When buying or getting a new computer (from work), most people have that one or few tools that they immediately install on their computer. Well, here is three apps I can’t be without by now:

Babylon - This is a very simple and small tool, yet ingenious. After installing, by right clicking (in combination with a key e.g. Ctrl) on anything (i.e. any text or number), anywhere (i.e. within any application window, title bar, menus, icons with text etc) it will recognize and look it up (either locally against your offline dictionaries or if none of them have the answer against all bablyon online ones). Apart from being able to look up translation and/or definitions in one or more dictionaries and encyclopedias, it will recognize and convert units such temperature, currency, measurements as well (currency are updated daily). And the fact that you can add your own dictionaries/glossaries the way I would like to with what I asked, it makes it a very powerful tool that makes life a lot more efficient. As and example, at work we have some 50,000 acronyms and expressions, so it is impossible to learn them all and on a daily basis I run into new ones. By creating my own glossary, now it is not problem and instead of going to the intranet and lookup the word or acronym, I simply right click on it. Colibri - For you Mac users, QuickSilver is probably a familiar application. This is an application that “combines the raw power of the command line with the intuitive nature of a modern graphical user interface to define a revolutionary new way of managing your computer.” I have been looking for something similar for a long while and although I found SlickRun which by the way is an awesome tool by itself, it was not as close as I wanted to be to QuickSilver. The other day though Colibri came my and so far I really like it.

PureText - “Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple. Just copy/cut whatever you want to the clipboard, click on the PureText tray icon, and then paste to any application.  Better yet, you can configure a Hot-Key to convert and paste the text for you.  The pasted text will be pure and free from all formatting.” I use this tool at least 10 times a day.