Tools of the trade

So starting a new job on Monday I needed to set up my rig with the tools/apps that I have learned I cannot live without.

HP EliteBook 8530w

My new laptop is a HP EliteBook 8530w, I’ll be writing a review and a comparision with my Dell XPS m1530 soon.  First major difference is that it’s running Windows XP rather than Vista. A bonus, many may say, but I do miss quick launching apps with a hit of the Windows key and then typing a few letters followed by enter. Fortunately, there is the free, and brilliant, Launchy to the rescue. Alt-space takes the place of the windows key for firing up the launchy text box which works much like Spotlight on mac.

For web development work I found the following tools invaluable:

1) Faststone image capture - the ultimate screen capture tool, does wholepage, video, page portions and even scrolls a page and captures it as one image. The video feature can also be set to only record a portion of the screen which is great for screencasts or demos where you don’t want a massive filesize or a squashed/compressed illegable video from a fullscreen recording.

2) Browsers - firefox and google chrome were one of the first things I installed. I would have also used IE Tester but this seems to be a bit redundant now that Microsoft have released their own version so I downloaded SuperPreview

3) Aptana Studio - My IDE of choice. I code in aptana for html, css, javascript and PHP. It has great tools and features and cuts out a lot of the nonsense that are in some WYSIWIG editors. It is based on Eclipse and so is Java based and chomps though a lot of ram so you’ll want at least 2GB of Ram on XP and probably 3-4GB on Vista if you are running it along side other ram hungry apps like Photoshop. Has great plugins that allow you to preview your page on iPhone or sync with subversion.

4) Vertrigo - This is a WAMP app by a Polish developer that is free and easy to install. You simply run the setup and you have an Apache server with PHP and MySQL ready to go. What’s great about it is that it doesn’t try to be constantly running on your system. Just fire it up when you need and close it when you don’t. Good idea to install this as one of your first apps as I have had conflicts when installing it on systems with a lot of other apps that may have been using ports/resources that it needed.

5) An IM client. In my opinion Skype had the best IM client for a long time (not to sure about the latest design) but seeing as most of my contacts are on Yahoo/MSN now I opt for the YIM client. I may switch this for Trillion or another all in one client in future but having an AIO client usually means features such as file transfer or group chat.

6) VLC media player - Not only is this the best player because it plays the most formats it is also even better at playing those formats than the native players. This is especially evident when playing HD content. HD MOV/MP4 files natively play in quicktime but even on decent spec systems can stutter at times. VLC plays them smoothly even on low spec systems (I’ve seen Hi-res video playing fine on netbooks with VLC). It also playes flash video (FLV) and supports more obsure codecs like HD MKV, which is becoming the standard for distributing large HD video files.

7) Adobe CS4 - no getting round it, although the price tag seems ridiculous and there are some alternatives out there, a serious designer/developer will almost always end up with Adobe software. I’ve given up fighting it and fortunately so have finance so will be getting CS4 installed shortly.

Firefox Plugins - The list of must have plugins seems to have shrunk as I find I am using the same small list regularly and others are just a distraction. I now use Firebug, Web developer toolbar, colorzilla, measureIT, ImageZoom, Delicious, and may get round to installing Scribefire now that I’ve started blogging again.

9) Office - Not too fussed whether it is MS office or Open office plus Thunderbird but best to keep to what everyone else running in the office so have the now ageing MS office 2003.

10) WinRar - For opening everything from ZIP/RAR files to ISO or 7zip - another AIO solution for compressed archives.

For entertainment I could add iTunes and a few other apps but as I’m tight on HDD space on this system I will stick to my iPhone for my music jollies. Fortunately I can now get my podcasts straight to my phone over wifi so PC syncing no longer a daily requirement.

What apps are in your utility belt? What tools can you not live with out?

Wordpress App for iPhone finally arrives

Today I was pleased to discover the Wordpress App on the App Store. With six apart having a Typepad App available from App Store launch day Wordpress users had been feeling a little left out. This was especially frustrating as using Wordpress from the iPhone Safari browser was near impossible with unedutable forms and crashes.

Summary
Liked:
+ Easy to use
+ includes all important fields (even tags & categories)
+ Saves a draft of your work if you get interrupted by a phone call
+ all work done locally so don’t have to worry about losing signal/connection when writing
+ Can insert photos from camera or photo library
+ has a preview mode that even downloads you wp theme where possible
+ Accepts HTML tags

Didn’t like:
- Crashes if you switch connection type in the middle of submission (e.g. Switch from GPRS to 3G or wifi to edge)
- no control over image placement
- HTML is hard to write on iPhone and no shortcuts are provided in the app. Would liked to have seen buttons for open/closing common tags like strong tags
- impossible to demonstrate code as even & amp and & gt gets converted to & and > when you save.
EDIT:- images get resized to 300px wide regardless of whether image was larger/smaller before

More
Setting up was easy enough. Just provide the URL of your blog and login details. The App doesn’t seem to handle http or www prefix so make sure you start with the domain/subdomain. Seems to support both wordpress.com and self hosted wordpress blogs. You can add multiple blogs and switch between them in the main menu. I don’t think you can post a single entry to multiple blogs though.

Once you enter your chosen blog you see your last 10 posts which can be editted or deleted. You can if course create a new post. The interface is simple to use with fields for title tags and you main text. You can also choose which category to post in and add new categories. Be warned view categories or adding new ones requires Internet access and if you witch from 3G to edge/wifi or vica versa while connecting the app locks up. It appears to be continually trying to submit/retrieve data but never finishes. This is more of an iPhone bug than a problem with the App. A timeout fail would be good though so you can save your work and try again.

The app doesn’t try and be too flash with graphics or effects. This is good as stability of the app is very important as a lock up or drop out can loose your hard work. Apart from when connecting to the blog and having the crash I described above the app has been stable. So although I still recommend saving often you should have problems with losing your work. Just don’t submit you post until you have a solid connection and are not moving.

At first I thought the app only supported plain text posts. However, after hitting done the virtual keyboard is replaced by a new menu which give the options of Write, Pictures, Preview and settings. Pictures allows you to insert images from you camera or photo library. Seeing as you can save images from the web into your photo library and this really gives you a lot of freedom to add imagery to your posts. There doesn’t seem to be anyway to control image place lment though. All images get inserted at the end of your post.

The Preview mode is very useful it downloads your current Wordpress theme from your site and renders your new post in context. Unfortunately it didn’t manage to retrieve my theme and so a simple preview was used. This was still helpful as I was then able to test if the HTML I used would render correctly or show up in the post. The HTML I tested worked fine. Unfortunately, the app is a little too enthusiastic with rendering HTML as even code you want to display is converted. For example & amp becomes & if you put the symbol with text, even if you do not finish with a semi-colon.

The settings option let’s you modify the time stamp and password protect entries, so even less commonly used settings are available.

Actually posting your blog when finished isn’t immediately obvious. There is no SUBMIT/make it go button. Just a status you can change from local draft to Published. It also allows you set status to online draft so you can finish off at a Desktop computer before making it live. For the purpose of testing I am posting this direct from my iPhone.

Overall a great App that every Wordpress blogger with an iPhone should have. A few minor quirks than hopefully can get worked out by future updates. Most importantly it is stable and works. This App recieves a FFE gold award.