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?

Free Microsoft Office and not a torrent in site!

As discussed on display-block the next edition of Microsoft Office could be free… Well ad funded.

Some have mocked that no one would use a version of office with embedded ads but I think it could work.

There will always be some people that want to use office but will never pay for it. It’s fairly expensive and so is a massive barrier to some users purchasing it. By making a free addition - even if it has embedded ads it means that users will be given the option to legitimately use the software without paying a dime. The corporate users that formerly paid for the software won’t want to put up with the ads and so will still pay the premium price so Microsoft will not lose much sales from this. However, those that formerly priated or used open source alternatives may be tempted to give the ad funded version a run and if the ads aren’t too intrusive keep it.

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