The canonical example would have to be EVEmon .
Not only does it let you monitor your skill queue from outside the game and notify you when training finishes, but it also has an excellent ship and item browser that lets you quickly look up the statistics on anything you're interested in as well as find out whether you have the necessary skills to use it.
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Eve Fitting Tool is useful for planning your future ship builds.
You can export it to Evemon to automatically generate an optimized learning plan as well.
An excellent resource for finding 3rd party tools is the Third Party Tools category on EVElopedia
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I highly recommend Eve Commander .
It's not an application, but rather a webapp that manages all kinds of information for you.
Great interface, lots of useful stuff, very responsive developer.
It's not free, but paid for with in-game money.
The prices are very reasonable, it was easily affordable and worth the money even for me as an Eve newbie.
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I use these: ( link with URLs http://eve.nako.us/tools/external-tools-for-eve-onine ) EVEMon - EVEMon is a lightweight, easy-to-use standalone Windows application designed to assist you in keeping track of your EVE Online character progression.
EveHQ EveHQ is an extensible character application for use in conjunction with Eve-Online.
Initially starting out as a character monitor and skill planner, EveHQ adopted a plug-in system where additional modules could be created independently of the main application which would extend the functionality of the program as a whole.
EFT - EVE Fitting Tool
Wormhole Thingie - Shows some useful info on wormholes and w-space systems.
EVE Asset Manager
MyPOS Eve-Metrics Market upoader Eve-central Upload Utility 2D Maps , PDF DOTLAN Eve Maps EVEMap is an out of game map of the EVE universe.
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I am using http://eve.grismar.net/explorer/index.php quite often to find stuff in EVE.
Most of the time I am looking for a new agent for a certain corp.
Most other tools don't let me specify as much conditions to limit what is show to me.
I can i.e. say "I want a agent for Federation Navy that provides lvl 4 missions, mostly kill missions, resides in 0.5+ systems, and is available with my standings."
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I would recommend taking a look at EVEHQ , it covers most of the information exposed by the API.
gaming.stackexchange.com/users/1631/Richard Slater
What tools do you suggest to use on the desktop (Windows) to help me with the game. I know there is an API that exposes a lot of information. I was thinking that it would be nice to have a tool that would show me my expenses and sales on the market to be able to analyze it, maybe export to excel, etc.
External tools for Eve Online
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Eve Fitting Tool, Commander and HQ are useful tools. Useful tools that help with the game are EVEmon, Eve Fitting Too, Eve Commander and EveHQ
People recommend a variety of tools to help with the game.