Essential software, etc.?

Dave!

Hey guys,

Just wondering, what would be your essential tools for desiging a site?

Say you were to buy a new laptop tomorrow, what would be the first things you install on it?

Photoshop?
Notepad++?
Firebug (FF add-on)?
XAMPP?

Gimme a list, and preferably expand on it so that I can decide if any of these are worth installing for myself

cormee

Almost everything you mention plus:

Dreamweaver
Illustrator

Also

Colour Contrast Analyser http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=628 (very handy for just picking colours off other applications and web pages as well as testing for accessibility)
Web Accessibility Toolbar http://www.visionaustralia.org/info.aspx?page=614
Utiliu IE collection (run all versions of IE on your PC) http://utilu.com/IECollection/
IE Developer Toolbar

Essential urls/web apps include

http://kuler.adobe.com/
http://browsershots.org/
http://www.seo-browser.com/
http://www.tineye.com/
http://resizemybrowser.com/
http://www.iconfinder.com/
http://procssor.com/
http://www.bounceapp.com/
http://validator.w3.org/

Dave!

cormee wrote: »

Colour Contrast Analyser http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=628 (very handy for just picking colours off other applications and web pages as well as testing for accessibility)

Reminds me I need to install ColorZilla

http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

It gives you an eyedropper tool for picking colours off sites, and you can copy the RGB or Hex value to the clipboard. Pretty handy.

MeasureIt is a good one too, for measuring pixels on a webpage

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/539/

Placebo

why dreamweaver?

nellyshark

Good topic.

For me
Notepad++
XAMPP
Firefox (Firebug and Fireftp) - for development
Opera/Chrome - for viewing. I dont know why I dont use Firefox for viewing but I just dont
Kuler

Graphics wise I have GIMP,Photoshop and Paint.net installed. I would say that I use paint.net the most but mainly for resizing and getting colors.

cormee

Placebo wrote: »

why dreamweaver?

It's extremely good software. There's a world of functionality beyond the wysiwyg window.

tricky D

DW is rubbish for visual aspects imo but does have some good production aspects. Still, can't remember the last time I used it.

cormee

tricky D wrote: »

DW is rubbish for visual aspects imo but does have some good production aspects. Still, can't remember the last time I used it.

Each to his own I suppose. But what do you mean by 'visual effects'?

It's fantastic software that ties in seamlessly with the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite. I've been using it ten years at the very least and it's progressed very well from WYSIWIG software to an enterprise-level web design/development tool equally at home on both asp.net and Linux environments.

I don't mean for this to sound patronising but I think the majority of people who knock it don't realise its capabilities, as you said yourself you can't remember the last time you used it.

It has some shortcomings but nothing that would make me give up using it for any other software.