Jul. 14th, 2007
Tagged by
schwa242
Jul. 14th, 2007 05:10 pmList 3 of your most favourite (and preferably obscure) software programs and why they're useful.
- Some of these I've mentioned before. They are all free:
- DDD, king of graphical debuggers. This is a front end that sits atop GDB and several other debuggers (including the standard ones for Java, Perl and Python), and gives you not just a pretty source-level look at the code, but also lovely graphical displays of linked data structures as networks of boxes. Truly superb for chasing after any malfunction in your code, and (in my opinion) far superior to the Windows Visual Studio-inspired interface that many debuggers seem to have converged on.
- Celestia, a free interactive diagram of the universe that lets you fly around among the stars and planets. I'm not sure "useful" is the word here—you can use it as a sky map for amateur astronomy, but other tools are probably better for that—but it's free and beautiful, especially in conjunction with downloadable add-ons.
- Hugin, an open-source panorama stitcher/perspective reprojector/distortion remover for your photos (essentially a unified GUI for Pano Tools and a suite of related utilities such as nona and enblend). It is scarily user-unfriendly and will eat all the CPU cycles you can throw at it, but once you take a week or two to figure out the controls, you can use it to perform miracles.