gonkulair

I know this is aimed a little more at the technical folks out there, but here goes anyhow.

In my experience I’ve found a couple windows platform applications that aid me greatly in developing/designing web pages. I’ll also try and list the Mac OS X similar product, as I do actually work on both platforms.

HTML/PHP/Script editor:

Basically, this is a really fancy Text Editor. It has text coloring to help you find mistakes and to give a better feel for structure to your document. My money (or rather no money) goes to HTML-KIT for Windows. It allows you to work directly on your server via FTP integration which supports multiple modes. It basically gives you a wonderful server/folder/file list on the right side. When you double-click a file, it downloads and opens. When you click save after having opened this way, it will upload and overwrite the version on the server. The comparable product on the Mac OS X platform is TextWrangler. It’s very similar to HTML-Kit and the price is the same.

Image Manipulation:

In the commercial world, we would say Adobe Photoshop. But in the open-source/free world we say GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) Basically, it’s free photoshop, and it’s nearly as powerful. I have yet to find something I can’t do in GIMP that I can in Photoshop. It’s interface is a bit stark, in that most of the options are accessed via a right-click contextual menu. But it works the same, and after a very short time, most people become quite comfortable using it. It does require the GTK framework for Windows, but that’s available on the website along with GIMP.
Vector Graphics Studio:

Vector graphics are an important part of the design world and ultimately the web world. Vector graphics differ from standard or “Raster Based” graphics in that rather than being and actual Bit by Bit map of the image, they are a series of math and markup that “describes” the object in the image. This allows for infinite scaling in either direction, it also allows for easier skewing, dynamic resizing and so on. Basically images are created by using a combination of basic shapes, lines, colors and techniques such as masking, clipping, grouping, etc. Most logos are vector graphics that have been “exported” to raster types. For Vector image work, I recommend InkScape.

Both Inkscape and GIMP are available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux Operating Systems.

There are of course other tools I use, but most of them wouldn’t be of interest to the average “I wanna make a webpage” person. They are aimed more at the “I develop Web Applications” crowd. Those will come in another post later. But these three basic, yet powerful tools get the most use in Web Page and Web App Development on my machine(s).

Well, geek time is done, hope this helps someone.