RENDR

It took me a while to find a sys­tem, a method, that really worked well for me.  The tools and soft­ware avail­able can be over­whelm­ing, so wast­ing your time test­ing “this” and “that” is some­times inevitable.  How­ever, I have cre­ated this list of tools that I use (cur­rently) that seem to do the job very well for me.  This isn’t a list that is going to work for every­one, but if you are just get­ting started and want a bit of a lead, you are in luck.

Some of this soft­ware is free, while oth­ers are not.  I’ve seen many lists for the best “free” soft­ware, and I love these lists.  But, this is not that list.  You might also see thing in this list other than full fledged appli­ca­tions (like Fire­fox plu­g­ins, etc).  In addi­tion, some of the appli­ca­tions I’m going to list below are online, and thus plat­form inde­pen­dent.  Please, enjoy.

Base

Assum­ing you are some­what tech­ni­cally savvy already, I don’t have to point out that you will be run­ning Win­dows.  How­ever, there are a few basic things I do need to go over.

Browsers

For test­ing pur­poses, you will need a wide range of browsers.  For every site devel­oped you need to cross-browser test them, to check for incon­sis­ten­cies.  How­ever, one of these browsers will be your main workhorse:

Fire­fox — FREE

One can argue that Fire­fox is the most exten­si­ble and user-friendly browser cur­rently avail­able.  It’s strength lays in it’s abil­ity to run add-ons (mini applications).

In addi­tion to being fast, easy to use, and exten­si­ble.. it’s also one of the lead­ing forces in stan­dards com­pli­ant browser rendering.

The rest are:

Safari — FREE

Safari, orig­i­nally writ­ten for Macs, is a part of the Webkit fam­ily.  It is a fast, light­weight browser that I actu­ally enjoy using from time to time.  The user inter­face is con­tin­u­ally evolv­ing to be friend­lier and eas­ier to use. UPDATE: The recently updated Web Inspec­tor has given Safari a lot of punch while design­ing / devel­op­ing for the web (http://webkit.org/blog/1091/more-web-inspector-updates/).

Chrome — FREE

Also a part of the Webkit fam­ily, but not made for Macs UPDATE: and runs on Macs and PCs alike. Chrome was devel­oped by Google for a faster, more intu­itive online approach.  While most browsers have an address and a search bar, Chrome has an omni­bar (which searches and accesses addresses intu­itively. UPDATE: With the addi­tion of exten­sions, Chrome is quickly becom­ing some developer’s choice as a solid test­ing browser (https://chrome.google.com/extensions).

Opera — FREE

While Opera has done an extremely good job in keep­ing up with being stan­dards com­pli­ant (one of the best) it gen­er­ally lacks in the ease of use depart­ment.  Although it only has just over 2% of the mar­ket, you prob­a­bly want to make sure your sites are ren­der­ing cor­rectly in Opera as well.

Inter­net Explorer — FREE

There are many ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer, each bring­ing to the table their own share of prob­lems.  Because you can only have one ver­sion installed on a machine at a time (with­out the use of VMware), I strongly rec­om­mend installing the lat­est ver­sion, accom­pa­nied by IETester.

Work­flow

In this sec­tion, I’ll go over what appli­ca­tions make my life/workflow a bit eas­ier.  From set­tings, to apps, I will be cov­er­ing how and what I use to work.

Rock­et­Dock — FREE

Emu­lat­ing the OSX Dock, Rock­et­Dock is a great appli­ca­tion launcher that I use every day.  Fully cus­tomiz­able (down to the icons and skin), it is also exten­si­ble.  Plu­g­ins for lap­top bat­tery life, weather, and many more “wid­gets” have been cre­ated to make this a very func­tional and use­ful tool.

Win­dows Taskbar — WINDOWS

Because I feel that Rock­et­Dock is best on the bot­tom, I need to move the Win­dows Taskbar to the top.  To do this, sim­ply make sure the Taskbar is not locked (right-click, and un-check “Lock the Taskbar”), choose an empty area on the taskbar, and drag it to the top of your screen.  You might notice that you can drag it to either left or right, but I haven’t found these to be really intu­itive positions.

Taskbar Shuf­fle — FREE

While ran­domly surf­ing a free-ware list, I saw an app that caught my eye.  I’ve con­stantly strug­gled with hav­ing too many win­dows open, thus hav­ing tons of entries in the Taskbar.  “If only there was a way to sort this,” I thought to myself.  Taskbar Shuf­fle gives you many set­tings to choose from, but the base func­tion­al­ity is all I really want/need (and it helps me a lot).

Vista Switcher — FREE

I Alt+Tab like crazy, but some­times it would be nice to see a screen­shot of what I’m tab­bing to as I might have three win­dows of the same app open, and don’t want to spend loads of time read­ing win­dow titles.  Answered.  Nuff said.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

With the thou­sands of tools and pro­to­cols there are to com­mu­ni­cate, it’s hard to choose which best suits your needs.

Gmail / Google Apps — FREE

If you have email, and your own domain, don’t you dare bother with using some­thing like Horde or Squir­rel­Mail.  While Gmail is great for host­ing per­sonal email, it is equally (if not more) amaz­ing for busi­ness emails.  There is a pretty easy to fol­low instruc­tions on how to get your company/domain email hosted with Google (the best part is that they have free accounts, which I’ve been using for well over a year now).

More and more appli­ca­tions are mov­ing to the browser — cloud con­cept.  This is awe­some because it allows you to access your email any­where, with all the same basic func­tion­al­ity.  In addi­tion, Gmail makes it stu­pid sim­ple to access your email by phone, and always stay up to date with IMAP.

Tweet­Deck — FREE

If you use Twit­ter, you’ll love the func­tion­al­ity of Tweet­Deck.  With a basic col­umn lay­out, you can sort your fol­low­ers into groups, search cri­te­ria, and men­tions of your han­dle.  I have four columns: Per­sonal, Design, Devel­op­ment, and Busi­ness.  Keep up with your friends AND colleagues.

All that, and it’s built on AIR, mak­ing it cross-platform!

Digsby / Pid­gin — FREE & FREE

I’m still torn between the two.  They both sup­port loads of pro­to­cols (AIM, MSN, ICQ, Face­book, Myspace, GoogleTalk, etc).  How­ever, where I find both lack­ing is the file trans­fer arena (con­tin­u­ally get­ting cor­rupt files, or won’t trans­fer at all).  Although, I’ll leave file trans­fer to FTP or email, and I don’t have a huge prob­lem with that.

What it comes down to is inter­face, and func­tion­al­ity.  Digsby has great func­tion­al­ity with social net­works like LinkedIn, Face­book, Myspace.. while Pid­gin has a very small foot­print, and allows my CPU to focus on what’s impor­tant at hand (although one can argue that a con­ver­sa­tion about cheese-puffs with a cross-country friend is important).

Either way, they are both win­ners in my book.

Skype — FREE

While it offers the same func­tion­al­ity of Digsby and Pid­gin with­out the inte­gra­tion of other pro­to­cols or social net­works, the video and audio con­fer­enc­ing is sec­ond to none for a free ser­vice.  In addi­tion, the file trans­fer­ring is rel­a­tively easy and reli­able.  I use this to con­fer­ence with clients and friends that I can’t meet with in person.

I should also note that you can make actual phone calls using Skype, but I have not ven­tured into this arena, as my cell plan is unlimited.

Design

Pho­to­shop — $642.49 / $699 Stan­dard — $908 / $999 Extended

Your going to be see­ing a lot more Adobe prod­ucts later in the list, but this is by far the must-have of this entire entry.  You might say, “What about GIMP?”  To that I respond, “Screw GIMP”.  It’s not that I don’t like GIMP.  GIMP and I never got into a fight about whose tie looked bet­ter at a black-and-white party a few years ago, thus caus­ing a quar­rel turned bad caus­ing the punch bowl to be over­turned and the party then became black-and-red..  No, noth­ing like that.  I just sim­ply love Pho­to­shop and it’s inte­gra­tion with the other CS tools (lat­est ver­sion is CS4, recommended).

As the indus­try stan­dard for graphic cre­ation and photo manip­u­la­tion, this is hands down must.

As far as what edi­tion to get, it’s really up to you.  You won’t be miss­ing out on a lot of tools needed for web design if you run with the stan­dard edi­tion, but it’s always nice to have all the bells and whis­tles in case some­thing does come up.

Kuler — FREE

It’s actu­ally more of a com­mu­nity than an appli­ca­tion.  Kuler allows you to browse hun­dreds of color com­bi­na­tions to find the per­fect fit for your design project.  You can even sub­mit your own com­bi­na­tion to the com­mu­nity.  A great tool when the color wheel just looks like a blur..

Picasa — FREE

Another appli­ca­tion devel­oped by Google, Picasa is a great pro­gram for man­ag­ing your pho­tos.  Some of my favorite fea­tures are facial recog­ni­tion and geo-tagging.  Picasa 3 also works hand-in-hand with the Picasa online ser­vice, so you can share your pho­tos with friends/family/colleagues.

Illus­tra­tor — $575.94 / $599

Sim­i­lar to Pho­to­shop in that it is mainly used to cre­ate graph­ics, Illus­tra­tor dif­fers in that it’s a vector-based appli­ca­tion (as opposed to bitmap/raster).  For things that need to be scaled up with­out los­ing any qual­ity, I use Illus­tra­tor (gen­er­ally logos, ban­ners, etc).  Using CS4, there is a con­sid­er­able amount of inte­gra­tion between Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor by uti­liz­ing Smart Objects.

Flash — $597.99 / $699

Cov­er­ing the gamut of online ani­ma­tion and video, Flash is a beast of a pro­gram.  Cur­rently run­ning Action­Script 3, you can essen­tially write entire web­sites in Flash (although not recommended).

Devel­op­ment

Dreamweaver — $377.99 / $399

Orig­i­nally writ­ten by Macro­me­dia, Dreamweaver is now part of the Adobe Cre­ative Suite.  There are a cou­ple rea­son I use Dreamweaver over other IDE’s.  The main rea­son is it’s inte­gra­tion with other CS applications.

FileZilla — FREE

FTP isn’t really a com­pli­cated task, but it shouldn’t be made any harder with poor inter­face.  FileZilla is easy to use, extremely fast and respon­sive, and doesn’t fluff up their inter­face with unnec­es­sary icons and graph­ics.  In addi­tion to their FTP Client soft­ware, they make it stu­pid easy to set up an FTP server out of your own machine.

Notepad++ — FREE

Notepad is a great tool for devel­op­ers across the world.  How­ever, there are just some basic func­tions that would be really nice in a text edi­tor.  Tabbed inter­face, syn­tax high­light­ing, auto­matic file his­tory..  These are a few of the many fea­tures that Notepad++ has to offer.  My gen­eral use for Notepad++ is edit­ing a few of my Apache con­fig files (I hate search­ing for them every­time I want to make a sim­ple edit).  Sce­nario: you have three con­fig files open, and close the appli­ca­tion.. the next time you open Notepad++, those files will be read­ily avail­able auto­mat­i­cally.  Saves on a lot of time dig­ging for files.

Tor­tois­eSVN — FREE

SVN has become one of my favorite tools for devel­op­ment, espe­cially when a team is involved.  In fact, I find it a neces­sity now, and will not work on a team project with­out it.  How­ever, inter­faces for SVN appli­ca­tions can some­times be a drag.  Who wants to open an appli­ca­tion just to make sure their files are up to date?  Tor­tois­eSVN is built right into Win­dows Shell, mak­ing it a right-click away from updat­ing your repos­i­tory or local build.

Busi­ness

Base­camp — FREE / MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION ($24, $49, $99, $149)

Project man­age­ment is one of those nec­es­sary evils.  With email get­ting way to clut­tered, and Google Wave still in “invi­ta­tion only” test­ing, Base­camp is a great tool to keep a team on track and on task.  Mile­stones (dead­lines) and a to-do list, as well as file uploads and mes­sag­ing and write­boards..  Base­camp was writ­ten by 37Signals, whose method is to keep things sim­ple (and it’s shown in the ease of use of Basecamp).

Fresh­Books — MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION ($19, $29, $39, $89, $149)

If you are, or have been a free­lancer, you know that invoic­ing clients is not the most glam­orous part of the job.  How­ever, it is man­age­able with some tools, one of which being Fresh­Books.  Easy to log, easy to send, easy to brand.  Not much else to say here but: “that was easy.”

Quicken — $59.99 / $99 (HOME & BUSINESS)

Free­lanc­ing?  Need to man­age your busi­ness money, and pre­pare for taxes cor­rectly?  Quicken, although it’s not that quick..

Microsoft Office — $319.99 / $499.95

I think it goes with­out say­ing that Microsoft has dom­i­nated the Word­pro­cess­ing, Spread­sheet and Pre­sen­ta­tion mar­ket.  These tools are vital to com­mu­ni­cate with oth­ers via documents.