10 Applications for All Web Developers
10 Applications for All Web Developers
10 Applications for All Web Developers
1.) Aptana Studio
Aptana Studio is an excellent developer environment for coding in
nearly all the popular languages found around the web today. With
a growing user base and a foundation in the solid Eclipse platform
it will give any web developer the tools he or she needs to
produce powerful, complex code for their projects. I have
personally replaced Dreamweaver CS4 with Aptana and couldn’t be
happier
http://www.aptana.com
2.) Firefox
The Firefox web browser might not be the fastest currently on the
market, but with an abundance of addons and solid support on
nearly every operating system in existence it is hard to overlook
as an excellent choice for your primary browser.
http://www.firefox.com
3.) Filezilla
If you do much work on a website you’re probably gonna need an
utility to transfer files between your computer and your web
server. Filezilla can do that with ease with support for FTP, SSH,
and more.
http://filezilla-project.org
4.) XAMPP
There are a lot of ways to display your site on your local
computer, but XAMPP is the only one I’ve found that will run on
all the major platforms. It is easy to install and administer and
comes with all the necessary features to turn your local machine
into a top-notch test server (I’ve even seen it run on a few
production web servers although I wouldn’t recommend the practice
myself)
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
5.) The Gimp
Photoshop might be the most popular image manipulation program on
the market, but it isn’t the only one that can handle image
manipulation for the web. The Gimp is an excellent, if somewhat
complicated, image editing package which can work all sorts of
magic on any photo you want to put online. For vector graphics it
can be used in conjunction with Inkscape to provide a solid
package for creating and editing everything from logos to pictures
from your last company picnic.
http://gimp.org
6.) SmartSVN
SmartSVN is a Subversion client which allows you to interact with
a Subversion repository. Subversion, in turn, is a version control
system allowing you to not only keep a repository of all the data
in your project, but it can also keep track of changes, rollback
changes, and perform all sorts of other tasks of use to a web
developer. It can even be a solid alternative for deploying your
work to your production server without the use of FTP or another
file transfer method in which it can be easy to forget a file.
There is even an excellent free SVN host available at XP-dev
http://www.syntevo.com/smartsvn/index.html
7.) VirtualBox
Virtualbox is a free virtual machine from SUN. It allows you to
run other operating systems on top of your main system which can
then be used for testing your project on other browsers and
configurations. For example, if you have a Mac you could run
Windows within VirtualBox on your mac and use it to see how your
project looks in Internet Explorer or other browsers not available
on your Mac.
http://www.virtualbox.org
8.) Xmarks
Originally known as Foxmarks, Xmarks is a service which can backup
and sync the bookmarks and passwords from your browser. This is a
must if you use multiple machines yourself or even if you just
want to pull up a page on a machine other than your own as you can
even access your bookmarks from their online interface. Currently
it works with Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on all the
major operating systems
http://www.xmarks.com
9.) DropBox
DropBox is a cross-platform file backup and synchronization
service that not only backs up your most important data, but also
seamlessly synchronizes it on your other computers. Of all the
applications I use on a daily basis this one is definitely the
handiest as I never have to worry about forgetting anything
important. Like Xmarks it even has a web interface in case your at
a different computer and need access to one of your documents.
http://www.getdropbox.com
10.) Google Apps
Although not a local application like the rest of this list,
Google Apps is an excellent resource for helping you set up your
personal web identity as well as those of your clients. It allows
for hosted email, calendar, and other services on your own domain
name and does so while providing users with the often familiar
GMail interface that so many people already know.
http://www.google.com/apps
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