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Web Development Tools – Part II

May 5th, 2007 by ShaunO

In a previous post I covered a group of (mostly) free tools which I find useful during web development. Time has moved on so it’s time for an update.

First the tools I referred to earlier:

Pixvue. Unfortunately this is no longer being maintained (and that’s exactly what the web link says..). I’m still using it for XMP management & web album creation as it works well and I can work around its quirks.
PSPad. Its quirks got to me I’m afraid. So I would now suggest Notepad++ which has pretty well everything you can think of for an advanced text editor and is reliable. Great graphics on its home page too.
Web Developer & ColorZilla add-ons have been updated for Firefox2 of course.

Some new tools worth checking out:

FireFTP is an FTP client inside your Firefox browser. Just install like any other Firefox add-on.
Firebug is a heavy duty in-browser debugging tool for Firefox, very handy if you need to dig deeper than Web Developer allows
IE Tab allows you to switch between FireFox and IE rendering engines inside Firefox, very handy for debugging CSS between browsers
Adblock Plus, nothing to do with web development but do get this Firefox add-on and make your browsing ‘ad free’

Images

With the demise of Pixvue I am back ‘on the hunt’ for tools for:

At this stage I would suggest you have a look at:

the latest version of XnView. Pierre is pretty constantly developing XnView and it can now see (but not yet edit) XMP metadata. I haven’t yet tried its built in web gallery creation tool.

Microsoft has released an add-on for XP users called Photo Info which provides metadata support for images from within Explorer (Vista users have the new Microsoft Photo Gallery which has full XMP support). Photo Info doesn’t provide full XMP support but it does write IPTC metadata into XMP concurrently so its a start.

If you know of any image software tools which might ‘fit the bill’ – let me know.