I would give that award to Mozilla/Firefox because they made Tabs go mainstream; I don't think they were the first / but they pushed others to build a better browser.
Regardless the state of the "coolest" moniker, only a true geek would try to argue that firefox's release with tabs was timed perfectly to take advantage of the concept the best.
Prior to Firefox, tabs were the cool new feature of unknown utility; afterwards, an expected for all browsers.
Well, it's 2009. A decade would be anything after 1999.
For mean, that means Napster wins hands down.
Not only did it completely revolutionize the music industry in ways that are still being felt today, it opened up whole new possibilities that helped to popularize things like bit-torrent and decentralized networks - One could argue that even cloud computing had it's origins in Napster.
Napster is like the Joy Division of the software world: Everyone forgets about them, but everyone loves something that has been inspired directly by them.
Well, I'd argue that 'of the decade' starts after midnight on 1 January 2000^, and Napster was just a smidgen too early for that. but upvoted anyway because I like your Joy Division comparison.
^ 2000, what a letdown eh? I'm still waiting for my atomic jetpack and frankly I'm running out of patience.
Mmm. For me, Python. It helped me break through the biggest programming walls by gently introducing a ton of great concepts.
There are practical applications I could point at, and I've moved on to shinier languages as well, but I think something so genuinely useful in educating me would have to go down as having the most cool factor of all.
Keyhole (which later became Google Earth) is the only program that really blew me away. I remember staying up way too late just flying around the planet totally amazed.
I set up a bare git repo in my dropbox folder so now I get a private github replacement. Works very well for 1 person projects (but it could work for several people as well)
It's completely changed my approach to open source software. Before GitHub, open sourcing something was a bit of a drag - you were committing yourself to setting up a mailing list, accepting patches etc - the administrative overhead was enough to put me off releasing a lot of my code.
GitHub is ideal for the "fire and forget" method of open source. I can knock out a bit of code that might be useful to someone, throw it up there and forget about it. If someone likes it and wants to improve it they can go ahead and fork it without me ever having to think about it again. If I /do/ want to maintain it, it's really easy to keep track of the modifications people make and merge them back in to my version.
The amount of high quality code coming out of GitHub projects these days is astounding, and I'm willing to bet a LOT of it wouldn't ever have been released using the older systems like Sourceforge and Google code.
IMO, open source means a lot more than just dumping code.
Not to contradict what you say about github (which is nice - I'm using it for Hecl these days), but as people like to say at the Apache Software Foundation, community is more important than code.
"Community is more important than code" - completely agree. That was my problem - I had code to share, but didn't want to work hard on the community around it. I kind of see GitHub as providing that community for me - it can form itself without any extra effort on my behalf.
Obviously the best projects are the ones with proper maintainers actively working on the community side of things - but GitHub enables the community to take up a project even if the original creator just threw it over the wall.
(There's a lot more to GitHub than just enabling me to create irresponsible throw-away projects, but personally I've found that aspect of it to be very liberating)
Wow, I didn't even have to complain! Thanks! I use (and am blown away by) lots of software, some on the web, some not, some free, some not.
The one that has blown me away continuously for the last decade are these two apps (they are part of a suite).
If I had said "photoshop and illustrator" it wouldn't have been controversial.
But being able to take a pile of word documents, build an entirely custom xml converter, entity extractor and semantic relation engine, in one tool (XEE), without writing a single line of code, then take that XML and analyze it in ways that would normally take at least a dozen disparate apps, but in one environment (Starlight), has been absolutely mindblowing. These two apps understand what XML is supposed to be about, use it as intended (for data interchange) and use it like nothing else I've ever seen.
Photoshop is "cool" and illustrator is "useful" but neither one has kept me up at night.
Spotlight, Colibri, LaunchBar, Google Quick Search Box etc. Even mobile phones have "quick search" now.
QS is the first thing I install on a clean Mac, it gives me access to everything else. When I use an OS without QS or similar I am slowed down and even stopped from finding certain things.
I was thinking along the same lines (but in a more vim-like sense, naturally). There are a lot of cool projects out there, but not many that affect me to such an extent. Of course it's not the most influential piece of software of the decade, but it has been the one tool that I've never found a replacement for in all my years. I've switched operative systems, browsers, search engines, social networks, graphics editing suites and mail applications more times than I dare count, but vim has always been my editor of choice.
(EDIT: Yes, I do know when both vi and vim were released, I'm just saying)
