Public Class GeoffAppleby

My Review of a New Programming Utility

There's a few tools and other assorted goodies that have become known as the 'standard' when it comes to productivity enhancements within Visual Studio - CodeBetter has even become friends with some of them :)

But I'd like to take a moment to present a slightly different stance on productivity tools. There's one tool above all others that stands out for me as my biggest productivity enhancement. It has a small memory footprint, runs happily without needing much screen real-estate most of the time, allows configurable keyboard shortcuts, and itself supports a large range of extensions and plug ins.

If you haven't guessed, I'm talking about Winamp. I code so much better when I have my headphones in place, the volume cranked to 11 and the lights off. Sadly, I can only code in the dark when I'm at home but occasionally when there's an electrician at work testing the lights I get 5 minutes of darkness, and I feel so much more comfortable. :)

The point of this post, however, is not to review Winamp itself. A new 'extension' for Winamp was released just over a week ago, and I managed to get my dirty little paws on it last night.

It's called In Your Honor, the new album by the Foo Fighters. It's a two CD album, with the first disc containing the 'heavy' stuff, and the second all acoustic.

Now, the Foo Fighters rock. They rock hard. And they're good at it. As time has gone on, their albums have rocked harder and harder, but never to the point of approaching the metal end of the spectrum. They just rock.

When I'm hardcore coding, I need my music loud, and I need it to rock. Disc 1 is the essence of exactly what I'm looking for - it's as if Dave Grohl was inside my head when we he put the tracks together. I've listened to it twice so far, and...Oh man. To put it simply, it just plain fucking rocks so hard, it's unbelievable. It's not super heavy, it just rocks. I'm in love.

The second disc is not so good for hardcore coding. It's soft, it's mellow (no, I don't mean Cold Play elevator music), it's still guitar heavy and rough in bits with classic Foo Fighters style, but it's all ... nice. That's a sad word to use to describe something that is extremely good, but it's true.

And as a result, it's really good for the less rocking background music that you can partially ignore when actually trying to think about design and those tough problems we all face when we discover that things aren't quite as perfect as we'd imagine they'd be before we actually wrote the code.

To quote the perpetually en-hatted Aussie, do yourself a favour. Get this album.