Some software has, over the years, impressed me with its stability, responsiveness, and reliability. I thought it might be worth mentioning which software have made the cut. It's a really short list:

Warm Feelings

• Propellerheads Reason is very stable and responsive, which is unusual for music software. Most music software is very crash-prone. I haven't really used it for more than a day (and this was version 2.0), but it didn't crash or choke.

• Adobe AfterEffects never seems to crash, ever. The last version I used extensively, though, was version 5.0. Adobe Premiere, by comparison, seems to crash if you breathe on it the wrong way. While they are different programs (AfterEffects is a compositor, Premiere is a NLE), the functions have grown together. I should really just buy AfterEffects and use that for everything.

Currently Evaluating

• Google Picasa is a nice piece of photo browsing software, not bloated, and snappy. The way they organize and filter photos is a little weird, and I find it difficult to use to actually organize files, but for viewing it's pretty cool. The UI is slightly clunky in operation, but compared to Adobe Photoshop Elements it is by far the better program. Photoshop Elements feels like it was designed by a committee of database engineers. I was just checking out Picasa Hello, their image sharing chat client, and have come to the conclusion that the company knows how to write good code and can a clean-looking UI, but they could do more work in the visual logic department...it's just slightly off.

• uTorrent is a BitTorrent client for Windows. I had previously been using Azureus, which is a giant do-everything client that requires Java. Which makes it HUGELY BLOATED. uTorrent is the exact opposite: 215KB total size, single executable. It apparently does everything I need, without the crap advertising that Azureus now includes with every installation.

Fallen from Grace

• There was a program in the early days of CD-ROM called Astarte Toast. Very stable and reliable. Astarte was a German company (of course). The current incarnation of Toast feels bloated by comparison. Then on the Windows side there's Nero, which used to be pretty lean-and-mean but is now encumbered by features piled on features. Often these features seem poorly conceived and executed, provided largely so the retail box and marketing copy can claim all kinds of things to unsophisticated buyers. Currently I'm giving CDBurner XP a go...

Fond Memories

• DeluxePaint was my favorite paint program for years, and in my mind still is the best example of a tightly-integrated orthogonal toolset I can think of. Photoshop has never gotten this right when it comes to bitmap editing.

• My favorite word processor growing up was easily WordStar, running under CP/M on my Apple II w/ the Z-80 card. The reason was the 'control diamond' which allowed navigation around the screen without your hands leaving the home keys position; as a result, writing and editing was very fast compared mouse-based programs. The arrow keys on keyboards are really there to make functions clearer, not faster.