My Work Taskbar – 26+ Applications at Once

Above and to the right are straight screen shots of what one of my workstations looks like. It’s almost no wonder that these days many of us require much more than 8GB of RAM. It seems that I am all over the place.

These are all applications that I tend to have open all at one time. I am typically programming in around 4 languages at a time and doing various other work such as Photoshop, FTP/Remote/putty file drops, all while reading an FRD. I don’t usually think of it from that perspective. So, I thought I’d walk through all the applications and share what this developer has on his plate most recently.

1. Snip Tool – Screenshots are important!
2. Microsoft Outlook 2010 – Email, Calendar, Contacts
3. Windows Explorer – File System
4. Google Chrome 20 – Primary Browser (virtual)
5. Google Chromium – Experimental Browser used for mobile development
6. Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 – Typically for Microsoft Apps
7. Mozilla Firefox 12 – When I have too…
8. Adobe Photoshop CS5 – Images
9. Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio – SQL Database Interaction
10. Microsoft Visual Studio – .NET (VB, C#) Development & TFS
11. Eclipse – Java Development, Including Android
12. Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 – ColdFusion Development
13. Notepad++ 5.9 – JS, HTML, Quick Development
14. PSPad 4.5.4 – PHP, JS, HTML, XML Development
15. Remote Desktop Connection Manager v2.2 – All the Remote Machines managed
16. Real VNC – Connect to Mac OS X machines
17. Visual Studio x64 Command Prompt – Juiced Prompt with additional TFS tools
18. putty – Connect to all the Linux boxes out there
19. CoreFTP LE – Quick FTP Access
20. Google Chrome Developer Tools – Developer Tools
21. Microsoft Office Excel 2010 – Spreadsheets
22. Microsoft Office Word 2010 – Documents
23. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 – Internal Communication
24. Microsoft Visio 2010 – Development Flow, ER, UML Diagrams
25. Eclipse (another instance) – Java Development (different workspace)
26. Control Panel – Just happened to be there

I should also mention that I typically have a couple of local Apache instances running PHP, MySQL, and ColdFusion, with at least 10 IIS websites, as many monitors as I can find to hook up to this particular setup (3), a test Android phone as of late, and two mice depending if I’m using Photoshop or doing other tasks… In all honesty, I think I’ve had crazier setups in the past… read my 6 monitor setup post. Any tools I’m missing?