Inspired by this post.
I was a sophomore in high school in 2005; just a couple of years into my hobby of technology. I wasn’t yet an Apple user (or even Linux, that would come in 2006), so my list of applications I was using 20 years ago is almost entirely Windows-based.
Yahoo Messenger / MSN Messenger: I’m putting these together. My hometown was very evenly split between Yahoo and MSN for instant messenging. I believe I had tried Trillian by 2005, but went back to the native applications because of the emoji-style features they had released that only worked in the native applications. Instant messenging was a huge part of my early computing life, and I feel like so much of that is lost these days where you can reach anybody at anytime of day.
Firefox: I don’t know when I started using Firefox, but it was probably in 2004 or early 2005. Outside of a decade stint starting in 2008 with Chrome, I’ve been a daily Firefox user for my entire computing life. It’s the best browser for me; it works like I expect a browser to work.
Picasa: I had a Canon digital camera and was in love with Picasa. My memory is it wasn’t a Google application at first; Google acquired them, but I don’t think I ever used Picasa before Google bought it. The face-grouping features it had back then felt like a magic trick, and I loved that it kept originals untouched on your filesystem.
iTunes: I bought my first iPod in 2004 and was pretty quickly converted to an Apple fanboy. I remember running some free podcast catcher (“podcatcher” we used to say!), I think it was iPodder. I have a screenshot on my Flickr page from June 2005 when iTunes was updated to support Podcasts. I can remember those days like it was yesterday, scrolling through the Podcast Directory and finding some gems.
XBMC: This is the only non-Windows program, but it has to be my favorite. I used a software-mod to modify my original Xbox; this had to be have been sometime in 2005. I have another picture on my Flickr that shows me watching Diggnation on XBMC on our 52" rear-projection TV. XBMC was pretty life-changing for me, to be honest. It taught me a bunch about file sharing and FTP and video codecs, knowledge I still have and use today.