Oops, My Start Menu is Showing
I just popped open my Start Menu today (yes, my de facto operating system is Windows, I’m sorry) and it struck me as funny. The top icons (for Internet and email programs) are fixed based on the default programs you have set for these tasks, but the rest of the menu is based on your most commonly used programs. Therefore, by looking at the programs in my Start Menu, it should tell me something about myself.
Here is an image of my Start Menu as of right now:
What does this say about me?
- Firefox is my default browser. I take great pride in this, even though it just seems like the obvious choice. If you’re not using it, then you should try out a standards-compliant, open-source, secure, and extensible browser for a change.
- Outlook remains my default email client.. My school (and my life) pretty much runs on meeting requests, calendars, tasks, etc. I haven’t felt the need to find an alternative yet.
- Dreamweaver: the program currently atop the frequently used list. I make an awful lot of webpages, especially over break (or at least, I do a lot of work on a few.) Dreamweaver is my editor of choice. Don’t worry, I never ever use WYSIWIG mode. However, the intellisense, auto completion, and project management are really nice, so don’t get on my case for not being “old school” and using notepad instead. You go ahead and try to remember which attributes the a tag can and can’t have. I’ll be using my handy popup menu.
- Fireworks takes second place. Again, not really a surprise. Originally, I used Photoshop for my web layouts. However, I’ve since changed over to Fireworks due to its better support for vector-style manipulation of shapes and the pixel-perfect control that you can have. I know I should be using Illustrator or Inkscape or something, but I’m really comfortable with Fireworks. It gets the job done. My one pet peeve: I can’t save in any vector formats that anything else can read. I’m hoping Adobe will keep the Fireworks line since they bought Macromedia and fix this problem instead of eliminating the program all together.
- Photoshop is next up. A close finish behind FIreworks, I use Photoshop for any photo manipulation, enhancement, etc. It’s a big part of my digital photography workflow, which means it gets used just slightly less than Fireworks. One area of weirdness is between the two programs are the “Save for Web” functions. PS can save JPG better than FW, but FW seems to do GIFs better. Weird.
- Internet Explorer (a.k.a Internet Exploder.) This program is here for one reason and one reason only. Unfortunately, a large portion of the general public still uses this crap-pile of a browser for their browsing needs. This means that, when I design standards-compliant pages, I have to make sure that IE can still render everything. This means many extra hours of tweaking, testing, and scouring the net for documented solutions to the many bugs in IE’s rendering engine. Microsoft has probably wasted more of my time with this browser than any other single factor in my life. Thank you!
- Notepad. What can I say? Sometimes I just need to edit text documents. I use them for lists, notes, and some editing of web stuff (on occasion.) I still haven’t found a Notepad replacement that I really like. Crimson Editor is close but a little too bulky and with some odd quirks. Everyone keeps screaming about JEdit, but I don’t think they have that for Windows…
- SmartFTP sneaks in at the end of the list. I’ve got to have a way to get all of this stuff onto servers, right? At one point, I had a program that can make FTP connections look like mapped drives in Windows, but it was a little buggy, so I eventually went back to my old standby.
That’s it. Not a very surprising list (at least to me). If this were during the school year, I’m sure that my start menu would look vastly different, but I’m still on break, so things like MATLAB, WinEdt, and Cadence/PSPICE aren’t showing up. One omission that is surprising is Warcraft 3. I guess I don’t play as many video games as I thought.
What’s in your Start Menu (or Mac or Linux equivalent listing)?
Comments (4 So Far)
1
Jon Chambers says:
HELLO GOOD SIR !!
Two quick comments:
1) You should definitely check out the IE Tab Firefox extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1419&application=firefox). It lets you embed an IE window inside of a Firefox tab, which is wonderful for keeping your window count down. Also wonderful for quickly paging between the two.
2) There IS a JEdit port for Windows (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/jedit/jedit42install.exe) that I use religiously. JEdit is one of those apps that you can customize to do just about anything, but not in the emacs sense of editing arcane config files. It’s worth at least taking for a spin, even if you decide that you don’t like it.
Rock on!
-Jon
2
Sean says:
Actually, I do in fact already use the IE Tab Firefox extension. I think that Windows still interprets this as “opening the application” somehow, which is why IE still shows up in the menu. I also occasionally open IE proper, because sometimes I don’t trust IE Tab’s rendering of a page. It IS an excellent extension. Highly recommended.
3
Charles G says:
BRAVO! I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks Fireworks rocks. I work in graphic design/web dev and I love Fireworks.
Most of my co-workers are Photoshop guys, but I have to spend most of my day making very lean sites and animated GIFs. Fireworks beats ImageReady hands down.
I’m wondering what the guys at Macrodobe are going to do with it.
Now that PS CS2 has it’s own symbol feature, I hope they don’t kill Fireworks.
4
Rob Sanheim says:
(yes, I’m late to this post…)
* JEdit is a java app, so its cross platform. It runs fine on win32 but doesn’t quite have a native look.
* You should really check out notepad2 - it beats notepad in every way and still loads very quickly. Once you have syntax highlighting in notepad you won’t go back. The url is http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
Make a Comment