Believe it or not, this place is about more than fools and their genitals. Sometimes stopping bye each day might just net you something useful, and now might just be one of those times.
Lifehacker has released what they’re calling the Lifehacker Pack for Windows. It’s their list of what they think are the most must have programs for Windows users.
Some of these, like CCleaner, Dropbox, µTorrent, Winamp and Thunderbird I use all the time, some I’ve heard good things about and some I’ve never tried, but there’s a lot of useful stuff here. I can’t vouch for the accessibility of everything, but you’ll never know unless you try things out, right?
One of the interesting things I learned from reading this is that Mozilla is planning to slow down development on Thunderbird. They’re not giving up on it, they’re just going to focus on security and stability. You know, the important stuff that sometimes gets taken for granted by program developers in favour of bunches of flashy crap that tends to mess up core functionality.
The article sort of paints this as a bad thing, but I don’t see how unless this is the first step toward its ultimate demise. Thunderbird does everything a mail client should do and then some, but it has its troubles. Hopefully this shift will allow them the time and resources to fix some of the ongoing bugs I’ve experienced since switching to it back in 2010.
For instance, that annoying thing where if you press the escape key one too many times, the program closes.
Or how about when you close it either intentionally or by accident, it doesn’t terminate correctly and a dialogue pops up about 20 to 30 seconds after the fact telling you to click ok to end the process? that one drives me bonkers.
Or perhaps the one where trying to accomplish anything in TBird while it’s updating your RSS feeds is pretty much a lost cause because every keystroke is on about a 3 second delay.
those are just the ones I can come up with with no thought whatsoever. If finding 3 is that easy, you know there are more. It would be nice to see them fixed before any more bells and/or whistles find their way in. Would make for an all around better user experience, I think.
