
CSS editor	TopStyle Lite (http://www.bradsoft.com/) This is a freeware version of a very handy CSS editor.
CD authoring	Nero from Ahead software (http://www.nero.com/). It is fast, stable, and covers most features an advanced user is likely to need.
MSI authoring	Advanced Installer (http://www.advancedinstaller.com/) is a very good GUI for creating Windows Installer (MSI) databases.
Remote control	UltraVNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a freeware remote control tool that operates over a TCP connection (http://forum.ultravnc.net/). UltraVNC is a Windows-specific version of VNC that is faster than the standard VNC flavor, and it also supports domain authentication.
Software development	Free Pascal (http://www.freepascal.org/) is a free cross-platform Pascal compiler. It can behave like Turbo Pascal and Delphi and offers its own enhancements to the language such as operator overloading.
Firewall	ISA Server (http://www.microsoft.com/isaserver/). It's quite expensive, but it's an HTTP proxy server, content cache, and NAT firewall all in one. Organizations can leverage their existing Windows NT or active directory account databases to gain very granular access control.