What desktop apps do you use?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27276

by danw • 19 years ago

5 31 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

danw2• 19 years ago

With web apps increasingly taking over from desktop, which desktops apps do you still use?

As a starter my mac os x dock has Firefox, Mail, Terminal, iCal, TextWrangler, Adium, NicePlayer & Democracy. Everything else has been slowly replaced by web apps. Which app will go online next?

davidw• 19 years ago

emacs, rxvt, firefox, openoffice covers most of it.

nostrademons4• 19 years ago

Firefox, Thunderbird (occasionally), Winamp, Gaim, uTorrent, Winzip, Acrobat, Ghostview, VMWare, SSH. Netbeans when I need to do work stuff, and IE for testing browser compatibility. MSPaint for quick graphic edits, and Notepad++ for quick text edits. Occasionally Civ3 or SimCity 2000 when I feel like playing a game, and the DVD burning software that came with the machine. Nothing else.

twism• 19 years ago

itunes, eclipse, gtalk, paint.NET, NaviCat, WinSCP, Putty, Windows Task Manager.

larkin• 19 years ago

BTW, why do you want to know that? :)

danw2• 19 years ago

To know which web apps need building next! If a lot of people are still using a desktop app when it can be made a web apps you've got to wonder why..

ktus• 19 years ago

In that case, then how about a web version of emacs.

nostrademons4• 19 years ago

How about a web version of VMWare? Then I could run Firefox, inside of VMWare, inside of Firefox, inside of VMWare, inside of Firefox...

Edit: Oh shit... http://wubuntu.weejewel.net/

abstractbill• 19 years ago

I use emacs, firefox, iterm and itunes.

I sometimes think about getting rid of iterm, but never seem to be able to find an emacs terminal mode that does full ansi support perfectly.

entelarust• 19 years ago

safari, firefox, textmate, transmit, photoshop cs3, adium, transmission, netnewswire, itunes, syncrosvn

omouse• 19 years ago

firefox, opera, safari, emacs, sonata, mpd, ncmpc, openoffice, gimp, inkscape, mirage, frostwire, gftp

tx4• 19 years ago

------ Work ------

Eclipse, Visual Studio, Photoshop, WordPad, FireFox

------ Fun -------

Picasa, Excel, Quicken, RAW Shooter Essentials, Bibble.

The only "online application" I use is gmail :) So much for "everything is moving to the Web" hype.

nostrademons4• 19 years ago

Or it could be that other people have moved to the web sooner than you have. ;-) Most of the planning and early design work was done over Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Groups, and Skype. (We mostly moved to AIM/phone/going to each others houses when we dropped from 5 founders to 2.) FictionAlley.org has a staff of close to 200, all managed through Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Messenger. Even at work, I often find myself communicating over AIM with my cubemates. And I talk to my boss over AIM a lot more than in person, since he's on the other end of the building.

tx4• 19 years ago

No kidding. :)

Is this thread about working or talking? Surely it's hard to collaborate with people using desktop applications without an internet connection.

The point I was trying to make is that "death of desktop" is a myth. A new buzzword, invented to get more PR for whoever is NOT developing "desktop software".

While harsh reality is that there are applications and there are web applications. And we all make our money using "desktop" software every day. Moreover, lately it become accepted (and even hot) not to pay for it (apache, mongrel, linux, eclipse, ruby interpreter, PHP, photoshop, firefox, internet explorer, even freakin BIOS). And proclaiming it "dead", while being 110% dependant on it, is at least superficial.

And if you ask people why they build web apps, the answer will not be "because desktop is dead", but probably (if they are being honest) because regular software takes a lot more skill, more learning time, more development time and frankly it's just not as "sexy" these days. Sexy or not, it surely is not dead.

We depend on "desktop" so much that people often pay for it, while "web software" is almost never considered valuable enough to get people to open their wallets for. To me that's pretty pathetic: not to be able to charge for what you've built, and becoming yet another semi-useful parasite sitting on AdSense wellfare.

brianmckenzie• 19 years ago

Firefox, TextMate, Terminal, OpenOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, iTunes, iChat, Pro Tools LE

myoung8• 19 years ago

Mail.app [1], iCal, AddressBook, Safari, FF, Skype, iTunes, iChat, iPhoto, Preview, Excel, Word, PPT, Photoshop

[1] You probably just shat a brick, but I like mail on my desktop...

dfranke• 19 years ago

On Linux: Firefox, mutt, emacs, xchat, gaim, amarok, skype, gimp, LaTeX, Mathematica, VMWare.

On 'doze: Firefox, Visual Studio, Quicken, OpenOffice.

The only one of these that I'd like to replace with a web app is Quicken. Buxfer looks promising but it's not nearly there yet.

staunch• 19 years ago

gkrellm, gnome-terminal, firefox, gvim, gaim, xchat, thunderbird, xine, mplayer, inkscape, gimp.

Linux with WindowMaker.

thisisnotmyname• 19 years ago

gvim, cygwin, firefox, open office, the gimp, visual studio, mysql, sql server express, itunes, aim

jim-in-austin2• 19 years ago

firefox, filezilla, puTTY, notepad++, nvu, itunes, irfanview, truecrypt, csved, calc (not what you think), excel and... nethack!

jim-in-austin2• 19 years ago

calc = http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/calc/ csved = http://csved.sjfrancke.nl/index.html

mynameishere• 19 years ago

I don't think we're being honest here. I use 5-6 different media players alone. Most of you seem to be boning up on your nerd credentials, because I don't see too many mentions of Doom or Quake, or MSFT Office, or Notepad, or IM clients, or Winzip/winrar, etc. The most popular dev environment seems to be Emacs. This tells me that your favorite language is still in diapers. I develop 10x faster in Eclipse than I ever could in Emacs. (I used emacs for a year coding C--it's okay, but its whole 'culture' harkens back to 300 baud modems.)

Some things that seem non-desktop, like Flash, really are in a sense--the connection to the browser and the web is very weak.

darose• 19 years ago

The ones I use the most are:

firefox, gaim/pidgin, rdesktop, eclipse, konsole, thunderbird, konqueror (as file manager, not browser), kedit, audacious, squirrel sql

What desktop apps do you use?

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