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Essential Web Development Software

Most developers when asked can get pretty passionate about their favourite text editor. Take the age old vi - Emacs holy war for example.

Some, however, may feel nothing but apathy regarding their choice of IDE, image editing software or general development tools.

I, for one fall into the first camp. And if you are one of the ones that don't, the chances are you just havent found the right software yet.

The following list outlines tools that I simply could not do without in my day-to-day development tasks. If you haven't tried any of them out, I would strongly recommend it. If you have, but know of better tools - please contribute using comments, I would love to hear about them.

• Text editor: EditPlus. The greatest text editor of all time. Extremely light weight and fast, yet supporting syntax highlighting, auto-completion, spell check, complex find-and-replace features. This editor deserves an entire post to itself. I'm yet to find a feature of this program that isn't fully customizable.
• Image viewer: Irfanview. Same as above, but for viewing images. Who would have thought something so light weight and unobtrusive could be so powerful.
• Image editor: Adobe Photoshop. Possibly one of the best pieces of software ever. I have been using this program for years and I still don't think I've encountered half of the features it offers. Unprecedented power.
• Internet Browser: Mozilla Firefox. Pure refinement. If you are using another browser it's because you haven't tried Firefox yet. Fast, secure, convinient, attractive. I am such a Firefox fanatic it's shameful.
• HTML/CSS/Javascript Tool: Firebug. I don't know how to sum up this Firefox extension. In short - if you are building webpages and have not heard of this tool you need to download it right now. Possibly the biggest time saving tool I have ever encountered.
• Database Client: Navicat. Quick and easy to use, with some great filtering options. Makes database design and administration too easy.
• .NET Development: Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions. I'm a little reluctant to add these to the list, since they only have one purpose - building Microsoft software. But they do it well. Quite lightweight, extremely easy to use. Beats the hell out of getting actual Visual Studio. Perfect for the casual programmer.

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