Dylan's Advent of Cool Nerd Things Day 25: Ninite
Posted by Dylan Beattie on 25 December 2020 • permalinkHappy Christmas, friends! Have we saved the best for last? Well, I’ll let you decide… we’ve had 24 days of fantastic tools, utilities, websites and apps.
In the first week of #nerdvent, we resized windows with Sizer, visualised hard drive space with WinDirStat, turned our iPhones into webcams using Camo, powered up Windows with the X-Box Game Bar, kept on top of timezones with WClock, managed all our social media apps with Franz, and tunnelled the internet to our local machines with ngrok. Week 2 brought us Instant Eyedropper, PowerToys and the Fira Code programming font; we edited audio files with Audacity, kept an eye on our systems with Open Hardware Monitor, jumped cacti and dodged pterodactyls with the Chrome Dino Game, and wrote beautiful Markdown documents with Typora. Week 3 we got colourful with Paletton, compressed files with 7-Zip, made beautiful images of source code with Carbon, got cracking with GitKraken, got creative with Canva and Unsplash, broadcast ourselves with OBS and got our volume controls under control with EarTrumpet. Finally, we met the incomparable Beyond Compare, gave Windows a spring clean with Autoruns, and tested our emails with Mailtrap. And yes, I did actually publish a blog post every day for 25 days. I’m as surprised as you are. Especially since I’ve also managed to do Advent of Code every single day as well, and stream it live on Twitch and YouTube.
Anyway. It’s Christmas! Let’s meet the last awesome tool I’m going to write about for #nerdvent: Ninite. Ninite is amazing. Open the Ninite website, tick the apps you want, and it’ll give you a single, bundled installer that will install all of them on your Windows PC, with sensible defaults, no spyware or bundled crap. And, er, that’s it. There’s not a huge amount to say about it other than that it’s very, very good indeed.
When I’m setting up a new PC or reinstalling Windows, I use the default browser to get my Ninite installer, and Ninite does the rest. Web browsers, image editors, utilities, developer tools - in fact, quite a few of the tools I’ve written about over the last few months are available via Ninite, so why not check it out by using it to check them out?
