Tools of the Trade

• December 2, 2005
• James Skemp
• StrivingLife, technology

Thanks to my sister still being in school, I've been able to pick up a number of very powerful commercial tools for fairly cheap. I'm big on free programs - Open Source being the key word these days - but sometimes the professional's tools are just more than all that.

That said, here's my pick of essential tools. If the items come in a group, or individually, I've mentioned the group and the 'essentials' underneath. 'Essentials' for what? Well, these just happen to be the programs that I can't go very long without :)

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• Macromedia Studio 8
  • Dreamweaver and Flash
• Adobe Creative Suite 2
  • Photoshop and Acrobat
• Firefox 1.5
  • with the Web Developer and HTML Validator extensions
• additional browsers as necessary - check your Web site's traffic, or world-wide trends
• file comparision utility, like WinMerge
• a FTP client like Core FTP or FileZilla
• a good office program, like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice
• an email provider that allows large storage limits, and an easy way to receive notifications of new email
  • I use Gmail and Gmail Talk
• a good chat utility, if you'll be working with a group of people, like Trillian
• a good computer 'management' (?) utility, like Coolmon, SysMetrix, or Samurize - what's your RAM, disk space, and network connection like? there's a quick way to find this out, and the rather slow way
• if you're looking at IP addresses and domains, Sam Spade is going to be a big help
• MWSnap, 'cause sometimes you just need a small screenshot without loading a number of other tools
• XnView or IrfanView, 'cause sometimes you just don't need to load Photoshop for an easy task
• a good zip utility, like 7-Zip
• Knoppix - see how one of the other groups works
• having a similar setup to your host's computer - in my case, Apache, PHP, and MySQL installed on my computer. being able to type http://localhost/ in a browser and having it load an actual page is something that any serious Web person should have, even if you're only creating a small site

That's probably it, right there. I'll unfortunately think of more, but on the bright side I'll be able to add a couple of alternatives (like HTML-Kit) that wouldn't suit my needs, but would at least be something.

~Jk