Six pieces of software I couldn’t live without this year.
1. Zotero. I sung its praises before, and it is still managing my pdf’s (and cif files) to perfection.
2. Cobian. Between daily backups to my USB key, to weekly backups to my external hardrive, Cobian does it all (Imsafe fulfills the same needs, but on OS X).
3. Vesta. I owe the authors of Vesta a lot. Crystal structure visualization and manipulation has never been so fast or beautiful. Make sure to cite their paper if you use it.
4. Inkscape. Vector drawings for those Nature and PRL schematics, without the need to sell your lab coat to afford Adobe Illustrator.
5. Gimp. Not the leather clad man, but the bitmap manipulator for making your images publication quality, without the need to sell your colleague’s lab coat to afford Adobe Photoshop.
6. Chemsketch. When you need to draw some annoyingly obscure organic molecule or make use of orbital templates, the freeware Chemsketch comes in handy.