Tag Archives | Technology and Software

I had already started work­ing on a blog post with my top 10 most use­ful Web design tools but, like many other things these days, I had con­tin­u­ally post­poned fin­ish­ing it in favor of “more impor­tant things”. Like client work…

But I saw a post today on the Visualrinse blog that tack­led the same topic so it prompted me to fin­ish mine.

As men­tioned in the above blog post, we all have our own favorite work­ing meth­ods, tricks and tools for com­plet­ing projects and, as I have already men­tioned here before, I have really tried to refine my process in the last year or so and find the tools that really help me get my work done, espe­cially since I am a one man shop and need to tackle both the design and devel­op­ment aspects of my projects as well as man­ag­ing them and my clients. Now that I am free­lanc­ing full time, I have really started to develop a process that works for me. So here are the tools I could not live with­out in my Web design and devel­op­ment work.

1. Mindjet MindManager Pro /​JCV Gantt Pro. I stated using MindManager in the sum­mer of 2007 and it has quickly become one of my most use­ful tools. I use it for sev­eral things like brain­storm­ing ideas, cre­at­ing pro­jetc man­age­ment doc­u­ments like a projet’s cre­ative brief, work bread­own struc­ture or tasks, site maps and more. Each project gets a “dash­board” map that links to all the other project related maps, doc­u­ments or fold­ers. From the tasks map I move to the JCV Gantt Pro addin to cre­ate the project sched­ule and deter­mine the cost of the project. MindManager is the best “knowl­edge repos­i­tory” appli­ca­tion I’ve ever tried and I now won­der what I did with­out it before I found it.
2. Axure RP Pro. Axure is the most recent addi­tion to my toolset. It takes off where MindManager leaves off for me. As great as MindManager is for my own inter­nal processes I real­ized it did not cre­ate great deliv­er­ables for clients. Axure is the best tool I found to cre­ate site maps and flow charts but its main pur­pose is wire­frames, func­tional inter­ac­tive pro­to­types and doc­u­men­ta­tion and it really excels at it. I’m work­ing on a appointment/​calendar app for a cur­rent site project and pro­to­typ­ing it in Axure will save me a lot of cod­ing time later. There’s noth­ing like show­ing a work­ing, click­able and inter­ac­tive ver­sion of a site fea­ture to a client, even if it is fake, to work out the kinks and nail down expectations.
3. Adobe Fireworks. The main­stay in my toolset for the last 10 years and my most used app along with Dreamweaver. I really could not do my job with­out Fireworks. It com­pletely replaced Photoshop for me for Web design and lay­out work over 10 years ago and I have never looked back. Its hybrid raster/​vector work­flow as well as Web cen­tric focus make it the most effi­cient design app I have ever used. It’s like Photoshop/​Illustrator and InDesign all rolled up into one killer app but just for the Web. CS4 will be released soon and it really will be the best ver­sion ever.
4. Adobe Dreamweaver. Unlike Fireworks which I pretty much adopted imme­di­ately after try­ing ver­sion 2.0, it took me a long time to warm up to Dreamweaver. I had been using HomeSite which was a great code edi­tor for a long time but I had to use a sep­a­rate FTP appli­ca­tion to upload sites and was look­ing for ways to auto­mate some of the repet­i­tive work. Around the release of Dreamweaver 4 but espe­cially the next one, Dreamweaver MX (6.0), the appli­ca­tion had evolved in such a way that it basi­cally replaced HomeSite for me. Now it is a full fledged Web author­ing envi­ron­ment I couldn’t live with­out any­more. It has the right bal­ance of code cen­tric fea­tures, visual edit­ing and a lot of other fea­tures around those that just make it a true pow­er­house. The new CS4 ver­sion which is in pub­lic beta right now adds very cool new fea­tures that are already mak­ing my life easier.
5. ColdFusion. I am more of a designer and front end devel­oper than a back­end devel­oper but I still have to wear that hat. I have tried Perl and used ASP in the past and although it was OK it got tedious for me after a while. I also tried PHP as it’s very pop­u­lar but I really don’t like it at all for some rea­son. It really didn’t click with me and I strongly dis­like the syn­tax. When I started work­ing with ColdFusion it’s like a light bulb was turned on for me. The syn­tax made sense and it could do more in fewer lines of code than ASP (and most other server-​side script­ing lan­guages) ever could. In the last few years, ColdFusion has kept evolv­ing into one of the most pow­er­ful server-​side devel­op­ment solu­tions around with many buit-​in fea­tures you need plu­g­ins for in other plat­forms. It really rocks my world and has empow­ered me to build bet­ter Web sites.
6. Web Developer Toolbar. Although Firefox is not my main browser (Opera is… and Google Chrome is gain­ning ground), no Web designer/​developer should be with­out this utility.
7. Firebug. Another amaz­ing Firefox exten­sion that prob­a­bly needs no intro­duc­tion. The Inspect func­tion­al­ity alone makes this an absolute must-​have. If you’re not sure what CSS rule affect a mis­be­hav­ing ele­ment, you’ll find it with Firebug’s Inspect. Not far behind is Opera’s new Dragonfly fea­ture which is still in alpha. Similar to Firebug but built right into Opera 9.5+.
8. Genopal. Going back to designer tools, Genopal is one of those rare finds you won­der how you did with­out before dis­cov­er­ing it. Genopal is a small appli­ca­tion used to cre­ate color schemes. Nothing earth shat­ter­ing here but, it does it in a very unique way that I had never seen before. This is the most intu­itive color tool I have ever used and I urge any­one strug­gling with cre­at­ing good color schemes to try it. I use the desk­top Pro ver­sion but there’s also an online ver­sion on the site. This one is a true lit­tle gem.
9. Studiometry. What would I do with­out this amaz­ing appli­ca­tion? Studiometry is the admin­is­tra­tive cen­ter of my world. Projects, clients details, con­tacts, timers, invoic­ing, reports and more, Studiometry tracks every detail of my pro­fes­sional work and helps me keep organized.
10. jQuery. This “lit­tle” JavaScript frame­work has rocked my world. Like ColdFusion but on the front end, it has empow­ered me to cre­ate com­plex inter­ac­tiv­ity faster and eas­ier than I ever could before. I have tried oth­ers but jQuery just clicked for me and I keep being amazed at what I can accom­plish with it.

So the above are my own must-​haves. The list is not com­plete though so here’s a few hon­or­able men­tions for other appli­ca­tions that are cen­tral to my work :

One is Outlook 2007 for keep­ing up with not only email but client con­tacts, cal­en­dar and cat­e­go­rized tasks lists (fol­low­ing the GTD prin­ci­ples). It’s the first app I launch in the morn­ing and the last one I ckeck at night.

Another is FeedDemon, the incred­i­ble RSS feeds aggre­ga­tor from Nick Bradbury and NewsGator. In our field, fight­ing infor­ma­tion over­load has become a real issue, at least it has for me. FeedDemon helps me keep informed by fol­low­ing the myr­iad of sites I am inter­ested in but also through key­word feeds that gather infor­ma­tion about spe­cific top­ics I’m inter­ested in.

Lastly, I need to men­tion Twitter and the TweetDeck client. I’ve been a very late Twitter adopter as I didn’t “see” the use and thought it would be a waste of time. But now that I work on my own full time, I enjoy the con­nec­tion to the peo­ple I fol­low. Like FeedDemon, TweetDeck enables me to sep­a­rate my Twitter “stream” into groups. But fur­ther­more, it enables me to keep watch on par­tic­u­lar top­ics in the “pub­lic stream” by let­ting me add colomns based on spe­cific key­word searches. It took me a long time to get on Twitter but now, TweetDeck is always run­ning on my lap­top while I work on my main machine.

Well that’s it for me at this time. What are your own pre­ferred tools that you just can­not live without?