The 2007 CyberNet Awards is wrapping things up by highlighting what we believe to be the Most Productive Apps of 2007. One of our favorite things to write about are programs that can help increase productivity, and it’s only fitting to close with this award. A big thanks to all the developers of the following programs, because without them I don’t know how I would get anything done!
The 2007 CyberNet Award for Most Productive App goes to…
–3rd Place: Foxit Reader–
This is an absolutely incredible PDF reader, and after using it you’ll likely never go back to Adobe Acrobat Reader. The reason why this has made me more productive is because of the incredible startup speed. It normally takes just 1 or 2 seconds to startup, compared to Adobe Acrobat’s 10 or 15 seconds (when you don’t let Adobe pre-load its software).
It doesn’t sound like much, but maybe you’ll see the significance once we put it into perspective. Lets say you open your PDF reader 3 times a day, and by using Foxit you save an average of 10 seconds on the loading time. Personally I know I open more than 3 PDF’s a day, so I think that is pretty conservative. That’s 30 seconds each day you could save by using Foxit, and in a year’s time that equates to over 3 hours of saved time! Even if you just open it once a day that’s one hour that you would save in a year.
–2nd Place: Launchy–
Launchy is arguably the best application launcher available, and the fact that it’s free makes it even better. They really upped their game with the new Launchy 2.0 that was just released a few weeks ago, which added a more unified experience by integrating settings into a single window. It also included some new skins which really makes the app look astounding.
I know that many of you rely on Launchy each and everyday to assist with finding the programs and documents you use the most. Having to hunt through the Start Menu or Windows Explorer to find what you want can waste so much time, but Launchy helps regain the time that would otherwise be lost.
–1st Place: Microsoft Office 2007–
I couldn’t help but give Microsoft first place in this category. Their new Office 2007 has made me a hundred times more productive thanks to the intuitive Ribbons that have replaced the old-fashioned toolbars. I find myself using features I never knew existed, and it looks so darn good. Yeah, I’m a sucker for eye candy.
I first started using Microsoft Office 2007 over a year ago when it was still in the pre-release stage. It took a few weeks to get accustomed to where some of the options had moved to, but in the end I find myself saving loads of time. A big thanks goes out to the developers who came up with the idea for “live previews,” because that alone deserves a gold medal. And the Mini Toolbar is sheer genius.
–And Your Winners–
Now it is time for you to chime in! Let us know in the comments who earned your “Most Productive App? award.
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Tags: Software, 2007 CyberNet Awards
Related Posts:
- 2007 CyberNet Awards Recap
- Announcing the 2007 CyberNet Awards
- CyberNet’s Year in Review: November-December
- 2007 CyberNet Awards: Best Tiny Programs
- 2007 CyberNet Awards: Most Innovative Products
#3= What about PDF-XChange? It is essentially the same as Foxit only you can edit w/out getting the mark on your page.
#2= Well deserved. Lightning fast, EZ, just the best.
#1= Never used, but looks excellent from what I’ve seen. I just looked up the preview formats, and it looks excellent!
It was a tough call, but the thing that tipped me over to give the award to Foxit was the ease of portability. The fact that you can use it on any computer via a USB drive was a big winner, but I do like PDF-XChange a little bit more than Foxit.
I have Foxit on my USB drive, but I use PDF-XChange as my default viewer. The tabbed interface is my favorite feature. Besides, how many apps include an icon to open the current file in a competitor’s application (it’s on the lower right in PDF-XChange)?
Launchy also gets a huge vote from me, especially since I just found out that the Explory plugin capability is built in with 2.0(you now need to include the backslash - C:\, not just C:). The 2.0 beta of Find-And-Run-Robot was recently released to anyone, rather than just previous donators. It’s more powerful and more customizable than Launchy, but this is a rare case for me where an app with plenty of out-of-the-box functionality beats one with too much tweaking neecessary to use its prodigious amount of functions. Also, FARR is seriously nagware.
As far as Office 2007 is concerned, it seems bloated on my laptop (AMD64 2.0 GHz, 1.2 GB RAM). Just opening a task in Outlook takes up to 2 seconds! I might like it on my desktop once I install the new dual-core processor and 4 GB RAM I just ordered.
The live previews in Office 2007 is really great
btw, why there is only one LINK element for opera widget ?
edit: and the “/”(slash) to close the tag is missing
Funny to see people fuss so much over app launchers. While I also have Launchy, an app launcher doesn’t really doesn’t make me more productive than what Windows offers since it has SO many different ways to launch any app.
And for Office 2007, it deserves that surely. One of the slickest looking UIs with power features and an amazing addon market (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/default.aspx) in which it has a FF-like advantage over OpenOffice.
Well, on my new laptop with vista on it, the start menu is a good enough launchy replacement (the search thing is awesome)…so I really haven’t used launchy in ages.
Microsoft office…screw it. I’ll never use it. Between notepad and google docs, I’m good to go. I don’t need tons of features or eyecandy, so those work fine for me.
My productivity app of the year is Firefox. nuff said.
I just replaced Foxit as my default PDF viewer a week or two ago. It seems that they have “updated” it or something, and I can’t do anything that I used to be able to do with it without upgrading to the paid version. Fair enough, I guess. I went with PDF-Xchange. It’s every bit as good as Foxit used to be, but more flexible.
WordPerfect has had a similar feature for years, so it’s definately not a Microsoft idea
But it’s still very nice.
Have you not heard of Keybreeze? It’s much better than Launchy — more features, more customization, less memory, and it’s free as well. - http://www.keybreeze.com
Why would there be more than one link element for the Opera widget? And we fixed the missing slash, thanks!
I only use Launchy on computers where I don’t have Vista. Which is currently just one right now. I hardly ever use it anymore, but it’s still an amazing program that has made my life a little easier this year.
I don’t think they downgraded the program at all. I believe they added some new features with the newest version which are paid-only though.
I haven’t used WordPerfect in ages, so I didn’t realize that. I wonder if they have such extensive previews in WordPerfect though. For example, Word 2007 lets you preview graphical changes as well, such as adding shadows to images.
No, I haven’t heard of that before. I’ll give it a whirl sometime and see what it’s all about.
So that users can select/install widget for specific cybernet items (like CyberNotes/Daily downloads etc.)
Guess I never knew about that. You could easily create a widget yourself from any of the feeds we provide:
http://widgets.opera.com/widgetize/start