Fun Friday, What’s in your bag?
As a Web Developer you often need lots of different little tools and items to make your life and work easier. I, for one, have a few that I’ve grown so accustomed to over the years that I just can’t part with and others that are rather new but have quickly found their way inside.
Website:
Tools:
- FireFox with all the goodies (including User Agent Switcher so I can use BSP’s) the Developer tools are just great
- Maxthon, this is a wrapper for IE that is loaded with features you get get some nifty plugins as well.
- HTTP Look, great way to watch your HTTP requests to help with debugging.
- Textpad, nice features for working with multiple files at one time.
- GIMP for Windows to do graphics
- Abilon, for my RSS feeds (has proxy suppot)
- Eclipse, for my PHP, Perl and Java development with the “Multi-Clipboard”, “Logwatcher” and “PHPEclipse” plugins.
- Grab Capture Screen, for my screen captures.
- Anything else I need I go look here
All of that in there makes my bag worth millions but in reality I only had to pay for the HTTP Look and Textpad licenses. So it cost me around $50.00 over the last several years. Not a bad deal I would say and most of all of this is transportable via my USB stick. In fact 80% of it runs quite well directly from my USB stick.
Updated:
Well after taking a look at what Gregor wrote and Brian wrote I’ve made some changes to my bag, I am now using instead of HTTPLook and TextPad, the tools Notepad++, which is based on Scite that Gregor recommended it’s just a bit more robust for multiple file handling; as well as Ethereal recommended also by Gregor.
I’ve also updated my favorites and bookmark with what Brian suggested.
I also almost forgot, for those of you doing telnet and SSH then you just have to have PuTTY.
For those of you who tried out the Maxthon browser with the myWebsites plugin then you’ve seen that you simply need to update the URL files on your USB stick and then running Maxthon from your USB stick and having the favorites there as well you can take it all with you!
So that now leaves me with a complete 0 cost for my bag! And everything other than Maxthon runs in both Linux and Windows and when I use a bigger USB stick I could have 100% of everything running from there and so far everything still runs quite well!
Eddy
nice list of tools. Here are the free alternatives I'm useing instead of HTTP Look and Textpad. Etherreal have a nice "Follow TCP-Stream" functionality:
http://www.ethereal.com/
Scite is a freeware Text editor with syntax highlighting for the most programming languages including Java, PHP, Perl.
http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTE.html
Regards
Gregor
We had almost the whole SDN team in Palo Alto this week and it was great to see some of them for the first time face to face. (Also the reason we are a bit behind with posting points for Weblogs. Sorry)
One of the ideas we had was to offer a my favorites page for the SDN Contributors.
I guess Craig, you can read minds. Thanks for letting us look into your tool bag.
Have a good weekend and this time I will not do work stuff, Mark.
Enjoy your weekend!!
Now that I have updated my bag from yours (and emailed a few of those links to the rest of the department:), I though to just peek into my bag, and see what is available to be returned. Turns out little. You already have all bases covered. But still, a few small things are available.
(1)For an HTML reference, I still find MSDN an excellent site. The information about each HTML tag is really good, showing not only the format of properties in HTML, but also the attributes available in DOM via JavaScript, plus methods and collections. Definitely the reference for all features available in IE (just so that we know not to use them:). The link I have on my desktop: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects.asp
(2) A JavaScript Debugger. This is probably tool number one that one should install as serious web developer. A relatively old script debugger with few features can be downloaded from MSDN (search on keywords such as "download script debugger"). But the new ones in the .NET development framework leaves nothing to be desired. For professional development worth it.
(3) HttpWatch. This is the http proxy tool in use at SAP. The nice benefit of this tool is that it plugs directly into the browser. This allows it some nice features such as looking at HTTPS traffic and seeing which requests were answered from cache. In my very personal opinion, the best thing since sliced bread. Use it ten times per day. See http://www.simtec.ltd.uk. (For SAP colleagues an enterprise version is avialable from intranet at /software.)
(4) OSS Note 616900. This note is an aggregation of all other BSP notes tht we write. Given a specific SP number, it is the first place to check and see if any relevant new notes are available! I always keep a link onto this note on my desktop.
bye, brian (of to install one of your tools:)
The cost of the HttpWatch is what sent me searching for other solutions, but I keep revisiting the tool with the powers that be in hopes that a spot in the budget will open.
I've got quite a few different references for DOM/DHTML/JavaScript/HTML etc. but the online ones usually work the best I'll go bookmark your link now 🙂 the OSS Note was bookmarked before I came onto SDN (thanks to the mail I get when someone replies to my weblog).
Thanks for the swap!
Craig
I prefer the site: http://www.w3schools.com.
have nice day.