Web Development Tool Freebies

Even though I work day to day creating software I find it very hard to pay for it. I know that I should but when it comes to entering the credit card details I have an almost physical reaction then have to lie down for a while in a darkened room and sip some weak tea. It could be because I was born in Yorkshire (in the UK) and Yorkshire folk although fine and upstanding people are not known for their free spending ways. In any case I gravitate time and time again to freebies are here are my favourites for web development.

IE Developer Tool Bar
http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en
I’ve never subscribed to the Microsoft is evil school of thought so with that in mind this is one of my favourite freebies. Lots of extensions to ease the web development process. Particular favourites of mine include changing the screen size without messing found with the control bar and isolating html elements by click. And the price – well no money need change hands but Microsoft will obviously pump pro-Vista propaganda directly into your skull as soon as you press the download link. Aww – those guys!!!

NotePad++
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
A must for all amateur developers. Lots of colouring coding for your code in formats from Ada to YAML with some macro stuff and a decent find and replace thrown in. What’s more it doesn’t take 4 days to install and 3 hours to load up like some other IDEs that will remain nameless (Visual Studio).

Regulator
http://sourceforge.net/projects/regulator/
Like most developers I’ve an ambivalent attitude to regular expressions. They are super useful but once you’re doing anything more complicated than finding a word then they might as well be written in hieroglyphics. So some kind of tool is essential. This one is a bit buggy on the last release I snaffled but still does the job. Lots of handy prompts and highlighting of your latest regex attempt. I think out of all of the recommends this would be the one that I would most consider spending some money on to upgrade to a more reliable product (probably Regexbuddy). Still it works well enough and it’s nought pounds and nought pence to buy. Great.

Filezilla
http://filezilla-project.org/
So once you’ve finished created you’re latest website of sheer brilliance then you’ll be wanting to get it straight up on the Internet so that all and sundry can marvel at your genius. No problem – Filezilla is the FTP client for you. Nice intuitive interface and does exact what’s needed - gets your files onto the server lucky enough to host your work of art. I was using SmartFTP for a while for this but it needed patch after patch and then churlishly they suddenly wanted to be paid for it. Can you believe it – developers wanting to be paid. I was quite frankly appalled.

Paint.Net
http://www.getpaint.net/download.html
This is something I thought I’d never see – a great image manipulation package for nothing at all. Wow! I’m sure that if I was a graphic designer and divided my time between snowboarding, wearing garish T-shirts and refusing to use PCs because Macs are sooo much better – then I might turn my nose up at this. But I’m thrilled if I can resize and image and do a fill with a gradient so this one is for me. My favourite out of all the recommends and the one that I would be most likely to donate money to if I wasn’t so mean.