Favorite Tools of the Trade

ABSOLUTELY! PSP9 is still the best paint/photo program I've used. Photoshop is the most unintuitive train wreck ever. Ya it's powerful, but it comes with frustration. PSP9 is quick, intuitive controls, and still quite powerful. I also dislike the new Corel PSP X. Its too much like Photoshop. All the intuitive stuff is gone.

As long as you understand that "intuitive" means "whatever I'm most familiar with". I was once forced to use Windows and PSP under threat of lay-off if I didn't. I nearly quit before the job was done, out of shear frustration.

Of course, I was used to Photoshop, which was therefore much more intuitive to me.

I object strongly to Adobe's pricing and upgrade policies, but they produce some marvelous software, much of which I couldn't work without.

Rob

I've been trying out Komodo recently.

Best text-editor I have found for windows so far.

http://openkomodo.com

rstevenson:

As long as you understand that "intuitive" means "whatever I'm most familiar with". I was once forced to use Windows and PSP under threat of lay-off if I didn't. I nearly quit before the job was done, out of shear frustration.

Of course, I was used to Photoshop, which was therefore much more intuitive to me.

I object strongly to Adobe's pricing and upgrade policies, but they produce some marvelous software, much of which I couldn't work without.

Rob

No, I mean intuitive :) If it doesn't make sense to me... it's wrong.

• • HTML Editors
• • CSS Editors

I use this modified version of Notepad2 with code folding...
http://code.kliu.org/misc/notepad2/

It serves as a drop-in replacement for notepad which I used to use for the longest time but syntax highlighting and code folding definitely came in handy. It also prints out code very nicely.

• • Text-Search Tools

grep -r 'STRING' *
http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?grep

And then good ole CNTRL F in any program.

• • Graphics Editors

Gimp. I really don't do much graphics wise and Gimp certainly takes care of what I need:
http://www.gimp.org/

• • Screenshot Tools

Eh? You can just hit Printscreen on most computers. Alt-Printscreen will give you just the active window.

• • Color Pickers

I use ColorZilla for Firefox
http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

• • Diff Tools

diff -b file1 file2

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?diff

• • FTP Tools

I typically tend to use FTP lightly. Usually I'm using scp to do any copying. However I prefer WinSCP on windows machines:
http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

• • Browser Addon's/Utilities

Woah nelly. Without Firefox I'd be crippled. In addition to ColorZilla I use these addons:

Dom Inspector
Firebug
Live HTTP Headers
Live PageRank
Page Speed
ShowIP
Total Validator
Web Developer
YSlow

Firebug and web developer are easily the most used.

• • Validators

Web developer toolbar has validation via w3c in the tools menu.

• • External Resources/Tutorials

I keep a Regex cheatsheet handy. I keep really good notes in a digital journal and a real one.

My backup server is pretty cool running off of rsync. All automagically.

I couldn't live without putty on windows machines.

• • Database Manipulation Tools (keep in mind, easy to use, esp for newbies)

Phpmyadmin mostly. Openoffice does a good job keeping csv files in check. I write custom programs if it's too difficult.

• • Other things?

Hrmm.. I have a collection of wooden puzzles and Rubik's cubes next to my desk.. I think those increase productivity by nearly 1000% ;)

Amaya 11 for html editing. WYSIWYG. Free, and W3 XHTML 100%% working
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/SourceDist.html

First post in a year :smile:

My favorite tools that I use every day:

Dreamweaver CS 5.5 (File Editing)
Illustrator CS 5.1 (Design)
FileZilla (FTP)
Outlook 2011 (eMail)
Excel 2011 (Data Management)

I know most people seem to hate Dreamweaver but I've never had problems with it and it's 100% the best for editing :smile:

I'm on my Mac most of the time, but if I'm on windows I use Notepad++ for editing. For some reason I'm biased to only using Adobe software on Mac :)

I'm new to all this and dont have much experience for comparison and yet, have found these all excellent (And they are all free)

BitKinex - A real gem of an ftp client with live editing, secure connections, multi-threaded uploads etc, interruption recovery & a file comparison tool.

notepad++ - plain and simple and very useful with some nice touches.

HTML kit 292 - Very comprehensive, great for people like me as it has some useful code checking tools. (It is not only for html, it supports pretty much everything from my newbie point of view.)

HxD Hex Editor - This is another that I have used for more comprehensive file comparison, similar to notepad++ (Which I prefer) so it hasn't had as much use, I have left it on my hard drive as its one of those things I think might be useful in the future, we will see if it lasts, it seems a bit too in depth for me, I would think some professionals may like it though...........

Notepad ++ and WinMerge.

Notepad ++ free
paintshop pro x7 not free but I cannot get my head around either gimp or photoshop

"Firefox Developer Edition"...sounded good to me but I found it as slow as molasses, the plugin-container usually occupied more memory than the core process (with ALL plugins and add-ons disabled!) and when I found it was the only browser than was showing the admin-category select dropdown incorrectly (as a non-idented list) I finally called it a day.

So my opinion is avoid this version and stick with Firefox normal + web developer, Firebug and HTML validator plugins.

I am going from HTML Kit to Notepad ++. I love me a good live Text Editor and Notepad ++ looks like something I can stick with for years. There is a slight learning curve, and some of its features need exploration. I have found a few tutorials on line but could you please tell me where I could find a good beginning/basic one (you always miss something in the introduction), and any good follow ons, too. I have been playing along with some but some are better than others. Thanks for your help on this.

For HTML, CSS, JS, even PHP, Sublime Text is my editor of choice nowadays. I used to use Notepad++ but dropped it a few years ago in favour of Sublime Text.

For PHP development when working on big projects I use PhpStorm, but for day-to-day things it's Sublime Text.

Hmmm, thanks, Dr. Byte. I am investigating Sublime Text now. They seem to have a great tutorial set of videos and text and I am playing along there to learn a bit about it before taking it out on a spin.

Inkscape for vector graphics. Couldnt live without it. Pixabay and unsplash for open images. Openclipart is but a shadow of its former self.