Archive for January, 2013

Jan

17

Software Tools I Recommend

January 17th, 2013 | Category: Computers and Software

I use and recommend the following tools for web development.

  • CSE HTML Validator Professional provides an easy way to validate web for compliance with web standards, thus making your pages more likely to render cleanly across many different browsers and devices. I use it as my code editor as well because it’s easy to use while still giving me the low-level control I demand.
    .
  • Easy Thumbnails is a free tool for creating thumbnails from Fookes Software. I like it because I was able to make custom batch files to process huge collections of images in one shot AND have the tool create a web page from those resulting thumbnails at the same time. The downside is that it doesn’t work with PNG files.
    .
  • Goodsync is a valuable tool for synchronizing data, including web data, across multiple devices and hosts. I use it for managing several web sites via FTP, as well as a file synchronization and backup tool so that I can duplicate selected files on multiple computers. This way I can develop information, including my CLU presentations, on a laptop, desktop, or external drive, and keep the others synced up.
    .
  •  Iconico provides provides clean, simple, elegant tools used like ColorPic and ScreenCalipers to help match colors, measure layouts and so on, and some of their tools are free.
    .
  • I use Advanced Renamer for giving my pictures and videos more meaningful filenames, as well as performing date/time stamp operations and case conversions, but this only scratches the surface of what the tool can do.
    .
  • For a free, basic text editor that nonetheless offers a lot of great, advanced features, I use conTEXT. It supports templates for many types of files, but if you don’t see or like the ones that are available, you can add or customize them to your taste. For example, I tweaked one for use with IBM Notes (formerly known as Lotus Notes).  I use this a lot for examining SQL files too.
    .
  • Batch Purifier is an easy way to strip unwanted data from your image files, such as camera information, location, and date/time.  The “LITE” version is free but works only with JPGs.
    .
  • Background images can be generated by tools found on grsites.com.
    .
  • freecsstemplates.org is one of may web sites that offers free CSS templates you can adapt for your pages.

No comments