‘Tis the season of thesis writing! Well, in my office of fourth years (!) at least. By this stage of PhD life, most of us have our own ‘toolkit’ of computer applications that we’ve settled upon to complete the task, but in the first year or two, it’s a case of trying lots of options and finding the one that works best for your PhD and style of working.
Here, I’ve listed my top ten freely downloadable computer apps and accessible websites that have proved invaluable so far. I should mention that although I use a Mac, almost everything listed below has an equally useful Windows version (some entries are specific to petrology, so if you’re a non-geology PhD student, you can probably skip those bits…).
Click on the links below to go to each section
1) LaTeX
2) Detexify
3) Bibdesk
4) PDF to Word
5) R
6) Textwrangler
7) Tetlab/Trinity
8) Georoc database
9) Generic Mapping Tools (GMT)
10) MELTS